Leah Rabin: Peace is a Process and There Will Be Bad Days

by Eugene Bird

Leah Rabin, the outspoken widow of assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, spoke directly to the American people after the fourth bomb in nine days exploded in Israel. She said on "Good Morning America" that she could not understand the mobs screaming, "Death to the Arabs."

"What does it mean, 'Kill the Arabs'? Are all the Arabs responsible...for a single Hamas person brainwashed by the ultrafundamentalistic movement?...People have to be restrained and have to be strong." And later in the interview, she said, "What is our alternative [to the peace]? And what is their alternative?"

Her remarks were not reported fully in Tel Aviv and, like all those speaking out for necessary compromises with the Palestinians over the West Bank, Gaza, and especially Jerusalem, Leah Rabin was largely ignored in the rush to blame Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres and Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat for the continued bombings by their radical Islamist enemies.

During State Department briefings after the bombings it was apparent that President Bill Clinton's team was following the lead of Prime Minister Peres, fighting for his political life and for the continuation of the peace process. Damage control was the word in both Washington and Tel Aviv and the Palestinians, as usual, were to bear the brunt of the measures to try and control Hamas, a task Israeli occupation authorities were unable to do when they were in control of the present autonomous areas.

Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Itamar Rabinovich seemed more realistic than members of the Washington diplomatic press corps, some of them characteristically more "pro-Israel" than the Israelis themselves. At a March 5 press conference at the Israeli embassy in Washington, DC some of the diplomatic correspondents insisted on asking questions about the responsibility of Damascus for supporting the "infrastructure" of the Palestinian Hamas. "Hamas has an office there," said one newsman. "Are you going to insist on its being closed?"

Rabinovitz's reply astonished his interlocutor: "It is only a public relations office. Of course we would like to see it closed, but it is less important...than other things we can do."

The essence of the Israeli response to the bombings, however, was essentially warmed-over occupation policy: More tough measures such as further border closures, denying Arabs work in the West Bank Jewish settlements, and demolition of houses of identified bombers, regardless of whether or not members of the families living in them supported Hamas.

The events of early March may actually strengthen the resolve of negotiators.

If the process does survive and if Peres is re-elected with a viable coalition majority, the events of early March may actually strengthen the resolve of negotiators to find common-sense solutions to final-status issues. Palestinians organized by Fatah came out in substantial numbers in Gaza to demonstrate against Hamas violence. There is evidence of a thin but underlying resolve emerging among Palestinians, in part as a result of the elections, to work against those who want to destroy the peace process.

The question will be, is there a similar resolve among a majority of Israelis to restrain their tendencies toward "retribution" and to cease retaliating. Before the bombings in early February, members of two key Israeli think tanks were queried on this point and gave very equivocal answers concerning the death of Yahya Ayyash, the Hamas "engineer" whose assassination by Israel's security operatives apparently re-started the killing after six months of restraint. "We should adopt new policies in the face of peace, but I cannot assure you that we are ready for that yet," said one such Israeli policy analyst.

The danger to American policy and to the Clinton administration's tenuous Middle East success seems to be far greater from the Israeli acts of "retribution," such as the Ayyash assassination, than from anything Arafat might or might not do in his crackdown on the military wing of Hamas and other Palestinian organizations that espouse violence.

The Clinton administration may, under the impetus of election-year politics that dictate it must not let the Middle East blow up before November, get more deeply involved than State Department experts would like in running the actual peace process,advising both Israeli and Palestinian security services on means and even targets for arrests.

The danger is that the administration's long-standing "hands off" attitude up to this point toward almost every key issue in the peace process ("Let the parties decide what to do") will be replaced by an urgent "save the peace at any cost" attitude.

Self-Defeating Policies

The success of the Arafat approach in seeking to dialogue with Hamas and isolate its leaders from real power in the new Palestinian Authority unless they pledge a suspension of all violence is being ignored in favor of the same Israeli policies that proved so self-defeating in the intifada. House demolitions, casual killings of suspects, jailing without trial and closures simply drove more people into joining the street fighters. It could happen again unless both Israelis and U.S. officials adopt the common sense enunciated by Leah Rabin.

In February I pointed out to a key Israeli adviser that since the Oslo accord was signed two and a half years earlier, there had been nearly 10 times as many deaths from violence in Washington, DC, a town smaller than Gaza City, than in all of Israel, Gaza, the West Bank, and Jerusalem containing almost seven million people. I said that the deaths of both Israelis and Palestinians are to be deplored but, placed in perspective, they were not reason enough for ending the peace process or even slowing it down.

His reply was that random street violence is different from violence targeted against Jews of Israel, or even against the general population. He was right in one sense, but entirely wrong in implying that counter-violence will relieve the situation in which the Israelis and Palestinians find themselves.

It's too bad President Clinton didn't ask Leah Rabin to join the international leaders who met in March at Sharm El Sheikh in Egypt to discuss the containment of terrorism and the ending of violence in the Middle East. She has some good ideas.