Monday, November 10, 2008

Rabin and the Oslo Process Revisited
Efraim Inbar - BESA Center Perspectives Papers No. 51, November 10, 2008
www.biu.ac.il/SOC/besa/perspectives51.html

Thirteen years have passed since Yitzhak Rabin was murdered and it's time to
take an unvarnished look at his diplomatic legacy.

Conventional wisdom, as manipulated by political circles of the Left,
commemorates and venerates Rabin as the hero of peace. Yet, Rabin was first
and foremost a military man. To him, peace was primarily a means to buttress
security, and the cautious Rabin believed that the transition to peaceful
relations between Israel and its neighbors would take decades.

The shift to the role of peacemaker was not easy for Rabin. While he had the
courage to make difficult decisions, he was ambivalent toward the path
chosen. His honesty and skepticism prevented him from articulating a soaring
"vision" of peace that would convince the majority of Israelis to go along
with his preferences.

Nevertheless, Rabin was successful in bringing about a de facto partition of
the Land of Israel and in greatly limiting the appeal of the Greater Israel
ideology.

Most Israelis were ready for partition, but the Oslo agreements never
received the whole-hearted support of the public and the Knesset. Rabin's
government coalition barely maintained a majority in parliament. Had he not
been assassinated, Rabin probably would have lost the 1996 election to
Benjamin Netanyahu, as he was trailing badly in the polls.

Rabin always believed in the principle of land for security, reflecting the
prevalent view of mainstream Israeli society. Therefore, it was with
reluctance that Rabin allowed the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO)
to take control of parts of the Land of Israel in exchange for an
unfulfilled promise to prevent terrorism. He also knew that dealing with the
PLO - even a reformed PLO - meant placing difficult issues on the agenda,
such as the establishment of a Palestinian state, the "right of return" for
Palestinian refugees, and Jerusalem.

He was also aware that the PLO was a danger to his preferred partner,
Hashemite Jordan. Moreover, it is important to remember that he tried to
first reach a deal with Syria. Indeed, his power politics prism led him to
attribute greater importance to the interstate dimension of the Arab-Israel
conflict than to the Palestinian dimension. In his eyes, the Arab states,
which had at their disposal tanks and airplanes, could harm Israel much more
than the Palestinians, who lacked military strength. The Arab states
constituted a military threat and were therefore the address for making war
and negotiating peace.

This idea is reemerging in current Israeli politics, as hopes of a
Palestinian state living peacefully next to Israel are confronted with the
bitter reality of a fractured and increasingly fanatic Palestinian body
politic. Following the failure to implement a two-state solution, I believe
that Rabin would have supported attempts to involve Arab states that signed
a peace treaty with Israel in tackling the Palestinian issue.

What is today called the "regional approach" is much more in tune with
Rabin's thinking then the attempts to placate the Palestinian national
movement and build a Palestinian state, which was once deemed by Rabin a
potential "cancer in the Middle East."

The tragic assassination of Yitzhak Rabin only delayed the recognition that
the two state paradigm was not working. We know that Rabin was frustrated
with the Palestinians' dismal record of state building and
counter-terrorism. There are indications that Rabin started having second
thoughts about his peace partner, Yasser Arafat. If he had survived, Rabin
himself might have decided to put an end to the Oslo experiment and expel
Arafat and the incorrigible PLO leadership, which did not deliver their part
of the deal. Rabin explicitly believed that the Oslo process was reversible
because Israel was strong. He could have easily mobilized popular support
for such a policy reversal among Israelis.

Yet his assassination by a religious fanatic galvanized what had previously
been lukewarm support for the "peace process". This event paralyzed the
Israeli political right and minimized opposition to the transfer of
Palestinian cities to the PLO in January 1996.

The realization that the perennial search for a partner to divide the Land
of Israel did not end with granting the PLO territorial control sunk deep
into the Israeli psyche only when Prime Minister Ehud Barak returned from
Camp David in July 2000 and the Palestinians subsequently launched a terror
campaign. Barak, Rabin's heir and disciple, coined the "no partner"
diagnosis to which most Israelis subscribe. More than anyone, Barak is
responsible for discrediting the messianic doves in Israeli politics, whom
Rabin generally detested.

Rabin would have been pleasantly surprised by the resilience of Israeli
society during the Second Intifada. He, like others in the Israeli political
leadership, expressed pessimism about Israelis' ability to withstand
protracted conflict. Such a pessimistic evaluation of the willingness to
suffer within Israeli society was one of the reasons that led Rabin and
others to advocate far-reaching concessions. Evidence that Israelis were
ready to fight and bear pain, contrary to his original belief, might have
led Rabin to display less tolerance of Palestinian violations and led him
toward a serious search for an alternative to the two-state paradigm.

*********
Efraim Inbar is professor of political studies at Bar-Ilan University,
director of the
Begin-Sadat (BESA) Center for Strategic Studies, and the author of Rabin and
Israel's
National Security (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1999). This is
a slightly
revised version of an article published by Bitterlemons on 10/11/2008.

BESA Perspectives is published through the generosity of the Littauer
Foundation