On that euphoric night in June 1992, listening to Rabin's victory
speech, I felt a rush of misgivings which refused to be suppressed.
The declarations "I shall make the decisions," "I shall navigate,"
were not those of a truly strong man. Such men speak more softly.
And the grudging manner in which, only under pressure, did he
acknowledge the contribution of Peres to the Labor party victory
bespoke a meanness of spirit.
This boastful, overly assertive tone jibed ill with the man who
dithered and gave in to the settlers in the mid-1970s in Sebastia
during his first tenure as Prime Minister. This surrender marked
the beginning of the Gush Emunim settlement drive. And Rabin's
pettiness in dealing with Peres was a bad omen for the future, when
this lack of generosity would later manifest itself in
penny-pinching concessions during the negotiations with the
Palestinians.
I am reminded of a conversation I had with one of Labor's venerable
lead¬ers shortly after the party lost the 1977 elections.
Talking of Rabin, the man, who knows him well, remarked: "Yitzhak
always had a very good head on his shoulders. But his character ...
his character ... " This is an attempt to sketch an outline for a
portrait of Rabin's charac¬ter, that of the man who may,
unfortunately, be the only one whom the Israeli masses will trust
when it comes to making the necessary conces¬sions to the
Palestinians (and the Syrians), when the time for decision comes.
The point may be, regrettably, that Rabin is not a man capable of
making those decisions.
He is known for having no intellectual interests, but also for his
clear and cold analysis of situations. His authority among the
military is high. He is famous for an enormous capacity for
methodical work, for his mastery of detail, for his respect for
people "who get things done," and his corre¬sponding contempt
for those who "just talk" (hence his known weakness for the company
of business leaders and senior officers), for his aloofness from
people and lack of psychological insight. The world he inhabits is
the world of power, where force is the first means to which one
resorts. This is accompanied by a reclusive shyness, a certain
brittleness, a tendency, on the one hand, to crumble when faced
with what seems to be a superior force, and, on the other, to be
brutal towards the weak. These inner ten¬sions and
insecurities are apparently the cause of his well-known penchant
for the bottle.
Thus, during the siege of Beirut in 1982, he visited the
battlefront and advised Sharon (who hardly needed such advice) to
"tighten the screws" on the besieged city, by cutting off basic
utilities. When the Intifada broke out, he, the Minister of Defense
in the National Unity Government, com¬pletely failed to grasp
the significance of the spiraling events, and post¬poned for
days his return from abroad. And when he did come back, it was he
who unleashed the brutality of the troops by advising them to
"break the bones" of the insurrectionists.
Dovish Conclusions
The curious things about Rabin's instinctive brutality is that, at
the same time, he has had dovish convictions. They are not a new
development with him. Even before he became Prime Minister in the
1970s, he said that he wouldn't mind visiting Hebron and Bethlehem
on an Arab visa. In a closed meeting held at the time, he carne out
firmly in favor of ceding the whole Sinai to Egypt in exchange for
peace. Rabin arrived at these conclusions on the basis of an
analysis of the politico-military-demographic-economic analysis of
the situation of Israel, not on any moral or ethical grounds. And
his views are apparently shared by most senior officers in the
army.
Still, when he did form his first government and could apply these
ratio¬nal insights about regional realities, he never
implemented them. The with¬drawal from the conquered Egyptian
territory was accomplished only by his successor, Likud Prime
Minister Menachem Begin. The strange fact is that, to date, Begin
and Sharon have been the only Israeli leaders who have had enough
nerve and clout to evacuate Jewish settlements.
In his present tenure, Rabin was faced with several major crises
during the first year and a half of his administration. It is most
instructive to observe how he reacted to them.
Tests of Leadership
The first was the expulsion of the Hamas leaders, at the end of
1992, in retaliation for a terrorist outbreak. The action was
decided upon in secrecy and carried out with tremendous speed, and
Rabin hid the true scale of the deportation from most of his
ministers. It appears that he took very few people into his
confidence, and acted largely on the advice of the Chief of Staff,
Gen. Barak, true to his inclination to rely first and foremost on
mili¬tary counsel.
Here was an action which pandered to public opinion, which was
under¬taken swiftly, secretively and decisively, against
targets which were large¬ly helpless - and which backfired in
a political and propaganda disaster. It was a result which most of
the ministers who were not party to the plan could have predicted,
not only the Meretz ministers, but also such bal¬anced, cool
heads like the Minister of Justice, David Liba'i.
Another example of Rabin's readiness to use a heavy hand was after
the Katyusha attacks by Hizbullah on the Galilee in 1993. Again,
apparently on Barak's advice, Israel's artillery rained tens of
thousands of shells on the towns and villages of southern Lebanon,
causing a mass flight to the north by the inhabitants. The action
was out of proportion to the provocation, and it is highly likely
that the tacit agreements reached with Hizbullah could have been
accomplished without this massive display of firepower, bringing
terror and misery to tens of thousands. But this was the typical
Rabin mode of operation: force used unstintingly, without recourse
to diplomacy, as long as you have the upper hand and the opinion of
the "street" behind you.
Hebron Massacre
Now comes the third major test, and perhaps the greatest of all -
the one which was the turning point of the Rabin administration:
the massacre in the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron, in February
1994.
It was, politically, a golden opportunity for Rabin to inflict a
deadly blow on the settlement movement. Even Gush Emunim people,
and those who sympathize with the settlers, were horrified by the
slaughter. A feeling spread, that after this horror, there could
never be a place for settlements in Arab territory, and certainly
not in Hebron. The nation at large was alienated and disgusted with
the settlement movement. The first thing that should have been
done, and there was broad consensus on this, was to evacuate the
small groups of fanatical settlers from the city of Hebron
itself.
The army prepared for it. The government was almost solidly behind
it. Everyone in Israel knows that the leadership of the settlement
movement, rather than the Likud, is the toughest enemy of peace.
Hitting the settle¬ment movement, and opening generous credits
for those who want to get out of the settlements and back to Israel
proper, would have been natural acts for a government which aims at
peace and a rapprochement with the Palestinians.
But nothing happened. The hope for immediate action petered out.
And as usual, after the atrocities committed by Jews in the
Occupied Palestinian Territories, a curfew was imposed, not on the
Jews who perpetrated the atrocity but on the Arabs who were its
victims. Many more Arabs were killed and wounded in demonstrations
after the massacre, which any sen¬sitive government would have
had the sense to permit to run their course in order to blow off
some of the pent-up steam of helpless fury. This does not excuse
the acts of indiscriminate terrorism perpetrated by Hamas, but it
explains much of the support they have gained among the Palestinian
masses, even if they sabotage the chances for eventual peace.
Since then we began to hear of vast sums of money being poured into
the settlements, despite all the talk of leaving them to "wither on
the vine."
"Facts on the ground" are being prepared to cut off Jerusalem from
any Arab territorial continuity. Rabin's actions are undermining
any prospect of settlement with the Palestinians. And without such
a settlement, as Rabin should know full well, all the highly touted
peace agreements with the Arab countries will sooner or later
become worthless.
Pining for Peres
A last example of Rabin's inept and doomed reliance on force is his
behav¬ior after the recent abduction of the soldier Nahshon
Wachsman by Hamas. Again, he failed to consult most members of the
cabinet, but resorted to a "military solution." By the very
summoning of Gen. Barak to organize a commando raid, he in effect
doomed Wachsman. Even the fastest and most efficient commando raid
could not be faster than the gun aimed at Wachsman's head. Both
Rabin and Barak must have known this very well, and had written
Wachsman off before the action started. Other questions arise: Why
was there no attempt to contact the abductors by megaphone, before
the attack commenced, to negotiate and reason with them? Why did
Rabin not call on the imprisoned Sheikh Yassin to speak to the
abductors, if the primary aim was to save Wachsman and not just to
kill the kidnap¬pers? After all, in all such operations there
is first an attempt to settle the matter bloodlessly. But Rabin
apparently only knew how to handle the big stick - at the expense
of Israeli soldiers. The callousness then is aimed not only towards
the Arabs. Human life in general doesn't seem to mean much in this
calculation. Diplomacy, the search for mutually acceptable
solutions, which is the most important element in the present state
of Israeli-Palestinian relations, appears a poor second in the way
Rabin views the world. One pines for the slickness, adroitness and
political savvy of Peres.
Up to a point, until April last year, one could see some reason and
logic behind Rabin's actions, one could excuse his twists and turns
as necessi¬tated by political maneuvering in the way of
achieving the eventual peace and accommodation with the Palestinian
people. But not any more.
Fading Authority
We see in these cases Rabin's essential weakness. Whereas he is
quick and merciless with Arabs, he has shown weakness and
vacillation when faced with determined resistance from the Jewish
side, backed by the various branches of the religious establishment
who are protecting those settlers who defeated him when the first
settlements were established in the OPT, in his first term of
office.
If Rabin had shown such pusillanimity in the case of Hebron, when
prac¬tically all the cards were stacked in his favor - can
anyone imagine him willing to confront the evacuation of
settlements in his present, much weakened, political
position?
I am very much afraid that Rabin has shot his bolt and failed. All
the bright hopes for a new Middle East are beginning to fade with
his fading authority.
Perhaps there is one thing which still brings hope that we win
emerge from this dark passage - the feelings of utter disgust and
despair at the endless conflict, the constant bloodshed, which
pervade most of Israeli society. We are no longer in the 1970s,
when the Gush was on the offen¬sive, before the Lebanese War
and the shabby retreat from that country. We are also after the
Gulf War, when Israel tasted for a few days a few drops of the
medicine it has been serving steadily to its neighbors, and the
memory of the shock of those nights still lingers. Everyone knows
that if there is not peace, there will be war, and a bitter and
costly one. In present day Israel, nobody, except the religious
fanatics, is prepared for that.