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Thirty years ago this month, an act of political violence changed the course of history. On Nov. 4, 1995, Yigal Amir, a right-wing Israeli law student, assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
Rabin had just left a rally in Tel Aviv supporting the Oslo peace process when Amir shot him. Amir is serving life in an Israeli prison.
Leaders matter, and the sudden death of a leader can alter the trajectory of history. Imagine the alternative courses American history might have taken had Lincoln or Kennedy not been assassinated.
Rabin’s killer did not emerge from a vacuum. Israel was deeply divided over the peace process laid out in two Oslo agreements in 1993 and 1995. It meant dealing with Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization, which had committed acts of terrorism against Israel for decades, and it required giving Palestinians control of some parts of the West Bank and Gaza. The Israeli opposition, led by future prime ministers Ariel Sharon and Benjamin Netanyahu and others, manipulated the fear of many Israelis into a frenzy for their own political ends.
I made my first trip to Israel in the summer of 1994 as “Oslo I” was being implemented with Arafat returning to Gaza from exile. My wife and I witnessed mass protests, including a rally in Jerusalem where Sharon, Netanyahu and other leaders on the Israeli right denounced Rabin as a traitor to the Jewish people. I took photos of protest banners across from the prime minister’s residence in Jerusalem, accusing Rabin of having the blood of Jews on his hands for making peace with terrorists.
Rabin was vilified and even portrayed as a Nazi at numerous protests. In July 1995, Netanyahu attended an anti-Rabin rally with a mock funeral procession featuring a coffin and a noose where protesters chanted “Death to Rabin!”
All of this created the toxic atmosphere from which the mentally unstable assassin emerged to do his deed.
Scholars of political violence call such acts of indirect incitement “stochastic terrorism.” Dictionary.com defines stochastic terrorism as “The public demonization of a person or group resulting in the incitement of a violent act, which is statistically probable but whose specifics cannot be predicted: ‘The lone-wolf attack was apparently influenced by the rhetoric of stochastic terrorism.’”
Rabin was killed just weeks after he and Arafat signed “Oslo II,” which created the Palestinian Authority and established joint control over the occupied territories. Rabin’s murder altered the trajectory of Israeli-Palestinian relations.
At Camp David in 2000, Arafat refused to accept a deal presented by President Clinton and Prime Minister Ehud Barak to end the conflict. Instead, he walked away without even making a counteroffer. Perhaps Arafat was unwilling to finally make peace with Israel; he definitely was fearful of being killed, like Rabin, by an extremist on his own side.
The Second Intifada erupted shortly after that, with Hamas, bent on Israel’s destruction, turning it into a deadly suicide bombing campaign. This led to the demise of Israel’s peace camp and the country’s rightward turn.
When Saudi Arabia presented its peace plan in 2002, Sharon rejected it, as did Netanyahu later. When Prime Minister Ehud Olmert presented arguably the most far-reaching peace plan to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in 2008, Abbas rejected it. Hamas’ attack on Israel and kidnappings of Oct. 7, 2023, and the brutal war in Gaza that followed has only further undermined the likelihood of brave leadership emerging on either side.
Political vision and courage, and perhaps the peace process itself, died with Rabin 30 years ago this month.•
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Atlas, a political scientist, is a senior lecturer at the Paul H. O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University-Indianapolis. His opinions do not necessarily reflect those of Indiana University. Send comments to [email protected].
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