In addition to being the 36th anniversary of the Iranian seizure of the US embassy in Tehran, today is also the 20th anniversary of the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin by a right-wing Israeli named Yigal Amir in Tel Aviv. There are remembrances of Rabin all over the place, many/most of them wondering if his death ended the chances for peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians. This strikes me as a bit of mythologizing. It’s certainly true that Rabin was the last Israeli prime minister who showed any real interest in making peace with the Palestinians, who really understood that Israeli democracy couldn’t survive continued occupation, and maybe if he’d lived longer the Netanyahu Era would somehow have been avoided. He certainly could have been a leader in the Israeli peace movement, a figure around whom those forces could have rallied, and that is something that’s been sorely missing on the Israeli left since his murder.
On the other hand, the forces that were arrayed against Rabin by the time of his assassination weren’t limited to fringe settler assassins. He was opposed by virtually the entire Israeli right over his peace plan, and a serious weakening in the Israeli economy had left his Labor Party, and his leadership of the party, in a dire political situation. It’s quite likely that Rabin and Labor would’ve gotten creamed in the scheduled 1996 Knesset elections and history would have proceeded much as it did. Maybe the 73 year old Rabin wouldn’t have lived much longer anyway. The Oslo Accords that Rabin and PLO leader Yasser Arafat negotiated may have died when Rabin was assassinated, but then again there’s plenty of evidence that they were already faltering, and at any rate those accords deliberately punted on some of the most contentious issues in the Israel-Palestine conflict:
At the time of Rabin’s death, the Oslo process was already in serious trouble. Oslo was a heroic but fundamentally flawed enterprise, an incremental process with no clear end state. It assumed that confidence and trust could be strengthened through a phased process in which the relationship between the occupier and the occupied might be altered through a series of quid pro quos involving land for security and the creation of responsible Palestinian self-government.
Oslo was never meant to be more than the start of a peace process, and watching how easily even that has fallen apart suggests that, even if Rabin had lived, the peace process would have been a long, hard slog that may never have paid off. Kind of like it’s been anyway.
I want to compare the mythologizing that Rabin’s legacy has been getting with the treatment of Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi exile leader who pushed and helped provide the justification for the Iraq War, who died yesterday.
Chalabi was a con-man, as Jim Lobe writes, who created evidence for Saddam Hussein’s supposed WMD programs in order to push the US to topple the Iraqi dictator (he was also literally a con man, as his 1992 conviction in absentia in Jordan for bank fraud shows). But the notion that he “gave us ISIS,” or that he “manipulated the US” into war (that one is particularly rich, considering the guy who tweeted it), is just ridiculous. Chalabi played a role in giving us the Iraq War, yes, but his role was to tell people like Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Richard Pearle exactly what they wanted to hear about Iraq and Saddam’s supposed WMD. These guys had been after a new war with Iraq since the mid-1990s, and they would have gotten there with or without having a guy like Chalabi to whisper welcome lies into their ears. To be sure, Chalabi was happy to do his part, but while blaming the war on him might be convenient now that he’s dead, doing so lets the Bush administration off way too easy.
Hey, thanks for reading! If you come here often, and you like what I do, would you please consider contributing something (sorry, that page is a work in progress) to keeping this place running and me out of debtor’s prison? Also, while you’re out there on the internet tubes, please consider liking this blog’s Facebook page and following me on Twitter! Thank you!
The Foreign Exchanges Companion 
