The right lesson from Rabin’s murder
This year’s commemoration ceremonies for the November 4, 1995 assassination of former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin garnered little attention. The Jewish calendar date fell five days before last week’s pivotal elections, and amid the surrounding media buildup, few reports contemplated the poverty of the assassination’s 31st anniversary. Israeli President Isaac Herzog gave a watered-down speech condemning “all political violence” in the company of several senior officials who have made a point to ignore, and even support, political violence. Outgoing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as customary since 2019, skipped the ceremony altogether.
The designation of November 4 as the launch date for Herzog’s negotiations to choose Israel’s next governing coalition is pure coincidence – the law requires the President to conduct them a certain period of time after elections. But it can also be seen as deeply symbolic: Herzog is choosing between a bloc led by Netanyahu – a leader who gave speeches at anti-peace rallies marked by violent, inciting rhetoric against Rabin – and one that opposes Netanyahu, which would likely include the support of Arab parties. But whomever he gives the first shot at forming a coalition to, the fact remains that Rabin’s legacy, and his murder by Jewish terrorist Yigal Amir, has become largely absent from public discourse. This indifference is, in part, a product of the Israeli left’s fundamental failure to see the tragedy as a breaking point in its relationship to the Israeli national-religious right. As Ran Shimoni noted in Haaretz, unlike the religious Zionists after the Gaza disengagement, “the liberal camp mourned Rabin along with everyone else, and did not build its own political ethos from the murder.”
Israel’s religious nationalist camp proved highly adept at converting trauma into political mobilization. The 2005 Gaza disengagement – the forced evacuation of Jewish settlements by the Sharon government – was a profoundly traumatic event for ideological settlers. Feeling betrayed by the state and the principle of mutual Jewish responsibility – defined by the Biblical phrase “Kol Yisrael arevim zeh la-zeh,” or “All of the Jewish nation are accountable for one another” – this camp radicalized. Over the next two decades, it mutated from a messianic minority into a violent militia with a powerful political presence. By the 2022 elections, parties that openly support radical religious nationalism – Netanyahu’s Likud, Smotrich’s Religious Zionism, and Ben-Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit – secured 46 Knesset seats. Four years of disastrous governance later, this coalition still won 40 seats, with Ben-Gvir’s party emerging as an independently dominant force.
Meanwhile, Rabin’s Labor party, which held 44 seats in 1992, plummeted to just four seats by 2022, rebounding slightly to eight in the recent election. While there are several reasons for the sharp decline, one of them is the left’s apologetic posture following Rabin’s assassination. Instead of confronting the existential threat posed by right-wing extremism, the left pursued conciliation, establishing dialogue tents to appease religious nationalists under the assumption that empathy would moderate them. This was a fatal miscalculation.
Buoyed by historic peace agreements with Egypt, Jordan, and the PLO, the 1995 Israeli left naively assumed that if Israel could make peace with external adversaries, it could easily find a middle ground with its Jewish ideological opponents. It failed to recognize that this camp did not want compromise, only capitulation. And that, in the end, you cannot make peace with an enemy of peace, and you cannot build a pluralistic democracy with an enemy of pluralism and democracy.
The critics that argue that the peace movement was inherently superficial and that Israeli society was fundamentally incapable of accepting a two-state solution undervalue the immense strength of this movement. Despite the First Intifada and a subsequent brutal campaign of Palestinian terror bombings, support for Rabin’s peace agenda was unprecedented: in 1995, more Jewish Israelis identified as left-wing than right-wing for the only time since polling began in 1986. The subsequent nosedive in popular support was not inevitable. It resulted from a refusal to assert its principles and recognize internal enemies.
Rabin’s assassination should have caused the left to harden its spine, and with a solid parliamentary and voting majority, demand that any future leadership continue his path and maintain the ethos he championed. Instead, it crumpled in the face of a crime it could not comprehend, that defied its understanding of Jewish values and democratic principles. Instead of rejecting religious nationalism outright, it sought to understand it – and with this act of tolerance and empathy towards a group that loudly championed intolerance and cruelty, betrayed itself, falling prey to a false promise of Jewish unity and mutual accountability which broke again and again until it shattered completely on October 7, 2023.
Rabin envisioned the Oslo Accords not just as a peace agreement, but as a path to “another reality” free from endless violence. Following his death, Israelis failed to defend that mission: Rabin was succeeded by Benjamin Netanyahu, who had previously headlined the very anti-peace rallies that incited his assassin. Netanyahu would go on to reshape Israel in his image for decades, perpetually campaigning on a false mantra of Jewish national unity and labeling Palestinians and Arabs as avowed enemies.
In order to find a way to Rabin’s reality, as a bare minimum condition, Netanyahu cannot be part of any new government, ever. But this is not enough. The lesson from November 4, 1995 is clear: allies and adversaries are defined by shared principles and political values, not ethnicity or religion. Jewish unity is meaningless without a commitment to democracy and the rule of law. And Arabs – as 20% of Israel’s population – will always form an important part of the country, and should participate in governance to ensure their voices are heard and their rights respected.
