It was one of the political assassinations that have most marked recent history.
The Jewish ultranationalist Yigal Amir pulled the trigger against Isaac Rabin on November 4, 1995. and, with two accurate shots, he not only murdered the man but also the idea he defended: the possibility that Israelis and Palestinians could have a lasting peace.
Two years earlier, Rabin, then Israeli prime minister, and Yasir Arafat, leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), had shaken hands and even smiled during the signing of the Oslo Accords, which sought to lay the foundations for Palestinian self-determination.
But although this agreement had awakened the hopes of many Israelis and Palestinians who were beginning to glimpse a small light at the end of the tunnel in the conflict that had confronted them for decades, also unleashed a wave of violence and hatred both among the Israeli right and among the militants of the radical Islamist group Hamas.
With fierce opposition against him, led by the right of today’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Isaac Rabin faced a aggressive smear campaign.
Israeli cities, as BBC international editor Jeremy Bowen recalls, were filled with posters showing Rabin dressed as Arafat, with the kufiya (the Palestinian scarf) on his head, or portrayed as a Nazi, in the uniform of the SS.
The extreme right did not forgive him for giving up control of part of the Palestinian territories. Hamas, for its part, had already begun a campaign of suicide attacks, convinced that the Oslo Accords were a surrender to a State that they considered should not exist.
That November 4, 1995, which marks 28 years this Saturday, Rabin gathered more than 100,000 people in Tel Aviv in an event in defense of the peace agreements.
“I was in the military for 27 years. I fought when peace had no chance. I think he has them now, and many of them. We must take advantage of this on behalf of all those who are present here and on behalf of those who are not here, who are many. I always believed that the majority of people want peace and are willing to take risks for peace,” he said that night in what would be his last speech.
The square then sang the “Shir LaShalom” (“Song for Peace”). In the inside pocket of the prime minister’s jacket they would later find a copy of the lyrics of this anthem for peace, soaked in his blood.
As soon as Rabin left the stage, Yigal Amin shot him twice in the back.
Rabin, a former army chief who signed peace
Isaac Rabin, a member of the Israeli Labor Party, was elected prime minister twice, most recently in the 1992 elections.
But for many Israelis, their best letter of introduction was their service record.
Rabin had started his military career in the Palmach, the elite unit of the Haganah, which would later become, after the proclamation of the State of Israel, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).
By the Arab-Israeli war of 1948, Rabin was already a prominent IDF commander, although this would only be the beginning of his military career.
In 1967, during the Six Day War, Isaac Rabin was chief of staff of an army who achieved a devastating victory over his Arab enemies. In less than a week, Israel defeated Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Iraq, and captured the territories of the Sinai, the Golan Heights, Gaza and the West Bank.
After this victory, at the height of his military career, Rabin did what many other Israeli generals did: he entered politics.
He was Israeli ambassador in Washington and upon his return, in 1973, he was elected deputy to the Knesset for the Labor Party. After the resignation of Golda Meir in 1974 (weakened by the Yom Kippur War), he held the position of prime minister for the first time (1974-1977), to which he would return in 1992 until his death.
For many historians, it was precisely his military past, impeccable in the eyes of the Israelis, that gave him the necessary legitimacy to embark on the Oslo peace process.
“It’s not that Rabin was the last chance for peace, but it was the bestprecisely because of his experience as a pillar of the defense system, the important credibility he had and the genuine transformation he experienced in the last years and months of his life,” Derek Penslar, professor of Jewish History at Harvard University, explains to BBC Mundo. .
Rabin had led the war, but he came to believe that dialogue was important for Israel’s security, as he passionately demonstrated in speeches like this one:
“I, serial number 30743, Reserve Lieutenant General Isaac Rabin, Israeli Defense Forces and Peacekeepers soldier; I, who have sent armies to fire and soldiers to death, say today: we are sailing towards a war that has no casualties, no injuries, no blood, no suffering. It is the only war in which it is a pleasure to participate: the war for peace“.
As Dov Waxman, director of the Y&S Nazarian Center for Israel Studies at the University of California, explains, Isaac Rabin “was not exactly a left-wing pacifist,” but that is why he became the most suitable person in Israel to lead. the peace process.
“Prime Minister Rabin was uniquely positioned to lead a successful peace process to its conclusion. Due to his long military experience he could give guarantees to the Israelisespecially to Israeli Jews, that it would not compromise their security,” Waxman tells BBC Mundo.
Vindicated by this support, and on the foundations established with the Madrid Peace Conference of 1991 and the Camp David agreements of 1978, Rabin became a key player for the Oslo Accords.
What were the Oslo Accords
In a scenario as volatile as the Middle East, negotiating a peace required discretion.
For this reason, the Palestinian and Israeli negotiating teams began secret talks in 1993 in the Norwegian capital, which would end with the signing of the first Oslo Agreement (Oslo I) in September of that same year in the White House.
In front of President Bill Clinton, Rabin and Arafat achieved with a handshake what until then had seemed impossible: recognizing each other as interlocutors.
Both, in addition to the then Israeli Foreign Minister, Shimon Peres, were recognized in 1994 with the Nobel Peace Prize.
A second agreement (Oslo II) would be signed in 1995.
Until then, Israel had refused to negotiate with the PLO, which it considered a terrorist organization. But from that moment on, the Palestine Liberation Organization became, in the eyes of Israel, the “representative of the Palestinian people.”
In turn, the PLO recognized Israel as a State, renounced terrorism, and its leaders were able to return from exile.
The Oslo Accords granted limited self-government to the Palestinians over their urban areas and led to the creation of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA).
But the framework created had to be temporary. Oslo was designed so that, within five years and thanks to new negotiations, a permanent solution to the conflict would be reached.
30 years have passed since then and reality could not be further from the hopes of that time. Today, almost no one talks about peace in the region.
Did Rabin’s assassination mark the end of the peace process?
His assassination had a profound impact on the Oslo peace process, the analysts consulted acknowledge.
After Rabin’s death, Shimon Peres assumed the leadership of the government that lost, a year later, in a close election against Benjamin Netanyahu.
“Although Netanyahu did not stop the peace process, did everything possible to derail it and for ensuring that it did not end with the establishment of a Palestinian State,” argues the University of California professor.
For Orit Rozin, a professor of Jewish history at Tel Aviv University, Rabin’s assassination shook Israelis in the same way that the Hamas attack on October 7, in which some 1,400 people died, has now occurred. according to Israeli authorities.
“The circumstances are obviously very different, but then, as now, the Israelis and their leaders felt like they had lost their balance,” argues Rozon, for whom Shimon Peres was “too upset to muster the courage to go ahead with the agreement”.
The Israeli extreme right, although it never recognized it, “celebrated the assassination of Rabin”points out the historian, that that night she received a call from a rabbi who lived in the settlements, who told her that “people were dancing on the balconies.”
Three weeks before the assassination, a 19-year-old young man had appeared on television with the emblem of Rabin’s Cadillac car, which he himself had torn from the vehicle: “We reached his car and soon we will reach him too,” he threatened. His name was Itamar Ben Gvir, today Israel’s Minister of National Security.
In the end, Orit Rozin summarizes, “Hamas, with its campaign of suicide bombings, and the Israeli extreme right ended up killing the peace process.”
After Rabin’s death, neither the Palestinian nor the Israeli sides emerged with the necessary leadership to keep the flame of peace alive, analysts say.
It is impossible to know what would have happened if Rabin had not been assassinated.
Negotiators had not yet begun to discuss the most complicated parts of the agreement, such as the future limits that the State of Palestine would have, the return of refugees, the status of Jerusalem or Jewish settlements in the Palestinian territories.
Rabin himself “Nor did he ever publicly declare that he supported the creation of a Palestinian state.”although he clearly understood that that was where the agreements were headed,” says Dov Waxman.
In fact, as historian Rachid Khalidi, who holds the Edward Said Chair of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University, reminds BBC Mundo, “Rabin said on numerous occasions in the Knesset that Palestine would be less than a State, that Israel would maintain the control of the entire Jordan River Valley and Jerusalem.”
Today, the Oslo Accords, which in theory are still in force, are greatly discredited. The ANP, which should have been replaced by a government elected, is losing its legitimacy.
The following attempts to return to the path of peace have also not prospered.
The last sincere effort, Derek Penslar maintains, was probably in 2008 between Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and ANP President Mahmoud Abbas.
“Once Netanyahu became prime minister again, everything was over,” says the Harvard professor.
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