Rabin’s murder and a critical election

Next Friday, October 23, is the 12th of Cheshvan on our calendar, meaning that it will mark the 31st yahrzeit of Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin’s assassination. Only four days later, Israelis will go to the polls on October 27 to decide the fate of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The two events are linked in a profound way. Rabin’s murder was meant to end the peace process he began, a process designed to ensure Israel’s survival well into the future. The 25-year-old Orthodox religious right extremist Yigal Amir succeeded in killing Rabin, but he failed to kill the peace process entirely. Today, 31 years later, thanks to Netanyahu and his two extremist allies, Finance Minister Betzalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, the peace process is on life support. The choice for Israelis is whether to pull the plug by re-electing Netanyahu, thereby putting Israel’s future itself on life support, or to give the peace process new life by bringing Bibi’s long reign to an end.

As an aside, there is another irony, as well. Rabin’s murder was comparable to the murder over 2,600 years ago of Gedaliah Ben Achikam, the Babylonian governor of Judea. Gedaliah was murdered by a religious fanatic named Yishmael ben Netanyahu.

Benjamin Netanyahu helped create the toxic political environment that led to Rabin’s assassination. In March 1994, for example, he participated in a protest near Ra’anana that was organized by the extremist Kahane Chai movement. Photographs show Bibi walking in front of a coffin beside which was a man carrying a pole with a hangman’s noose attached.

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On October 5, 1995, exactly one month before the assassination, Bibi organized and addressed an anti-Rabin rally in Jerusalem’s Zion Square where protesters chanted “Death to Rabin.” Bibi did nothing to quiet those chants. Itamar Rabinovich, Rabin’s former ambassador to Washington and later biographer, said of that event, “Netanyahu’s incitement at the time crossed the line.”

When Shin Bet chief Carmi Gillon warned Netanyahu that there was a plot on Rabin’s life and urged him to help tone down the hateful rhetoric he and others were using, Bibi refused to do so. He later denied that he ever intended to incite violence — and he ended up being Israel’s longest serving prime minister to date, a position he hopes to hold on to on October 27.

Smotrich and Ben-Gvir also played parts in stoking the anti-Rabin hatred. Just weeks before the assassination, Ben-Gvir was being interviewed on national television after having stolen the logo off Rabin’s car. “We got to his car, and we’ll get to him too,” he said for all viewers to hear. Ben-Gvir was asked what he would do if he did “get to” Rabin. “I’d shout at him,” he said.

I do not doubt that Ben Gvir had no intention of encouraging anyone to assassinate Rabin, but in the days that followed his “we’ll get to him too” remark, it took on a life of its own among the extremist crowd, Yigal Amir included.

Amir, now 56, was sentenced to life plus 14 years for his crime. While Ben-Gvir may not have been encouraging Rabin’s murder, he has been outspoken in demanding that Amir be released from prison and even has insisted that Amir be granted a pardon. In 2007, for example, he said, “If Israel is ready to release terrorists for peace, by the same principle, we demand the release of Yigal Amir.”

Smotrich has never condoned the assassination, and he has condemned Amir, whom he called a “revolting murderer.” On the other hand, and quite bizarrely, Smotrich insists that Amir was not totally to blame for committing his horrible crime. He was egged on by the “irresponsible manipulations, which haven’t been fully exposed to this day,” of Shabak — a/k/a the Shin Bet — Israel’s internal security and domestic intelligence agency.

As I have written in previous columns, Smotrich and Ben-Gvir are avowed racists, and they are proud of it. They also have encouraged the rise of extremist violence on the part of Israeli settlers on the West Bank. They make no secret of their desire to clear out all Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza. If they cannot be encouraged by the violence and harsh government measures to leave on their own, they must be forcibly ejected.

Ben-Gvir’s hatred of Palestinians is almost legendary. He even once had a portrait of Baruch Goldstein on his living room wall. Goldstein, you may recall, murdered 29 Muslim worshippers and wounded more than 100 others at Hebron’s Cave of the Patriarchs on Purim in 1994. Ben-Gvir finally removed the portrait in 2020, but he did so for political reasons, not as a way of condemning the mass murderer of Muslims.

Let me be clear about this. Hamas and Hamas alone is responsible for all the deaths and destruction in Gaza over the last three years, since the Sh’mini Atzeret Massacre on October 7, 2023. Just last week, on the third anniversary of that horrific event, 77 retired U.S. military leaders and legal experts released an open letter that defended the IDF’s conduct of the war Hamas caused and firmly rejected all accusations that the IDF was conducting a genocidal war.

The letter praised the IDF for “taking an unprecedented combination of precautions to avoid civilian casualties…even when those precautionary measures ceded tactical advantage to enemy forces.”

These 77 signatories all are people who understand war only too well. They included a former Central Command deputy commander. CENTCOM is responsible for American military operations across much of the Middle East and Central Asia. It also included a former NATO Supreme Allied Commander, a former head of the U.S. Strategic Command, a former Marine Corps commandant, and a former commander of the U.S. 7th Fleet, the Navy’s largest forward-deployed fleet. Among the signers, as well, was Urban Warfare Institute executive director John Spencer, arguably the world’s leading expert on urban warfare.

“Israel has not committed genocide but rather set a high bar for how to conduct urban warfare against an enemy who will stop at nothing, including the death of its own civilians,” the letter bluntly says.

The letter urges the world “to carefully assess the facts related to the Gaza campaign…, and [to] reject factually and legally dubious accusations against Israel. Failure to do so incentivizes future adversaries to deliberately endanger civilians and then exploit civilian suffering to portray lawful operations as genocide, weaken public support, and divide our alliances.”

The world clearly does not see things the way these 77 unequivocal experts see them, and it is not likely to do so anytime soon. The letter makes very clear why that is and who is responsible:

“This pattern of law-abiding IDF conduct in Gaza also contradicts accusers’ claims that some statements from Israeli political officials, seemingly encouraging unlawful harm to civilians, are evidence of genocidal intent. Such inflammatory statements are disgraceful. Yet, while it deserves unequivocal condemnation, rhetoric from politicians uninvolved in military decision-making is in no way reflective of actual IDF operations.”

Israel today is a pariah nation nearly everywhere in the world and is fast becoming one among most Americans as well. Survey after survey proves that. A Pew survey from March, for example, found that in just four years, the number of Americans expressing an unfavorable view of Israel rose from 42 percent to 60 percent, while favorable opinions of the Jewish state fell from 55 percent to 37 percent.

This criticism of Israel, by the way, is no longer confined to the political left. The various surveys show that it has become increasingly visible across the political spectrum, including among Republicans on the right.

Yitzchak Rabin understood that Israel’s longtime survival depends either on achieving actual peace, or to be seen as aggressively pursuing it despite setbacks caused by perfidious Palestinian leaders. As long as it did so, he believed, the world would stand behind Israel, as it did in 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973.

Benjamin Netanyahu’s policies — especially his attempts to minimize the extent of the growing extremist violence on the West Bank — and the abominable rhetoric coming from Smotrich and Ben-Gvir have turned Israel’s friends into its enemies. The world sees it all as proof that Israel has turned genocidal, and it has led to what is almost certainly the most dangerous development of all: One nation after another has declared that it will no longer resupply Israel with weaponry if a new regional war breaks out. You only have to recall Golda Meir’s begging Henry Kissinger to desperately replenish Israel’s depleted weapons stock with 22,000 tons of military equipment during the Yom Kippur War to understand just how dangerous that development is.

On October 27, Israeli voters have to decide whether to keep the dream Yitzchak Rabin died for alive, or whether to finally finish the job Yigal Amir began 31 years ago when he put a Beretta semi-automatic pistol to Yitzchak Rabin’s head and squeezed the trigger.

We, of course, do have a small role to play in this decision. We can urge our Israeli relatives and friends to consider their votes very carefully for the sake of their children and grandchildren, and what future they want them to have — if there is a future for them.

Shammai Engelmayer is a rabbi-emeritus of Congregation Beth Israel of the Palisades and an adult education teacher in Bergen County. He is the author of eight books and the winner of 10 awards for his commentaries. His website is shammai.org.