http://www.arabnews.com/?page=7§ion=0&article=127991&d=2&m=11&y=2009&pix=opinion.jpg&category=Opinion
Monday 2 November 2009 (15 Dhul Qa`dah 1430)
Remembering Yitzhak Rabin
Uri Avnery I [email protected]
A YEAR before the Oslo agreement, I had a meeting with Yasser Arafat in
Tunis. He was full of curiosity about Yitzhak Rabin, who had just been elected
prime minister.
I described him as well as I could and ended with the words: "He is as
honest as a politician can be." Arafat broke into laughter, and all the others
present, among them Mahmoud Abbas and Yasser Abed-Rabbo, joined in.
I always liked Rabin as a human being. I especially liked some traits of
his.
First of all his honesty. He was a decent human being. When his term as
Israeli ambassador in Washington D.C. came to an end, his wife Leah left behind
a bank account, contrary to Israeli law at the time. When it was discovered, he
protected his wife by assuming personal responsibility. At the time, unlike
today, "assuming responsibility" was not an empty phrase. He left the prime
minister's office.
I liked even his most evident personality trait - his introversion. He
was withdrawn, with few human contacts. He had no small talk. In every
conversation, he came to the point right at the start. In a world of
pretentious, garrulous, mendacious, back-slapping politicians, he was a
refreshing rarity.
More than anything else, I respected Rabin for his dramatic change of
outlook at the age of 70. The man who had been a soldier since he was 18, who
had fought Arabs all his life, suddenly became a peace-fighter. And not just a
fighter for peace in general, but for peace with the Palestinian people, whose
very existence had always been denied by the leaders of Israel.
From 1969 on, until after the Oslo agreement, we had a running debate
about the Palestinian issue. In 1975, after the start of my secret contacts
with the PLO, I went to brief him (in accordance with the express wishes of the
PLO).
I brought him several messages from Arafat, conveyed to me by the PLO
representative in London, Sa'id Hamami. Arafat proposed small mutual gestures.
Rabin refused all of them.
Consequently I was all the more impressed by Oslo. Later Rabin explained
to me, one Shabbat at his private apartment, how he arrived there: King Hussein
had resigned his responsibility for the West Bank. The "village leagues", set
up by Israel as pliant "representatives" of the Palestinians, were a dismal
failure. As minister of defense he summoned local Palestinian leaders for
individual consultations, and one after another they told him that their
political address was in Tunis. After that, at the Madrid conference, Israel
agreed to negotiate with a joint Jordanian-Palestinian delegation, but then the
Jordanians told them that all Palestinian matters must be discussed with the
Palestinian members alone. But at every meeting, the Palestinian delegates
asked for a pause in order to call Tunis and get instructions from Arafat.
Rabin's conclusion: If all decisions are made by Arafat anyhow, why not talk
with him directly?
It has always been said that Rabin had an "analytical mind". He did not
have much of an imagination, but he viewed facts soberly, analyzed them
logically and drew his conclusions. If so, why did the Oslo agreement fail?
The practical reasons are easy to see. From the beginning, the agreement
was built on shaky foundations, because it lacked the main thing: A clear
definition of the final objective of the process.
For Arafat it was self-evident that the agreed "interim stages" would
lead to an independent Palestinian state in the whole of the West Bank and the
Gaza Strip, with perhaps some minor exchanges of territory. East Jerusalem,
including of course the Holy Shrines, was to become the capital of Palestine.
The settlements would be dismantled.
But Rabin's aim was unclear, perhaps even to himself. At the time he was
not yet ready to accept a Palestinian state. Absent an agreed destination, all
the "interim phases" went awry. Every step caused new conflicts. Arafat was
conscious of the faults of the agreement. He told his people that it was "the
best possible agreement in the worst possible circumstances". But he believed
that the dynamics of the peace process would overcome the obstacles on the way.
So did I. We were both wrong.
After the signing, Rabin began to hesitate. Instead of rushing forward to
create facts, he dithered. Deep under the surface, powerful currents were at
work. They pushed Rabin off course and in the end they swallowed him.
Rabin was a child of the classic Zionist ideology. He never rebeled
against it. At the critical juncture of his life, he fell victim to an
insoluble inner contradiction: His analytical mind told him to make peace with
the Palestinians, to "give up" a part of the country and to dismantle the
settlements, while his Zionist genetic heritage opposed this with all its
might. That manifested itself visibly at the Oslo agreement signing ceremony:
He offered his hand to Arafat because his mind commanded it, but all his body
language expressed rejection.
It is impossible to make peace without a basic mental and emotional
commitment to peace. Impossible to change the direction of a historic movement
without reassessing its history. Impossible for a leader to steer his people
toward a total change (as Ataturk Mustafa Kemal Pasha did in Turkey, for
example) if he is not completely devoted to the change himself. Impossible to
make peace with an enemy without understanding his truth. Rabin's inner
convictions continued to evolve after Oslo. Between him and Arafat, mutual
respect grew. Perhaps he would have arrived, in his slow and cautious way, at
the necessary mental change. The assassin and his handlers must have been
afraid of this and decided to forestall it.
Rabin's failure will find its expression at the memorial rally next week
at the very place where we witnessed his murder, 14 years ago. The main
speakers will be two of the gravediggers of the Oslo agreement, Shimon Peres
and Ehud Barak, as well as Tzipi Livni and Education Minister Gideon Sa'ar, who
belonged to the forces that created the climate for the murder. Rabin, I
assume, will turn in his grave.
Will I be there? Not me, thank you very much.
