A generation after Rabin’s assassination, his vision has almost died too

The marking in Israel next Wednesday of Memorial Day for Yitzhak Rabin, the assassinated prime minister who signed the Oslo agreement with the PLO in 1993 and paid for it with his life two years later, may receive little media attention because of the wars in Gaza and Lebanon and the confrontation with Iran

For those marking it, however, it will be an especially sad day because right now Rabin’s legacy and self-styled vision of ensuring Israel’s future, through reversing years of demographically untenable territorial expansion, is taking another major hit.

Resettling Gaza is on the agenda, enabled, say critics, by a military siege and bombardment operation in northern Gaza that has been described as “ethnic cleansing” by Haaretz. The IDF says it is acting according to international law as it seeks to prevent Hamas from regrouping in the area.

If the idea is to replace Gaza Palestinians with Jews, it’s a far cry from Rabin’s vision of making less of Greater Israel in order to have a democracy and an exemplary Jewish state ensconced in the Western family of nations.

It’s not that he was a stranger to harsh application of military force, dating back to 1948, when as a commander he oversaw expulsions of Palestinians (which with characteristic honesty he described in his memoirs).

It was rather that by his second term as prime minister, he had decided that the perceived Palestinian demographic challenge could only be addressed by political agreement, the opposite of current day advocates of a “transfer” of Palestinians out of the West Bank and Gaza.

Yossi Beilin, key negotiator of the Oslo agreement, told The Jewish Independent that “he wanted to assure Israel would be Jewish and democratic. Demography was the major issue for him. That’s why he joined us with Oslo. He believed that partitioning the land and having a border could assure a Jewish majority for eternity”.

A few months after the famous handshake on the White House lawn with Yasser Arafat, I asked Rabin at a press conference for his definition of Zionism. “I believe the Zionism of today is not judged by how we expand the territory under Israeli sovereignty,” he said.

“I believe the real Zionism is the return to Zion of most of the Jewish people from all over the world to build up a society that can serve as an example of traditional Jewish values coupled with Western civilisation.”

Today’s settler-dominated Zionism has turned the country 180 degrees away from Rabin’s approach. Settler leaders believe that something good can come out of the Gaza war in the form of a return to the Strip 18 years after then prime minister Ariel Sharon withdrew the settler presence.

Some are already renaming largely destroyed Gaza City and other areas with Hebrew names and at least 600 families are ready to move in, according to their leaders. In the West Bank, settlement activity is at a record pace and Palestinians face a surge of settler violence.

That is the antithesis of Rabin’s view that scaling down settler power and ideology was an integral part of making peace with the Palestinians. Israel would be secured as a Jewish state by ceding territory in a political process not by expelling Arabs. Settlers would need to be evacuated.

With the most right-wing coalition in Israel’s history now in power and in the revenge environment prompted by Hamas’s brutal October 7 attacks, it seems that 29 years after he was murdered by fundamentalist settler supporter Yigal Amir, Rabin’s vision is something for the history books - with no prospect of revival. Rather than negotiate with Arabs, today the idea to make them disappear is openly discussed.

“Each of you will go to Gaza and Arabs will disappear from Gaza,” settler leader Daniella Weiss told a crowd gathered near the Strip two weeks ago. Speakers unrolled maps of the Gaza Strip to highlight sites for settlements. Palestinians would “go to different countries in the world.” Weiss said.

“If these people would have told Rabin they want to settle Gaza, he would have laughed and kicked them out of the room,” says Uri Dromi, director of the Israel Government Press Office under Rabin.

“But Netanyahu makes them the most important ministers and allows them to funnel money for settlements to serve an ideology that all of the Land of Israel belongs only to the Jews and that the Arab presence is an aberration and that they should be pushed out. All of this is so alien to everything he believed in.”

Already during the 1992 election campaign that brought him to a second term as prime minister, Rabin staked out a battle with settlers and their Likud party backers over the meaning of Zionism. He put settlers on the defensive by coining the term “political settlements” to stress his view that most settlements had no security value and were a drain on taxpayer money.

To settlers who viewed themselves as being on a divine mission to return to biblically endowed land it was a threat, “he was trying to make people see us as a burden, not an asset,” said writer Yehuda Shalem, who lives in the Ofra settlement.

Shalem stresses that Amir’s murder of Rabin was against Judaism. But he is blistering in his criticism of Rabin even after all these years, accusing him of “abandoning Zionism” by recognising the PLO.

In power, Rabin kept up his demotion of the settlers. He oversaw what he termed a “change in national priorities”, slashing funding for most settlements and redirecting monies to education and social programs. The major exception was in and around East Jerusalem, where the Rabin government kept up a settlement drive.

All told, building dropped from about 7000 units in the last year of the tenure of Likud’s Yitzhak Shamit to approximately 1300 in Rabin’s first year, according to Peace Now.

For those disillusioned about the current clout of right-wing Jewish fundamentalists in Israeli governance and their lawbreaking and violence in the West Bank, Rabin’s tragic death and the left’s defeat in the battle with ideological settlers were harbingers of today’s deterioration into Jewish supremacy becoming a guiding value, including the push to push out Palestinians and to settle Gaza.

But for settlers like Shalem, it was Rabin who got it all wrong by making an agreement with the PLO. “Making an agreement with a body whose very essence is to destroy Israel means relinquishing the right to Israel. A Palestinian state would endanger Israel and threaten its existence, so you can’t use the word Zionism in such a context.”

“Zionism not only has to include Judea and Samaria, in fact they are the essence of the matter,” he said.

But Shalem also thinks Gaza is essential and supports the resettlement push. “I take my hat off to Daniella Weiss. This is also part of Eretz Yisrael. We need diplomacy that expresses our legitimate right to settle in Eretz Yisrael,” he says.

Shalem believes that Netanyahu’s statements that the government does not intend to settle in Gaza are not out of disagreement with the idea but rather because he thinks the time is not yet ripe in terms of Israel’s international relations to publicly support it.

Shalem stresses that Jews have historic ties to Gaza, citing the fact that sixteenth century liturgist and rabbi Yisrael ben Moshe Najara, who composed the sabbath hymn Ya Riban is buried there. Shalem and the settler leadership say moving settlers into the area will help the IDF control it, the opposite of Rabin’s view of “political settlements” as a burden for the army to defend.

Dromi termed the suggestion that Rabin “abandoned” Zionism as “nonsense”.

“He was a Zionist to the core. Rabin was a serious man who read reality as it is. I think he hated messianism. He understood that if the settlement movement was successful, we’re heading - if not to an apartheid state - then to an impossible demographic situation between the [Jordan] river and the [Mediterranean] Sea. He also knew the military difficulties of guarding settlements.”

In Dromi’s view it is Jewish supremacists like Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir who “hijacked” Zionism.

“If Zionism is kicking all the Arabs out in order to maintain a Jewish state, then Rabin wasn’t a Zionist.”