by David M. Weinberg
Lessons for Netanyahu as he faces Obama next week: Don't let Israel be pushed off course for imaginary, temporary relief.
This week, Israel
marked the 20th anniversary of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's
assassination, as well as what would have been the 100th birthday of
late Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir.
There are lessons to be
learned about the way we remember these two great leaders, both of
blessed memory. This is especially true for Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu, who next week once again enters the lion's den -- meeting
U.S. President Barack Obama in the White House -- after a long period of
conflict regarding policy toward Iran and the Palestinians.
Rabin's true legacy is
Israel's struggle for secure and defensible borders and a unified
Jerusalem, and great wariness of Palestinian statehood. The use of
Rabin's name to support a galloping-forward, two-state-solution peace
process is left-wing historical revisionism.
Like the majority of
Israelis, then and now, Rabin was willing to take risks and give the
peace process a chance. But he remained suspicious of his Palestinian
partners, skeptical about the outcome, very wary of a full-fledged
Palestinian state, and insistent on maintaining defensible borders for
Israel.
In fact, Rabin may have
been close to calling-off the Oslo process -- according to his closet
advisers and family members, and scholars.
His daughter Dalia told
Yedioth Ahronoth in 2010 that "many people who were close to father
told me that on the eve of the murder he considered stopping the Oslo
process because of the terror that was running rampant in the streets,
and because he felt that Yasser Arafat was not delivering on his
promises."
"Father after all
wasn't a blind man running forward without thought. I wouldn't rule out
the possibility that he was considering a U-turn, doing a reverse on our
side. After all he was someone for whom the national security of the
state was sacrosanct and above all," said Dalia Rabin.
Last week, Dalia Rabin
similarly told The Times of Israel that "as the waves of terror hit the
peace process ... I have the feeling that he [Yitzhak Rabin] wouldn't
have let it continue. There would have been a stage where he would have
decided: We're in a phased process. Let's evaluate what we have achieved
and what the price has been. He wouldn't have stopped Oslo, but he
would have done what Oslo enabled him to do: to look at it as a process
and assess whether it was working."
In his 2008 book "The
Long Short Way," Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon wrote that a few weeks
before the assassination, Rabin told him (then the IDF Military
Intelligence chief) that after the next Israeli elections "he [Rabin]
was going to 'set things straight' with the Oslo process, because Arafat
could no longer be trusted." And this was before the murderous Second
Intifada!
Professor Efraim Inbar,
director of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, surmised much
the same thing in his 1999 award-winning book, "Rabin and Israel's
National Security": "Rabin did not exclude the possibility that the Oslo
agreements might not lead to reconciliation. He was not sure that an
agreement on final status issues with the Palestinians could be reached.
... He perceived an improved strategic environment containing less
chances for existential dangers, but he knew that such military
challenges still existed. He was unmoved in the belief that an armed
peace was the best to which Israel could aspire in the near future."
In his famous last
speech in the Knesset, on Oct. 5, 1995, a month before his
assassination, Rabin in fact specifically distanced himself from
Palestinian statehood. "We view a permanent solution [as involving] a
Palestinian entity which is less than a state," Rabin pointedly said.
Rabin then rejected the
notion of withdrawal to anything approximating the 1967 lines, and
dismissed any thought of dividing Jerusalem: "We will not return to the
June 4, 1967 lines. The security border of the State of Israel will be
located in the Jordan Valley, in the broadest meaning of that term."
(Rabin meant to include the eastern slopes of the West Bank hills -- a
1,200-foot topographical barrier ridge.)
"The responsibility for
external security along the borders with Egypt and Jordan, as well as
control over the airspace above all of the territories and Gaza Strip
maritime zone, will remain in our hands," he averred. "And first and
foremost in our concerns is a united Jerusalem," Rabin continued, "as
the capital of Israel, under Israeli sovereignty."
So Netanyahu might
point out to Obama this coming week that the ongoing drive by America,
Europe and the Israeli Left to establish a full-blown Palestinian state
in the grandest contours, and with the malfeasant Palestinian leaders we
are currently stuck with -- does not accord with the so-called "Rabin
heritage" at all.
In fact, Netanyahu's
skepticism of the Palestinians today, and his insistence on permanent
Israeli military control of the entire West Bank envelope, is very much
in line with Rabin's positions of the early 1990s.
By contrast, the
clap-happy advocacy of unfettered Palestinian statehood as if Oslo had
no bitter aftertaste -- which we hear today from Obama, former President
Shimon Peres and the like -- does not accord with the "Rabin heritage"
one bit.
Netanyahu might also
take heed of the bitter lesson learned by Shamir in his dealings with
former U.S. President George H. W. Bush.
According to Moshe
Arens, who was defense minister under Shamir, Shamir thought he was
buying preferential treatment from the U.S. by acceding to Bush's
entreaties to stay out of the fighting in Iraq in 1991. Shamir thought
that he was clearly signaling his priorities to Bush, leader-to-leader.
"I'll give you restraint in Iraq and you lay off on settlements" as it
were.
When I asked Shamir
about this in 1999 (as I interviewed him for my masters thesis), he
said: "I knew that the settlement issue wouldn't go away. But I made a
calculation: I felt that we really could better stand up for ourselves
on the diplomatic and settlement issues in this way. You have to choose
your battles. Indeed, we prevailed diplomatically after the war.
Settlements continued. Madrid was a success from our point of view.
Never had they given in to us as much as they did."
What can this teach us with regard to Netanyahu's current policy dilemmas?
Well, despite the
leeway Shamir thought he had purchased from Bush, after the Gulf War the
conflict between Washington and Jerusalem over settlements intensified
and became embroiled in the dispute over loan guarantees. These
guarantees were denied to Shamir's government because of continuing
Israeli settlement activity -- notwithstanding whatever "understandings"
Shamir thought he had reached with Bush.
Many observers believe that this dispute played a role in the defeat of the Shamir government in the 1992 Israeli elections.
The Shamir experience
would suggest that calculations of "accrued credit" and presumed
"trade-offs" make for faulty and dangerous policymaking.
The lesson for
Netanyahu is that he should be guided by Israel's strategic and
operational considerations regarding each issue on its own merits --
regarding the need to confront Iran, to push back against the violent
Palestinians, to build in Jerusalem and the settlement bloc, and so on.
Netanyahu should have
no illusions of implicit understandings with Obama or linkages that
might imaginarily accrue Israel credit in the current White House.
We must not let Israel be pushed off course for ersatz, temporary relief.
David M. Weinberg
Source: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=14259
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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