For a quarter century, mention of his name would cause me a vague spine creep of nausea. From the 1996 election, days like last week were fate. Nobody has the excuse of saying they didn't know the scum that is Bibi Netanyahu from the first time he ran for Prime Minister and he refused to condemn hundreds of rabbinical incitements for Yitzhak Rabin's assassination. An orthodox fanatic killed my political hero, Netanyahu faced a weaker candidate, and he became Prime Minister.
I liked Shimon Peres. Except for his suavity, everybody seemed to talk about him the way they talked about me. They mistrusted him for being too European, too Yiddish, having too much trust in words and too little practicality. He was the last of Israel's founding fathers to leave the bimah, but everyone dismissed David Ben-Gurion's personal assistant as 'not a real Israeli.' But if I liked Shimon Peres, then Yitzhak Rabin was my political hero.
When Yitzhak Rabin was 25, he was COO of the Palmach, the Jews' elite special forces in the Israeli War of Independence, a war both the CIA and the British foreign ministry predicted Arab forces would win. Rabin had only joined the Palmach seven years earlier when he could neither shoot nor drive. Twenty years later he was commander-in-chief of the Israel Defense Forces in another war that was supposed to be lost yet took only six days to win. Later we learned that Rabin lead the army while personally on the edge of a nervous breakdown, yet he oversaw the whole thing. When he was Prime Minister the first time, he resigned at the first hint of a scandal rather than represent his constituents unfairly - his wife had $10,000 in an American bank account. When he was Defense Minister in the 80s, he ordered the IDF to retreat from the center of Lebanon to a line much nearer the Israeli border, and during the First Intifada got much criticism for ordering soldiers to beat Palestinians and shoot them with rubber bullets. Many critics thought he should have killed them.
Yitzhak Rabin was a statesman for the real world. Not a fighter for social justice but an actual fighter; in theaters of war where morality is compromised on every side, he used his soldier's grit to move the moral needle inch by inch. When a literary man like Peres promised peace, no brilliant speech could make Israelis believe him. When one of Israel's greatest generals promised it, the belief was real. When Peres shook Arafat's hand, he was all smiles. When Rabin shook it, he looked as though he was about to run to the nearest bathroom to throw up. It's Rabin who said what history might remember as the most necessary quote about peace of the 20th century: 'you don't make peace with your friends, you make it with very unsavory enemies.'
If history has one rule, it's that our beliefs are wrong. Even if the right believes otherwise, there was a moment when peace between Israel and Palestine was possible. Even if the left believes otherwise, it was never going to be anything but a very bad peace. A shitty peace is better than no peace. It would have made Palestine into a kleptocratic dictatorship: like Jordan at best, Kuwait at worst; it would have made Israel live with a certain level of terror: like post-apartheid South Africa (and we won't get into that debate...). Both sides found it unacceptable, but both sides would have their futures guaranteed. The threat of nuclear war would drastically reduce as Israel concentrated the entirety of their force to Hezbollah on the northern border and policing Iran's developments. A handpicked heir to Arafat would have full control of Palestine. He'd value his physical safety to the point that he'd crush any violent Islamic forces with a savagery that impresses even them. A million Israelis would leave the country at the first sign of better opportunities elsewhere and a series of right-wingers would win election by blaming the peace process while running roughshod over the rights of Israeli Arabs. But two corrupt sides would have seen cooperation as their mutual interest, and worked together to ensure that no twice in a century war would originate from them.
One of the many things our modern tellings of history get wrong is that progress does not happen from the bottom up. The bottom may demand progress, but progress only happens when a 'great man' is a 'good man' and uses his great power to make sure that no man can ever be as powerful as him ever again. We call the people atop who make history 'Great Men', but as often as not, great men are villains: sociopaths and narcissists who rise to society's top because of their will to extreme acts people with a conscience never fathom. The struggle to wrest power from them is eternal, and often as not, we fail.
The Jewish world's failure has a name, and that name is Bibi.
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