The Big If That Never Was

This is a guest post by Mark L. Levinson, a regular reader in Israel.

Israel is a dramatic country, but it’s not a Shakespearean country.  In Israel, if you liquidate the leader, you don’t go on to eliminate all his henchmen and rule the country yourself like Macbeth or Richard the Third.  So I’ve never understood why people — most recently Bill Clinton — speak as though the Rabin assassination had forced Israel to turn away from an impending peace.  “If Yitzhak had not been murdered,” said the 41st president last Saturday in Jerusalem, “I believe we would have achieved peace in three years’ time, and created cooperation between Israel, Palestine and Lebanon.”

If Rabin had not been murdered, he plainly would have been thrown out of office.  The upsurge of terror following the Oslo agreementhad ordinary Israelis afraid to ride a bus in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem.  We immigrants from North America see ourselves as the local champions of tolerance and civility, but when Rabin came to speak to the Association of Americans and Canadians in Israel in those grisly days, he was met by a roar of abuse.  The impressive rally at which he was assassinated drew thousands of kids not because they agreed with Rabin’s policies — or had any political awareness at all — but because pop stars were performing for free.  All the opinion polls showed a whopping majority of voters impatient to send Rabin packing.

And when Rabin was murdered instead, was there no one to pursue the Oslo principles with equal enthusiasm?  Did Shimon Peres, appointed to replace Rabin, send Yasser Arafat away to mope over lost friendship like Henry the Fifth exiling Falstaff?  On the contrary, Peres had always been more enthusiastic about turning Israel’s enemies into friends than Rabin was.  And in trying to win public approval, his camp was not ashamed to imply that to oppose its policies was to support the assassination.

Thus the Oslo process had a greater opportunity to sell itself after Rabin, not a reduced opportunity.  But when election day arrived with no end to terror in sight, the country rejected Rabin’s successor.  Rabin, had he lived, would have done no better, unless he came around to renouncing Oslo himself.

So where does the notion come from that the bullets that killed Rabin, rather than the bombs that blew apart busloads of citizens, punctured the dream of peace?  I suppose it comes from people who, seeing what arose from their foolish bet that the terrorist leopard would change his spots, would rather believe, against all evidence, that it arose from something else.