Yitzhak Rabin: A Political Biography

230 Pages·2014·0.965 MB·English

by  Leslie Derfler (auth.)

Yitzhak Rabin
Previous Books by Leslie Derfler
Political Restoration in the Twentieth Century: Charles de Gaulle, Juan
Perón, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, 2012
The Fall and Rise of Political Leaders: Olof Palme, Olusegun Obasanjo,
Indira Gandhi, 2011
The Dreyfus Affair, 2002
Paul Lafargue and the Flowering of French Socialism, 1882–1 911, 1998
Paul Lafargue and the Founding of French Marxism, 1842– 1882, 1991
An Age of Conflict, 1990
President and Parliament: A Short History of the French Presidency,
1984
Alexandre Millerand: The Socialist Years, 1977
Socialism since Marx, 1973
The Third French Republic, 1966
The Dreyfus Affair: Tragedy of Errors, 1963
Yitzhak Rabin
A Political Biography
Leslie Derfler
YITZHAK RABIN
Copyright © 2014 Leslie Derfler
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2014978-1-137-38658-8
All rights reserved.
First published in 2013 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the
United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth
Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of
the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan
Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998,
of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above
companies and has companies and representatives throughout the
world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United
States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-349-48168-2 ISBN 978-1-137-38659-5 (ebook)
DOI 10.1057/9781137386595
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from
the Library of Congress.
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Scribe Inc.
First edition: January 2014
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Preface vii
1 Soldier 1
2 Hero 17
3 Ambassador 27
4 Prime Minister 41
5 Termination 67
6 Interment 81
7 Defense Minister 101
8 Intifada 115
9 Resurrection 127
10 Oslo 143
11 Assassination 161
Epilogue 177
Notes 185
Works Cited 211
Index 219
This page intentionally left blank
Preface
Rabbi Abraham Hecht walked across the room in his house on Ocean
Parkway in Brooklyn. He had assured both relatives and reporters that
he felt no danger. Yet on that December night in 1995, as he looked
through a slat in drawn blinds, he again felt the anxiety that so fre-
quently had gripped him during the past few weeks.
The previous June at a Manhattan conference of rabbis, the 73-year-
old Hecht had stated that giving back land on the West Bank to
Palestinians not only was illegal but according to Jewish law warranted
the death penalty for its advocates. Some saw this as promoting the
violence that gave rise to the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister
Yitzhak Rabin. The Israeli government placed Hecht in the extremist
wing of Orthodox Jews, and only a few days ago, exposed and stigma-
tized, he had been suspended by his own synagogue. Asked to explain
his remarks, he said, “I must have got carried away. I have very strong
feelings about the completion of the land. If God gave it to us, I don’t
want to give it back.”1
The assassinated head of government, Yitzhak Rabin, was a former
general, military chief of staff, defense minister, ambassador to the
United States, and twice prime minister of Israel. He helped direct
Israeli strategy from the mid-1960s, arguably even as ambassador,
aside from a brief retirement, until his murder in April of 1995.
When he replaced Golda Meir as prime minister in 1974, Rabin
was only 52 years old and the first native-born Israeli to hold the post.
After resigning three years later because of a financial scandal involv-
ing his wife, he sat on the back benches of his party for the next seven
years. Then he served as defense minister in two national unity gov-
ernments until 1990. As such, he oversaw the Israeli departure from
Lebanon in 1985, which ended three years of occupation. In charge
of Israeli handling of the (first) Intifada, the Palestinian uprising that
broke out in December 1987, he took the tough line that hurt his
reputation abroad but sent it soaring in Israel. Then, with a strength-
ened conviction that the only solution lay in a political settlement with
viii Preface
the Palestinians, Rabin the soldier became Rabin the peacemaker. He
went on to win the leadership of the Labor Party and the national
electoral victory that won him a second term—after 15 years out of
the prime minister’s office—as head of government. His entry into
the Oslo Accords with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)
held the promise of peace and secured him a Nobel Prize, but his will-
ingness to negotiate with what he himself had called a terrorist group
and return land to the Palestinians generated resentment and hostility
and led to his assassination.
There are several biographies of Rabin, but the last was published
well over a decade ago. Since then, numerous articles on Israeli his-
tory and politics have appeared, many translated from the Hebrew,
which shed a brighter and more critical light on Rabin. This book,
a political and analytical biography, provides explanations for the
important episodes in Rabin’s life. It examines his longtime leadership
of the military and political direction of the Jewish state (the two not
easily separated) and his efforts to secure a peace with Egypt and with
the Palestinians.2
Yet, while showing admiration of Rabin and his efforts to secure
peace, this biography tarnishes his image by pointing to such precipi-
tous actions as ordering the military attacks on Syria that led to the
Six-Day War and to the overconfidence (shared with the Israeli public)
that left the nation unready to meet the two invasions that launched
the Yom Kippur War. Also, he helped create and maintain the well-
kept secret Israeli–S outh African military alliance, even to the extent of
having Israel enable the apartheid state to develop nuclear weapons.
During the Oslo peace process it was only his opposition to the PLO
that was reversed, not his long-standing belief that the Palestinians
were entitled to shape their own destiny; his rejection of a two-state
solution remained firm. Above all, in keeping his focus on the Arab
states, he long failed to see the core problem as that of the Palestinians,
and when agreement with the PLO was finally reached at Oslo, he
failed to make an end to terrorism a condition of signing the accord.
Many of Rabin’s biographers view the (first) Intifada as responsible
for what seemed a dramatic shift from Mr. Security to Mr. Peacemaker,
or as King Hussein of Jordan put it, one who “died as a soldier for
peace.” In contrast, I see a continuity, an underlying awareness of the
need for a political and not a military solution to assure Israeli security,
his most enduring contribution to achieving a Middle Eastern peace.
Israeli political scientist Hemda Ben-Yehuda formulated seven propo-
sitions identifying the components of the attitude expected in a peace
Preface ix
existence conflict: identifying the adversary’s claim to national iden-
tity; denying any relationship between the adversary and the contested
territory; holding a belief that the adversary is bound to lose over the
long term; viewing the adversary as hostile, even genocidal; viewing
the adversary as ideologically committed; seeing conflict and resolu-
tion as a zero-sum game; and advocating “the exclusive use of military
means.” Between 1967 and 1987, between the Six-Day War and the
Intifada, Rabin’s attitude fitted most, although not all, of these com-
ponents.3 Putting security first, he only grudgingly came to accept
Palestinian autonomy (part of the 1978 Camp David Accords) and
only accepted Palestinian participation in peace talks after 1985 as a
way to get Jordan involved.
Although Rabin long distinguished between the PLO and the Pal-
estinian people, there was to be no wholly independent Palestine (with
an army of its own). But he would consider exchanging land for peace
because the integration of one and a half million Palestinians into Israel
would mean the end of Israel as a Jewish state. Similarly, he distinguished
between security and nonsecurity (political) Jewish settlements in the
occupied territories in order to set defensible borders for Israel. He
came to recognize that compromise was necessary: after the Lebanese
War (1982–8 6), Rabin acknowledged the need for limits on military
force but insisted that a Palestinian state posed the greatest threat to
Israel and that the PLO, which demanded it, could be a partner in
peace negotiations but only as part of a Jordanian delegation. Between
1967 and 1987, there was little change in Rabin’s attitude.
After the Intifada, his “iron fist” eventually extended to a (hesitant)
handshake with PLO leader Yasser Arafat. He came to acknowledge
the need for Palestinians—but not the Tunis-based PLO—to partici-
pate in negotiations. During his second term of office, he realized that
the PLO had the real power to decide on peace or war, and “peace,”
he acknowledged, “is not made with friends; peace is made with ene-
mies.”4 Accordingly, agreement between the Israeli government and
Arafat was (reluctantly) reached.
By the early 1990s, Rabin admitted that both Israelis and Palestin-
ians had links to the same territory: “We have been destined to live
together; on the same piece of land in the same country,” he told the
Knesset in July 1992. He now included the PLO, and not only the
Arab states, among the antagonists of Israel, and was open to nego-
tiating with it.
Rabin is one of several twentieth-century heads of government who
achieved the pinnacle of political power, fell from or relinquished