- 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.
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- I described him as well as I could and ended with the
words: "He is as honest as a politician can be."
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- Arafat broke into laughter, and all the others present,
among them Mahmoud Abbas and Yasser Abed-Rabbo, joined in.
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- FOR THE sake of proper disclosure: I always liked Rabin
as a human being. I especially liked some traits of his.
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- First of all: his honesty. This is such a rare quality
among politicians that it stood out like an oasis in the desert. His mouth
and his heart were one, as far as is possible in political life. He did
not lie when he could possibly avoid it.
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- He was a decent human being. Witness the "dollar
affair": when his term as Israeli ambassador in Washington DC 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.
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- I liked even his most evident personality trait
his introversion. He was withdrawn, with few human contacts. Not a fellow-well-met
back slapper, not one for lavishing compliments, indeed an anti-politician.
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- Also, I liked the way he told people straight to the
face what he thought of them. Some of his expressions, in juicy Hebrew,
have become part of Israeli folklore. Such as "indefatigable intriguer"
(about Shimon Peres), "propellers" (about the settlers, meaning
electric fans which spin noisily without going anywhere), "garbage
of weaklings" (about people leaving Israel for good).
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- He had no small talk. In every conversation, he came
to the point right at the start.
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- His H
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- One might imagine that these characteristics would alienate
people. Quite to the contrary, people were attracted to him because of
them. In a world of pretentious, garrulous, mendacious, back-slapping politicians,
he was a refreshing rarity.
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- 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.
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- The public memory, one of the most effective instruments
of the establishment, is trying nowadays to obliterate this chapter. Throughout
the country one can buy postcards showing Rabin shaking hands with King
Hussein at the signing of the Israeli-Jordanian peace agreement, but it
is almost impossible to find a card showing Rabin with Arafat at the Oslo
agreement signing ceremony. Never happened.
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- As I have recounted before, I was an eye-witness to his
inner revolution. From 1969 on, until after the Oslo agreement, we had
a running debate about the Palestinian issue - at the Washington embassy,
at parties where we met casually (generally at the bar), in the Prime Minister's
office and at his private home.
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- In one 1969 conversation, he objected strenuously to
any dealings with the Palestinians. One sentence imprinted itself upon
my mind: "I want an open border, not a secure border" (a play
of words in Hebrew). At the time, his former commander, Yigal Alon, was
spreading the slogan "secure borders", in order to justify extensive
annexations of occupied territory. Rabin wanted an open border between
Israel and the West Bank, which he intended to give back to King Hussein.
After this conversation, I wrote him that the border would be open only
if there was a Palestinian state on the other side, because then the economic
realities would compel both states Israel and Palestine to
maintain close relations.
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- 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). In the conversation that took place at the Prime Minister's office,
I tried to convince him to give up the "Jordanian option", which
I had always considered silly. He refused adamantly. "We must make
peace with Hussein," he told me. "After he has signed, I don't
care if the king is toppled." Like Shimon Peres and many others, he
entertained the illusion that the king would give up East Jerusalem.
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- I told him that I could not follow the logic of this
line of thought. Let's imagine that the king signed and was then overthrown.
What next? The PLO would take over a state extending from Tulkarm to the
approaches of Baghdad, in which four Arab armies could easily assemble.
Was that, I asked, what he wanted?
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- In this conversation, too, one sentence imprinted itself
on my mind: "I will not take the smallest step towards the Palestinians,
because the first step would lead inevitably to the creation of a Palestinian
state, and I don't want that." In the end he told me: "I oppose
what you are doing, but I will not prevent you from meeting with them.
If these meetings reveal things to you that you think the Israeli Prime
Minister should know about, my door is open." That was Rabin all over.
The contacts, of course, broke the law.
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- After that 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.
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- 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?
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- 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.
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- IF SO, why did the Oslo agreement fail?
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- The practical reasons are easy to see. From the beginning,
the agreement was build on shaky foundations, because it lacked the main
thing: a clear definition of the final objective of the process.
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- 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.
I am convinced that he would have been satisfied with a symbolic return
of a limited number of refugees to Israel proper.
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- That was Arafat's price for giving up 78% of the country,
and no Palestinian leader, present or future, could be satisfied with less.
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- 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. (As I wrote at the time, when traveling from
Paris to Berlin, one can stop at interim stations. When traveling from
Paris to Madrid, one can also stop at interim stations - but they will
be quite different ones.)
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- 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.
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- After the signing, Rabin began to hesitate. Instead of
rushing forwards to create facts, he dithered. This gave the opposing forces
in Israel time to recoup from the shock, regroup and start a counterattack,
which ended in his assassination.
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- Perhaps this mistake could have been foreseen. Rabin
was by nature a cautious person. He was conscious of the heavy responsibility
that rested on his shoulders. He had no taste for drama, unlike Begin,
nor was he blessed with a vivid imagination, like Herzl. For better and
for worse, he lived in the real world. He had no idea how to change it,
though he knew that he had to do just that.
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- BUT THESE explanations are only the foam upon the waves.
Deep under the surface, powerful currents were at work. They pushed Rabin
off course and in the end they swallowed him.
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- Rabin was a child of the classic Zionist ideology. He
never rebelled against it. He carried in his body the genetic code of the
Zionist movement, a movement whose aim from the beginning was to turn the
Land of Israel into an exclusively Jewish state, which denied the very
existence of the Arab Palestinian people and whose logic ultimately meant
their displacement.
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- Like most of his generation in the country, he absorbed
this ideology with his mother's milk, and was raised on it throughout.
It shaped his ideas so thoroughly that he was not even aware of 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.
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- 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 towards a total change (as Ataturk 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- Will I be there? Not me, thank you very much.
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