The Rabin legacy. Revised?

A number of senior Israeli officials have been warning about “settler” violence. Ehud Barak

Earlier on Thursday, at a memorial ceremony for assassinated prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, Barak warned of further political murders in Israel by “cancerous” groups of religious right-wing extremists.

Yuval Diskin:

On Sunday, Shin Bet chief Yuval Diskin, whose agency’s bodyguard unit is the equivalent of the U.S. Secret Service, warned that settler fanatics could resort to “live weapons – in order to prevent or halt a diplomatic process.”

I remember the last time we heard such an outpouring of fears: It was in advance of the evacuation of the Jewish residents of Gaza. In the wake of the “disengagement” there were precisely zero assassinations. I don’t think that anyone was arrested for such a plot either.

In a similar vein, Treppenwitz scolds Shimon Peres:

You are a fraud, Shimon Peres. You took office with a promise to heal old wounds and bring about a national reconciliation. From that time until this, you have barely even given lip service to that admirable goal. Instead you have studiously ignored every violent act by leftists and anarchists and branded every misdeed from the right as the harbinger of ‘the next inevitable political assassination’.

You have never been interested in a national reconciliation, so it puzzles me why you would bother even mouthing the words at this point in your career.

In your famous Haaretz interview with Daniel Ben Simon following your loss in the 1996 elections, you divided our people neatly into two camps; ‘Israelis’ and ‘Jews’. According to that interview, the Jews are those who don’t have “an Israeli Mentality”. You counted yourself then among the Israelis, and sneered down your prominent Semitic nose at the Jews.

Tell me President Peres… what has changed since then? Have you and your friends come to a new way of reckoning our people? Have you arrived at some new formula for doling out legitimacy? If not, why would you think that ‘the Jews’ would suddenly come to your party?

With all these public figures appropriating the memory of Yitzchak Rabin to marginalize part of the Israeli population it makes it all the more remarkable the recent rapprochement of Yitzchak Rabin’s son Yuval to – Binyamin Netanyahu.

Yuval Rabin met today with none other than Benjamin Netanyahu, who was widely branded by Rabin’s supporters as bearing indirect responsibility for the murder — for having created what was called a “climate of incitement” that seemed to legitimize and justify the crime. Rabin’s widow Leah famously refused to shake Netanyahu’s hand. But now her son not only appears to be making peace with Israel’s opposition leader, but also apparently lending him public support in advance of the coming elections. When confronted by reporters (according to the Hebrew-language site NRG), Rabin said that he was “unwilling to live only in the past, but also in the present and future . . . reality has changed. Just look at who else is running in the elections.”

This would mark a huge departure for Rabin. Here’s a profile from eight years ago:

Yuval joins in the criticism, suggesting that Barak, and the Israeli public, had all along disparaged the hardships the Palestinians endured.

“I don’t understand the disparity between Barak’s declarations and his actions,” he says. He challenges Barak’s claims to having gone “further than any previous Israeli prime minister,” saying Barak conceded no new territory to the Palestinians, and only carried out the Wye accord withdrawals already agreed to by Binyamin Netanyahu. He goes on to say that no one can be sure if Barak’s concessions to the Palestinians at Camp David and afterward – none of which were written down officially – were really made.

If the media reports are correct – that Barak offered Yasser Arafat all of Gaza, 90-odd percent of the West Bank, at least a good chunk of east Jerusalem, and an end to Israeli sovereignty over the Temple Mount – then, Rabin says, “I can’t understand why the Palestinians refused.”

He is asked to clarify: Does he mean that Arafat evidently didn’t trust Barak’s offer because, on the basis of the prime minister’s execution of the Oslo accord up to that point, Arafat had good reason not to trust it?

“That could be,” Rabin replies. He faults Israeli society for failing to part with land when the Palestinian Authority was delivering peace – during the PA’s wholesale crackdown on terror during the two years leading up to the al-Aksa intifada, a period when, Rabin notes, “Israel was safer from terror than it had been, possibly, at any time in its history. Did this encourage us to move further in the peace process? I have my doubts.” While objecting to violence as a political tool, he conversely raises doubts that Israel would have signed the Oslo accord without the intifada, or that it would have signed the Camp David Accord with Egypt without the Yom Kippur War.

“All the people who are now saying ‘I told you so’ should consider whether the situation would have been better had there not been an Oslo accord,” he says.

I’d have to guess that something convinced the younger Rabin that the Palestinians did not act in good faith in response to overtures from Israel. I wonder what changed his mind.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.