{Originally posted to the author’s blog, The Lid}
The official memorial service for the late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin will be held today, November 1st, the 12th of the Jewish month of Heshvan, which is his yahrzeit —the anniversary if his death per the Jewish Calendar. The English date of his assassination was November 4, 1995.
“The scar from the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin will ensure for generations and will not be erased,” Netanyahu once said at a Rabin memorial ceremony atop Mount Herzl ceremony.The prime minister went on to say that Rabin had spoken of the threat posed by radical Islam to Israel and the entire free world, and he even quoted remarks made by Rabin to then-U.S. President Bill Clinton. “Rabin sought peace,” Netanyahu said, “but he recognized the unwillingness of a significant part of the Palestinians to make peace.”
Indeed what most people do not realize Rabin was not the “sacrifice everything for the sake of peace” person the liberal media painted. In fact, Yitzhak Rabin was the last prime minister of Israel that did not support the creation of a Palestinian State.
Nine days before he was assassinated, Rabin delivered a speech to the Knesset that laid out his vision for the future of Israel and the disputed territories, including:
- No Palestinian State: “We view the permanent solution in the framework of State of Israel which will include most of the area of the Land of Israel as it was under the rule of the British Mandate, and alongside it a Palestinian entity which will be a home to most of the Palestinian residents living in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. We would like this to be an entity which is less than a state, and which will independently run the lives of the Palestinians under its authority.”
- No return to ’67 borders: “The borders of the State of Israel, during the permanent solution, will be beyond the lines which existed before the Six Day War. We will not return to the 4 June 1967 lines.“
- Control of Jordan Valley: “The security border of the State of Israel will be located in the Jordan Valley, in the broadest meaning of that term.”
- Gush Katif as model: “The establishment of blocs of settlements in Judea and Samaria, like the one in Gush Katif.”
- All settlements remain intact during interim period: “I want to remind you: we committed ourselves, that is, we came to an agreement, and committed ourselves before the Knesset, not to uproot a single settlement in the framework of the interim agreement, and not to hinder building for natural growth.”
- United Jerusalem, which will include both Ma’ale Adumim and Givat Ze’ev — as the capital of Israel, under Israeli sovereignty, while preserving the rights of the members of the other faiths, Christianity and Islam, to freedom of access and freedom of worship in their holy places, according to the customs of their faiths.
- (During interim period) “The responsibility for external security along the borders with Egypt and Jordan, as well as control over the airspace above all of the territories and Gaza Strip maritime zone, remains in our hands.
(The entire speech can be found here)
None of this is meant to denigrate the memory of the Israeli PM who was slaughtered over two decades ago, its more to show the true nature of the media and world leaders like the former American President Barack Obam who slanted Rabin’s legacy to tell the story they want to tell. They have taken upon themselves to recreate Rabin into something he was not. For many years, Rabin’s legacy was defined by the dreams of the peace process that he was engaged in with the Palestinians at the time of his murder. Whether this was what he would have wanted has been debated by his relatives and confidants, some of whom were aware of his growing doubts about the intentions of Yasser Arafat, who was already sabotaging the diplomatic process by ordering terrorist attacks before, during, and after the time of Rabin’s assassination.
Bill Clinton surely would have known that at the time of his death Rabin was ready to bail on the Oslo process.
Seven years ago Rabin’s daughter Dalia wrote in an Israeli magazine :
“Many people who were close to father told me that on the eve of the murder he considered stopping the Oslo process because of the terror that was running rampant in the streets and that Arafat wasn’t delivering the goods.
Father after all wasn’t a blind man running forward without thought. I don’t rule out the possibility that he considered also doing a reverse on our side.
After all he was someone for whom the security of the state was sacrosanct.”
Rabin was not the blind peace-maker like some of the Prime Ministers who followed him such as the late Shimon Peres, Ehud Barak, and Ehud Olmert. The Oslo process Rabin began came to be roundly criticized, as it led to deadly violence including the second intifada, while at the same time it consolidated the power of the terrorist Arafat. But who can honestly know what would have happened if a crazy zealot didn’t strike him down 22 years ago? Oslo might have been over long before the intifada and Arafat might have been sent back to his hiding place under a rock in Tripoli.
One thing is for sure, the same liberals who created the revered image of Yitzhak Rabin vilify Binyamin Netanyahu even though in some ways Bibi’s positions today are more moderate than the great peacemaker Rabin.