In my article last week, I wrote about two Western leaders, the late US president John F Kennedy and the former king of Spain Juan Carlos, and their respective roles in advancing the causes of peace, democracy, political diversity, and international security.
What is even more important when discussing their leadership is their respective roles in advancing and protecting political reconciliation and diversity in their countries, however.
In this article, I thought it would be useful to write about two Israeli politicians whose paths led in opposite directions with devastating consequences for their own people, for the Palestinians, and for the cause of peace and reconciliation not only between Palestinians and Israelis but also for the Middle East and the world at large.
The reason I am choosing to write about them now is because this November marks the 30th anniversary of the assassination of former Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin at the hands of Yigal Amir, an Israeli extremist hailing from the settlement movement in the Occupied West Bank, on 5 November 1995.
Rabin, the fifth Israeli prime minister since the establishment of Israel and the first to be born in Mandate Palestine (on 1 March 1922 in Jerusalem), was credited with recognising the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), led by the late Yasser Arafat, as the representative of the Palestinian people in 1993. This was an historic first in the history of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict after 1948. At the same time, the PLO recognised the state of Israel and vowed to renounce violence in an exchange of letters of mutual recognition.
Rabin and Arafat met on the While House lawn on 13 September 1993 in the presence of former US president Bill Clinton to sign the Oslo 1 Accord, officially called the Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements. Two years later, they signed the Oslo 2 Accord in Taba in Egypt, also called the Taba Agreement, on 28 September 1995. This is officially called the Interim Agreement on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
The latter accord divided the West Bank into three areas, or zones, called A, B, and C. In the first two of these, the Palestinian National Authority (PNA), created in accordance with Oslo 1, was to exercise certain responsibilities in coordination with the Israeli army. On 24 October 1994, Rabin signed with the late King Hussein of Jordan the Jordanian-Israeli Peace Treaty commonly known as the Treaty of Wadi Arba.
Once the signing of the Declaration of Principles had been completed on the White House lawn, Clinton invited Rabin to a private lunch. In his memoirs entitled My Life, Clinton wrote that he had asked his guest the reasons why he had agreed to the Declaration of Principles.
Rabin’s reply, as related by Clinton, was that “he explained to me that he had come to realise that the territory Israel had occupied since the 1967 war was no longer necessary to its security and, in fact, was a source of insecurity. He said that the Intifada [of 1987] had shown that occupying territory full of angry people did not make Israel more secure but made it more vulnerable to attacks from within. Then… when Iraq fired Scud missiles into Israel [in 1990] he realised that the land did not provide a security buffer.”
I guess that Rabin, a military commander turned political leader, had rightly drawn this conclusion not only from the Iraqi missiles falling on the Israelis but also from the first Intifada of 1987 that proved that the Israeli occupation of the West Bank was not meant to last.
Regrettably, those lessons were not shared by another Israeli political figure who came to power on 29 May 1996. In private discussions with his political base in the Likud Party, this figure said that his mission would be to make sure that the implementation of the two Oslo accords would not come to pass. I am speaking, of course, of current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who formed his sixth government in December 2022 and presides over the most extreme right-wing coalition in the history of Israel.
In 2001, Netanyahu was quoted as saying that he was once asked whether he would carry out the said accords. “I said I would,” he said. “But I am going to interpret the accords in such a way that will allow me to put an end to this galloping forward to the 1967 borders… Nobody said [what] military zones were. Define military zones as security zones; as far as I am concerned the entire Jordan Valley is a defined military zone.”
In the same quotation, Netanyahu explained that he had insisted in his discussions with the American side that he be allowed to specify which areas constituted a “military location,” such as the whole Jordan Valley. He explained the importance of this insistence by pointing to the fact that from “that moment on [I] stopped the Oslo Accords.”
If you are still trying to fathom what the Netanyahu-led coalition in Israel has been trying to achieve in Gaza and the West Bank over the last two years since the Hamas attacks of 7 October 2023, you will probably find a credible answer in the quotes attributed above to Netanyahu.
After the assassination of Rabin, Netanyahu wanted to present his condolences to Leah Rabin in person. She refused to receive him. How could she have accepted condolences from a man who by his fiery speeches against the Oslo Accords, and his firing up of the extremists in the settler movement against them, had led to the assassination of an Israeli leader who had had the political and moral courage to make very difficult choices for the sake of peace and mutual and balanced security between his own people and the Palestinians?
Had the road Rabin traced on in September 1993 lasted, it is probable that the October 2023 attacks would never have occurred. Herein lies the difference between genuine statesmen and politicians whose only interest is power and how to keep it at all costs.
The price of this over the last two years has been more than 70,000 Palestinians killed by the Israeli army and more than 2,000 Israelis dead. The numbers are continuing to rise.
* The writer is former assistant foreign minister.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 4 December, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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