Myth and reality abound 20 years on from assassination of Israeli prime minister who came close to forging durable reconciliation with Palestinians

In grim, reflective mood, Israelis are marking the 20th anniversary of the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin – the prime minister who took a historic step towards peace with the Palestinians – linking his murder by a rightwing nationalist to the latest wave of Arab-Jewish violence and the bleak prospects for ending the conflict.

Rabin was honoured on Monday in ceremonies at the Mount Herzl cemetery in Jerusalem and in the Knesset, after President Reuben Rivlin solemnly pledged that his unrepentant killer, Yigal Amir, would never be released from prison. Many other events are taking place across Israel in the coming days.

In September 1993, Rabin signed the Oslo agreement with the PLO leader, Yasser Arafat, with President Bill Clinton watching their famously hesitant handshake on the White House lawn. It was a landmark in the century-long war over the Holy Land – though a controversial one that generated furious opposition on both sides.



But his murder at a peace rally in Tel Aviv on 4 November 1995 (the anniversary is marked according to the Hebrew calendar) was widely seen as a hammer blow to hopes that the interim deal, involving a partial Israeli withdrawal and the creation of a Palestinian Authority, could indeed lead the way to a just and lasting peace.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Yitzhak Rabin’s daughter Dalia speaks at a ceremony marking the 20th anniversary of his murder. Photograph: Debbie Hill/AFP/Getty Images

“Sadly, I have no news,” Rabin’s daughter, Dalia, said poignantly at her father’s graveside on Monday, in one of the memorial speeches broadcast live on TV. “There is no peace process. We are facing terrorism. Blood is being shed again. I have no other country and my country has changed.”

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Rabin is remembered as a soldier, having expelled Palestinians en masse during the 1948 war and as chief of staff during the 1967 victory, when Israel occupied the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip. But the general-turned-peacemaker was also the first Israeli political leader to be murdered – and, shockingly, by another Jew; not, as had always seemed more likely, by an Arab.

The 20th anniversary of his death has seen a torrent of comment against an unusually turbulent background: high tension over the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif site in East Jerusalem and the deaths of 50 Palestinians and 10 Israelis in the last month. Whether or not this constitutes a new intifada (uprising) or not, it has come as a vicious reminder of the intractable nature of the conflict and the persistence of the occupation – not to mention the hatred and desperation that can erupt when hopes for finding a solution die.

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Binyamin Netanyahu, the Likud prime minister, made an immediate connection with the current violence. “I didn’t agree on everything with Yitzhak Rabin,” he told the Mount Herzl gathering. “Rabin wanted to end the conflict and he worked for peace, but he too was forced to deal with a cruel wave of terror. No knife, no stone, no petrol bomb or mine will stop us. We will never surrender to terrorism.”

In the mid-1990s, Netanyahu, then in opposition and a fierce opponent of the Oslo accord, was blamed for contributing to an atmosphere of incitement. Rightwing activists portrayed Rabin in SS uniform, while extremist, pro-settlement rabbis ruled that by talking to the PLO and ceding territory to Arafat, Rabin was a traitor – views that Amir used to justify his crime.

Much of the current discourse around Rabin’s death is about the danger of extremism in Israeli society. “The shots that killed him targeted the very essence of the sovereign Jewish state,” the thinker Prof Yedidia Stern commented in Haaretz this week. “The blood on the pavement was the blood of democracy itself.” Schools are holding classes on the meaning of political murder and the importance of tolerance.

Yet critics question the way Rabin is seen. “The main political forces in Israel today are the extreme settlers, and Rabin’s memory has nothing to do with them,” argued Tom Segev, one of Israel’s leading historians. “Rabin has become the poster boy for what Zionism and Israel have lost. He was the opposite of the fanatics. He was secular, pragmatic and sane. He was the last of the beautiful Israelis.”

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Many clearly hanker after a more decisive prime minister than Netanyahu, whatever their views. “Israel needs a leader with Rabin’s DNA, who will act with faith and determination to reach an agreement,” said Uzi Baram, a former Labour minister.



Palestinians are sceptical. In 1987, when the first intifada erupted, Rabin was the defence minister who threatened to “break the bones” of the young stone-throwers confronting the occupation. “Rabin never wanted a Palestinian state,” insisted Mahdi Abdel-Hadi of the Passia thinktank. “He played politics and worked with an isolated, corrupt Arafat. He wanted to contain the PLO, to tame the shrew. Oslo was an illusion. Israelis who believe it would have led to a real peace are indulging in wishful thinking.”



But if the memory contains elements of myth, it remains a powerful one. On Monday evening, Israel’s Channel 2 TV broadcast an interview about Rabin with Clinton, who describes his devastation when the stunning news reached the Oval office. “My first thoughts were not even for the peace process,” the former US president said. “They were just for my friend. Then immediately I thought, ‘This could kill all his dreams.’”



Twenty years after Rabin’s death, Israelis and Palestinians agree on little. But many on both sides are certain that Oslo is dead, or in its dying days – with doubts growing that its institutional legacy, the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank under Arafat’s successor, Mahmoud Abbas, can survive much longer.



“Rabin probably stood a better chance of forging a durable reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians than any other leader before or since,” writes Dan Ephron in Killing a King, a riveting new book about the prime minister and his murderer. “That we’ll never know how close he would have come is one of the exasperating consequences of the assassination.”