It's been eight years since the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. This year's commemoration has already been marred by inexcusable vandalism, apparently on the part of right-wing extremists. A shanda (outrage or shame).
Nevertheless, I'll irreverently diverge from the numerous and largely justified tributes to Mr. Rabin that always proliferate at this time every year to reiterate a point I made a year ago. (Much as I dislike quoting myself), this was the lead:
November 3, 2002: The fictitious legacy of Yitzhak Rabin
Tomorrow we’ll mark the seventh anniversary (on the Western calendar) of the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. And we’ll be subjected to all sorts of nostalgic postulations about the peace that would envelop the Middle East today had he survived. I blog not to praise Rabin, nor to criticize him, but to try to dispense with some of this sentimental propagandistic bullshit.
I rarely use words like "bullshit" on this blog. Well, there, I've gone and done it again. But if you go back and read what was being written in both the pro-Israel and the pro-palestinian press just months before the assassination, you'll discover an amazing fact. The "peace process" was already foundering badly. What's more, Arab apologists had already declared the so-called peace process “dead,†and laid the blame squarely at the feet of -- surprise -- Prime Minister Rabin.
So I'll say it one more time, with feeling.
Rabin’s assassination was an outrage, an abomination and a tragedy. But it wasn’t the beginning of the end of the golden road to peace. That road never led anywhere other than exactly where we find ourselves today.
And today, one year later, the song remains the same. Whether you call it the "road" or the "roadmap," "Oslo" or "Geneva," it still leads, sadly, to the same dead end. It's time to move on.
