The Rabin Assassination as a Turning Point in Israel's History

The assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on 4 November 1995 clearly was a major turning point in Israel's history. During the previous decades, the Jewish community in Palestine and the State of Israel had witnessed several significant cases of domestic political violence but the assassination of an incumbent prime minister by a fellow Jew was the most severe case of such violence. Yet, the event's significance lies well beyond this fact. Its impact on Israel's history lies in two different but interrelated domains.

First is the Israeli-Arab peace process that had been unfolding in the 1990s. The process was launched by the Bush-Baker Administration in late 1991 at the Madrid Peace Conference and was the most ambitious international effort to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict. After a lame start the process was rebooted by Yitzhak Rabin when he was elected as Israel's prime minister in 1992. When given a rare chance to return to the prime minister's seat after 15 years, Rabin was determined to introduce a profound change in Israel's position, first and foremost by putting substance into the Madrid process. Characteristically, Rabin did not begin with an ambitious comprehensive effort but rather in a limited attempt to effect a breakthrough with either the Palestinians or Syria. It was only after his initial successes that Rabin's policy became more ambitious. Rabin's peace policy led to the signing of the Israeli-Palestinian agreement in Oslo and Washington in August/September 1993 and to the signing of a peace treaty with Jordan in October 1994. Rabin also conducted a significant negotiation with Syria in the course of which the contours of a prospective Israeli-Syrian peace were sketched. These breakthroughs led also to a significant degree of normalization in Israel's relationship with the larger Arab world. In 1994, a Middle East economic conference was held in Casablanca with participation of Arabs and Israelis. Meetings of Arab-Israeli groups negotiating on the parallel multilateral track of the peace process were held in Arab countries and semi-diplomatic relations were established with Arab countries in the Gulf and in North Africa. These breakthroughs created a widespread sense that for the first time in decades, the Arab-Israeli conflict was possibly on the verge of resolution.

In September 1995, the second phase of the Oslo peace process was launched by the signing of Oslo II. The timetable for the next phases of the peace process was quite clear: The five-year transitional period that began in May 1994 was to end in May 1999, by which time Israel and the Palestinian Authority were to conclude the negotiation on a final status agreement between the parties. When Yigal Amir assassinated Yitzhak Rabin in November 1995, it was precisely this course of events that he sought to abort.

There is a school of thought which argues that Amir was indeed fully successful. This view was articulated most eloquently by The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, in an article titled "Foreign Affairs; … and One Man Voted Twice". Friedman published his article on 2 June 1996, after Amir was given by the Israeli Supreme Court the right to vote in the elections that ended in Benyamin Netanyahu's victory over Shimon Peres. Friedman argued that:

In killing Mr. Rabin, Mr. Amir deprived the Labor Party of its only leader who embodied both a vision of reconciliation with the Palestinians and the hard-headed toughness to persuade a majority of Israelis to follow him. Try as he might, Shimon Peres just couldn't bring together those two attributes. But Mr. Amir did something else—something more subtle and paralyzing. By pumping two bullets into Mr. Rabin's back, he raised the terrifying specter of civil war in Israel, if the peace process went any further. In the wake of the assassination, many Israelis, subconsciously, wanted to remove the divisive peace process from the public agenda, and that too worked against Mr. Peres. Said an Israeli political theorist, Yaron Ezrahi: "I was in a cab after the election and...