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.