Yitzhak Rabin's assassination 20 years later: How it shaped the Mideast peace process
Peace process remains in limbo, violence rocks the region after Israel's PM was killed Nov. 4, 1995
Emanuel Adler was at the fateful pro-peace rally in Tel Aviv 20 years ago today, when two shots from the gun of a radical right-wing Israeli law student ended the life of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and altered the peace process for years to come.
"People started to shout, 'Something happened to Rabin,'" said Adler, the Andrea and Charles Bronfman chair of Israeli Studies at the University of Toronto. "We returned to the parking lot and turned on the radio and heard the news. When we got to Jerusalem, we learned he was dead."
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If there was someone who could "get a two-state solution with Palestinians, that would have been him," he said.
Instead, according to Dan Ephron, author of Killing a King: The Assassination Of Yitzhak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel, "it's clear that the assassination set off this chain reaction that shifted power in Israel from the pragmatists to the ideologues, to [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu."
"But this was a moment where things could have gone differently in terms of the peace process between Israelis and Palestinians," Ephron said in a recent interview with NPR. "There were obstacles. There was trouble. But there was probably more hope than at any time since then. And had Rabin lived, had the peace process progressed in some significant way, I think everything would be different today."
His death, on Nov. 4, 1995, came in the wake of the controversial Oslo Accords, a landmark agreement signed by Rabin and, as Adler says, Rabin's "mortal enemy" — the late Palestine Liberation Organization chairman Yasser Arafat. The agreement gave the Palestinians limited self-rule in the occupied territories and set up the Palestinian Authority. In turn, Arafat pledged to condemn violence and recognize Israel's right to exist. By 1999, the two sides were to have negotiated a final peace deal.
But the peace process is in limbo today. In recent weeks, for instance, clashes have flared up in parts of the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
"[Rabin] allowed, for a very brief period, of imagining a world in which these two peoples got along," said David N. Myers, a professor of Jewish history at UCLA.
Oslo condemned
The Oslo Accords had been condemned by many in the political and religious right who called Rabin a traitor and accused him of compromising security and allowing Palestinians access to land some Israelis believed they had religious claim to.
Rabin, leader of the left-wing Labour Party, was shot dead in a parking lot moments after a rally that had been a gathering of thousands of people in support of the Oslo Accords.
He was gunned down by Yigal Amir, an ultra-nationalist Jewish extremist who opposed Rabin's policy of trading land to the Palestinians for peace. Amir, now 45, is currently serving a life sentence in an Israeli prison.
"Amir actually did what many thought they would never do ... and even deplored that fact but were relieved when this happened because they understood that things would change," Adler said.
Certainly no peace dove, Rabin was a former general and defence minister during the first intifada (known as the Palestinian uprising), where he was accused of ordering his soldiers to break the bones of Palestinian militants.
Nor was he the initiator of the Oslo Accords, as Adler points out, but felt, as a strategic move, in an effort to gain international support, that he had better try to work with it.
'He was taken by it'
"He said, 'Let's see what happens,'" Adler said. "He didn't start the process, but he gave it a try and then he was taken by it."
Yossi Beilin, a former Israeli cabinet minister considered one of the architects of the Oslo Accords, said Rabin had never committed himself to the two-state solution.
"I'm sure that in a few years, he would have changed his mind, like [Ariel] Sharon would change his mind," Beilin said about Israel's prime minister from 2001 to 2006.
"He was very clear on this issue: 'We have to negotiate with the Palestinians as if there is no terror. And to fight terror if we don't negotiate.' This is not easy. Easy to say, difficult to implement, but not impossible to implement.
"What happened after [Rabin's] assassination is that whenever there was some kind of terrorism, from the Palestinian side, the talks stopped. And this is really a prize to the terrorists."
Shortly after the assassination, the militant group Hamas, also an opponent of the Oslo Accords, launched a series of deadly attacks that had a devastating effect on the fragile Israeli psyches, Myers said.
"Fear will almost always win over hope," Myers said. "Rabin's hope-filled agenda was extraordinarily promising but quite thin and, as we saw, it really hinged on a single individual to carry it forward."
Since Rabin's death, Israelis have made peace offers to the Palestinians that have been rejected, but Myers suggested that Rabin may have been able to bring Arafat on board.
"We are always awaiting the great Mandela-like figure," he said. "I will go out on a limb and say Israel presented one, and he, by the force of his personality, might have been able to persuade his one-time enemy to go through [with it]. That's the counterfactual — could have Rabin persuaded Arafat to take a deal? And I am not prepared to say no."
With files from The Associated Press