Israel's Rabin illusion.

• Author: Morris, Benny

Benjamin Netanyahu and his relationship with assassinated prime minister Yitzhak Rabin continue to arouse controversy in Israel. Martin Indyk, the former U.S. ambassador to Israel, recounted in January on an episode of PBS's Frontline, "Netanyahu sat next to me when I was ambassador in Israel at the time of Rabin's funeral.... I remember Netanyahu saying to me: 'Look, look at this. He's a hero now, but if he had not been assassinated, I would have beaten him in the elections, and then he would have gone into history as a failed politician.'" Netanyahu's office denied that he said it.

Last November was the twentieth anniversary of the assassination of Rabin. It remains a contentious date in Israeli history. The occasion was accompanied by the publication of several works, most notably by former Newsweek Jerusalem bureau chief Dan Ephron's Killing a King and a documentary by one of Israel's leading filmmakers, Amos Gitai, Rabin, the Last Day. A major question raised by both was whether Middle Eastern history, including Israeli-Palestinian relations, would have developed in a radically different direction had Rabin lived. It boiled down to whether the assassination had aborted a peace process that would or could have culminated in a historic peace between the Israelis and Palestinians and, by extension, the Arab world as a whole.

Plenty of turning points can be detected in Israel's turbulent past. In 2005, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon unilaterally pulled Israel's troops and settlements out of the Gaza Strip. After his demise a year later--he descended into a decade-long coma, dying on January 11, 2014--no further Israeli withdrawals occurred after Gaza and the partial occupation of the West Bank continues down to the present day ("partial" because the West Bank's main towns and their peripheries are under the control of the Palestinian Authority, though Israeli troops occasionally mount penetrating raids to arrest or kill suspected terrorists, and Israel fully controls the airspace above the whole of the territory). Sharon's successor, Ehud Olmert, renewed negotiations with Mahmoud Abbas, the "president" of the Palestinian Authority, and offered him Palestinian statehood in virtually 97 percent of the West Bank and 100 percent of the Gaza Strip, with a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem. But Abbas rejected the offer, paving the way for the return of Benjamin Netanyahu to the premiership and leaving the status quo, with its burgeoning Israeli settlements, Palestinian terrorism and Israeli counterinsurgency, intact.

Did Sharon's stroke alter the course of history? The jury is still out. It remains unclear whether he actually intended to withdraw unilaterally from the West Bank, perhaps to a line along the so-called "Security Barrier," which would have left about 90 percent of the territory in Palestinian hands. It is likely that he was playing it by ear and had not yet made up his mind when felled by the stroke--though it was Sharon who, after the outbreak in 2000 of the Second Intifada against Israel, had sired the idea of the fence and had overseen the initial stages of its construction. While primarily designed to curb the infiltration of terrorists into Israel, many at the time suspected that Sharon had also conceived of the wall as "political," demarcating the eventual border to which Israel would someday withdraw.

Be that as it may, for many the more tantalizing question mark hovers over the historical significance of Rabin's demise, partly because of the grim nature of his death at the hands of a fellow Jew, partly because Rabin was a supremely likable, if reserved and shy, character (even a tearful PLO [Palestine Liberation Organization] chairman Yasser Arafat, Abbas's predecessor, paid a condolence call on the widow, Leah, in the Rabins' home in Tel Aviv), and partly because of the paradox presented by the apparent transformation of a laurelled general into a peacenik murdered by a right-wing activist bent on halting the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and the prospective withdrawal from Judaea and Samaria, the biblical designation of the territory constituting the West Bank. The killer, Yigal Amir, of Yemenite origin, was at some level also driven by resentment towards the Ashkenazi establishment that Rabin epitomized. As much as many in the Islamic world applaud martyrs, however brutal, in the cause of Islam, so the enlightened West adores its martyrs for peace--and none was more prominent than Rabin.

But did the two bullets that struck Rabin in the back in downtown Tel Aviv on November 4, 1995 reverse the course of history and definitively halt the Israeli-Palestinian peace process? Rabin assumed the premiership in July 1992, having run and won on a peace platform. Though cerebral, Rabin made an unlikely peacenik. He had made no substantive peace proposals to the Palestinians during his first premiership from 1974-1977, had spent most of his adult life in the army, and had personally signed the orders for the expulsion of the Arab inhabitants of the towns of Lydda and Ramie during the 1948 war. He also had orchestrated the Israel Defense Force's Six-Day War victory over Egypt, Syria and Jordan and the occupation of the Gaza Strip and West Bank in June 1967; in 1988, in suppressing the First Intifada (or revolt) against the Israeli occupation, he had, as defense minister in the coalition government led by the Likud's Yitzhak Shamir, ordered the troops to "break the bones" of Palestinian rioters.

But that intifada seems to have convinced Rabin that Israel could not...