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Insight

Anniversary of the Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin

Aired November 03, 2005 - 23:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
COLLEEN MCEDWARDS, CNN HOST (voice-over): At the time, his wife said it was the happiest day of his life.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through translator): We know how to make peace, not just to sing about it.

MCEDWARDS: Yitzhak Rabin, full of hope and on the verge of real progress, was gunned down at a peace rally. He was shot three times by a Jewish extremist and for years the prospect for Middle East peace seemed dead and buried at well.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

Hello and welcome to INSIGHT. I'm Colleen McEdwards.

Ten years ago today a right wing Israeli Jew assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. The murder shocked the nation already polarized over Mr. Rabin's moves to negotiate with the Palestinian Liberation Organization.

Now a decade later, Israel will mark the anniversary with somber ceremonies and uncertainty over what's ahead.

Guy Raz takes a look now at the legacy of Yitzhak Rabin.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BILL CLINTON, FORMER U.S. PRESIDENT: Shalom, chaver. Good-bye, friend.

GUY RAZ, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): The promise of imminent peace between Israel and Palestinians died the night of November 4, 1995.

The last moments of Yitzhak Rabin's life are well-known. A peace rally in Tel Aviv, a sober-minded man not known for sentiment visibly moved by the massive show of support.

SHIMON PEREZ, ISRAELI DEPUTY PRIME MINISTER: The last day in his life was his happiest day. I never saw Yitzhak embracing somebody. On that terrible evening, he came and embraced me. I never saw him singing. That night, he sung. I never saw him so happy.

RAZ: On November 5, Israel woke up to a new reality.

DALIA RABIN, YITZHAK RABIN'S DAUGHTER: I think that the morning of the 5th of November, 1995, we have become a different country. There was something bigger than life that happened.

RAZ: Something so big that it propelled Yitzhak Rabin into the pantheon of international statesman.

ARI SHAVIT, "HA'ARETZ": The murder had turned him into a saint before he really fulfilled and implemented his vision on the ground. It's obvious, I think, that had not Rabin -- if Rabin had not been murdered, he would have run into a real dilemma.

RAZ: A dilemma, says writer Ari Shavit, of how far to go in the pursuit of peace.

SHAVIT: The people who try to portray Rabin as someone who became a total lefty, a total peacenik, are totally wrong. There was here a realistic, rough, tough, hawkish (UNINTELLIGIBLE). A realistic son of this land.

RAZ: Even months before his death, Rabin never specified the parameters of his peace vision.

RABIN: There is a need to divide between the Palestinian and between the Gaza Strip and parts of the West Bank and Israel.

RAZ: It was a process known then as Oslo, a peace plan eventually brokered by the Americans. But today most Israelis believe Oslo failed.

SHAVIT: It did not work as expected, but as a long-term vision for generations, saying we must divide this land between Israelis and the Palestinians. We must end occupation, but we must end Israel's security, this has not failed. This is still with us.

RAZ: And it's what may have led to Israel's recent withdrawal from Gaza, ending its 38-year presence there.

PERES: Without the things that Yitzhak said 10 years ago, Ariel Sharon wouldn't be able to do the things he does today.

RAZ: Sharon and Rabin were political rivals but personal friends, men who both faced bitter and hostile denunciations by their countrymen.

PERES: Sharon is facing his opponents and the attacks upon him and the threats to his life with the same courage as Yitzhak did.

RAZ (on camera): And though he may not like the comparison, Ariel Sharon today is very much the inheritor of Yitzhak Rabin's political legacy.

Now before Rabin embraced the notion of dividing the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the River Jordan into two states, Israel and Palestine, many Israelis regarded that idea as almost subversive. But today it's the most widely accepted solution on both sides towards resolving this conflict.

(voice-over): And for different reasons it took these two old enemies, fighters and later partners, to bring the two-state solution to the table. Rabin had the credibility to do it. For much of his life he was seen as a warrior and a military man.

Author Leon Uris, who wrote the book "Exodus," based the character Ari Bin Kanin (ph) in part of Yitzhak Rabin.

SHAVIT: There was a mythological element to his life throughout. His death, his murder, turned him into a myth altogether. But even before that there was something in his life, in his biography, that symbolizes the entire Socialist Zionist project.

RAZ: His life and legacy is now being cut into the stones that will house this museum, the Rabin Center in Tel Aviv is almost complete. Its purpose, to carry on the vision of its namesake.

DALIA RABIN: Yitzhak Rabin was us, the better part of Israel. He represented all the nice elements of the young, born Israeli.

RAZ: Rabin talked about reconciliation, something that is barely mentioned these days. Real peace is still elusive, much blood has flowed between Israelis and Palestinians since his death, but Yitzhak Rabin undoubtedly had begun a process that is now acknowledged as an irreversible one.

Guy Raz, CNN, Jerusalem.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

MCEDWARDS: We'll take a short break. When we come back, Rabin's profound impact on the region.

Stay with us.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MCEDWARDS (voice-over): Israelis mark the anniversary of Rabin's death in ceremonies, rallies and conferences. President Moshe Katsav began the two-week series of events with a simple candle-lighting ceremony. Rabin's daughter spoke of her father's courage.

DALIA RABIN (through translator): We have understand, maybe not all of us, that we had a leader of great statute that chose to go a new way. There was a true and significant breakthrough and there was a tough and determined man that paved this way. Even though he had anticipated and foreseen the difficulties of this way, he knew this is the right way. There was no other way.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MCEDWARDS: Welcome back.

Time has not tarnished Rabin's image. In a recent poll by the Israeli Democracy Institute Rabin was ranked as the country's best prime minister; 79 percent of those questioned held him in high regard as a leader who placed the interest of Israel over the interest of his party.

The poll also found that most Israelis fear another political assassination is likely in Israel in the wake of the Gaza withdrawal.

A short time a go we spoke with David Horovitz, the editor-in-chief of the "Jerusalem Post" about Rabin's legacy.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

DAVID HOROVITZ, "JERUSALEM POST": Well, it does center largely around the process he attempted to achieve with Yasser Arafat. Rabin was the Israeli soldier who headed the army at the time of the Six Day War, Israel's most extraordinary and probable military victory, who then later in life went into politics and believed that he saw an opportunity to achieve that Israel has always sought to achieve since it was established in 1948, which was to normalize its relations with the rest of the Middle East.

He faced a Palestinian leader who after years of vowing to destroy Israel professed to be ready to coexist alongside Israel and very hesitantly -- and nothing emblemizes that more than Rabin's own hesitation when it came time to shake hands in 1993 -- hesitantly embarked on a partnership with Yasser Arafat, which ultimately failed.

But we must not forget also that as he tried to progress with the Palestinians, he did achieve a peace treaty with Jordan, which has held. He built a personal and strong relationship with Jordan's King Hussein, and in the Rabin era, as the efforts were being made to progress with the Palestinians, other Arab states, more moderate Arab states, also began to warm their ties with Israel.

MCEDWARDS: Did his death change the way young Israelis, I mean, you know, the people who were lighting candles back then, who were weeping in public because of his death, did it change the way they saw their future relative to Palestinians of their generation as well?

HOROVITZ: It may have done at the time in that the death of Rabin certainly at the time and for some people still came to symbolize the death of the peace process. But I don't think most Israelis today see it that way. I think they see the killing of Yitzhak Rabin as an act of -- a despicable killing that demeans all of Israel, that shook our democracy, that shattered the innocence of this young country.

But I think most Israelis have come to regard the failure of the peace process not as a consequence of an Israeli Jew killing of our prime minister but as a consequence of Yasser Arafat's failure to make the transition from terrorist to statesman.

But at the time that Rabin was killed, there was certainly this sense that, you know, everything was now collapsing. I just think there's been a more sobering assessment, because things got so bad with Arafat, certainly in very recent years, that the sense of the death of Rabin as the death of the peace process is regarded by most Israelis as really a skewing of our recent history.

MCEDWARDS: Yasser Arafat used to call him my partner in peace, but I understand Mr. Rabin didn't think much of Arafat.

HOROVITZ: Well, the relationship between those two people is very complicated and as many people as you ask who were involved on the sidelines, you will get as many opinions.

Rabin certainly was wary of building a relationship with Arafat. Again, you saw that hesitation on the White House lawn. He became convinced that unless he dealt with Arafat, he couldn't come through on his pledge, which was to try and accelerate the peace process.

But he was for many months certainly in the two years between the start of the Oslo process, after that handshake, and Rabin's death, he was frustrated by Arafat's evident disinclination, to put it mildly, to try and court terrorism.

Now, there are people who were very close to Rabin who do argue to this day that if Rabin had lived, it would have been a different Arafat, that Arafat would have truly changed and become somebody who sought to outlaw terrorism. Most people, even most people who were very deeply involved, don't believe that.

I was just speaking very recently with a very senior Israeli intelligence official of that era who derided the notion that Arafat was really ever tackling terrorism and in fact said that when Israel gave Arafat information on the whereabouts of wanted Palestinians, far from helping Israel track them down or arresting them himself, Arafat passed on that information to enable them to evade capture and himself burned the intelligence sources who had given Israel the material in the first place.

So it was a very problematic relationship. And I think also with time people forget the reality in Israel and the months heading up to the Rabin assassination. We had an incredibly divided society. On the furthest margin it produced an assassin. But we also had a gradual Israeli disillusionment with the partnership with Arafat. Most Israelis had strongly supported that partnership in 1993, when it was begun. But because acts of terrorism continued and Arafat didn't stop them, Rabin was actually trailing in opinion polls in the months before his death and it certainly is not unreasonable to think that he might have lost the next election had he been around to fight it.

MCEDWARDS: What about his impact on Israeli politics then?

HOROVITZ: Well, he, I think he, as a former soldier and someone who then embarked on this search for peace, I think that impact is profound.

In terms of moving Israel as a whole to the left, I think he was central to that, because although it is quite commonly said inaccurately that Israel has moved to the right, it has a Sharon government, a government dominated by the right wing Likud, the fact is that the context has changed, that most Israelis have long since reconciled themselves to independence for the Palestinians. Most Israelis have come to regard it as Israel's prime interest to separate from the Palestinians, to relinquish control over a large proportion of the Palestinians so that Israel can remain overwhelming Jewish and democratic.

And the obvious recent consequence of that or reflection of that has been in the formerly right wing leader, Ariel Sharon's transition to really a man of the center or even the center left, championing the Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip just a few weeks ago under which Israel forcibly removed several thousand Jews from their homes in order to relinquish control over 1.3 million Palestinians.

MCEDWARDS: David Horovitz, we have to leave it there. Thank you so much.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

And just ahead, is the peace process dead? We'll talk to a U.S. diplomat who played a leading role in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.

Stay with us.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

MCEDWARDS: Israeli soldiers clash with rock-throwing Palestinians in the West Bank. They mistakenly shoot an 11-year-old boy who was carrying a toy gun.

A suicide bombing last week in the Israeli port city of Hadera (ph). Five Israelis were killed. The recurring images of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Welcome back.

The death of Yasser Arafat, the Gaza pullout, events don't seem to change the cycle of violence between Israelis and Palestinians.

The current peace plan, the so-called roadmap, is sponsored by the United States, Russia, the European Union and the United Nations, but it isn't really going anywhere.

A short time a go I spoke with Dennis Ross, a distinguished fellow at the Washington Institute. Ross is a U.S. diplomat who was intimately involved in negotiating several agreements between the Israelis and Palestinians during the Clinton administration. He came to know Yitzhak Rabin very well.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

DENNIS ROSS, WASHINGTON INSTITUTE: I was devastated. I mean, for me, Rabin was the embodiment of the Israeli experience. He had fought for the state, literally, as a kid. He had spent his whole life as a soldier even though that hadn't been his life's ambition, and he became after that determined to become a statesman and he was, in my mind, someone who had inherent credibility, who could speak to the Israeli public about what would be necessary, some hard truths about what would be necessary in terms of reconciling with the Palestinians, and he had the credibility, because no one questioned that he understood Israel's security needs and would safeguard those. And I had dealt so extensively with him that for me he was a fixture and the possibility, much less the reality, that he could be assassinated by an Israeli was something that was just overwhelming. So I was devastated, literally devastated.

MCEDWARDS: Were you among those who felt that the prospects for peace perhaps died along with him?

ROSS: I didn't feel that. I mean, I'm saying that now. At the time, I was overwhelmed. I didn't know what it would mean. I thought that it was going to have a stunning effect within Israel. If anything, I thought it would delegitimize those who were questioning him because this was such a stunning, staggering development that basically put the whole state of Israel into a state of shock.

But at the same time, as I look back on it, I also felt and was reminded of something that Rabin said to me six months before he was assassinated. He asked me a question of who I thought would determine the next election in Israel, and I thought it had to do with the internal dynamics of Israel, and he said, no. He said Hamas. Two Hamas bombs and I'll lose the next election in Israel.

So in a sense, one goes back, there happened to be four Hamas and Islamic Jihad bombs after the assassination, a couple of months after the assassination, and that had a huge effect on determining what the 1996 election in Israel would be.

So I think we have to keep in perspective what has affected the process and what hasn't.

MCEDWARDS: How do you think the peace process, such as it is, would be different today had he lived?

ROSS: The hardest thing to know is would Arafat have been any different. I mean, Arafat used to always say his partner Rabin had been assassinated.

My own view is that Arafat, in the end, was not capable of ending the conflict, because ending the conflict meant he had to end grievances, he had to end claims, he had to end struggle. And all those defined him.

But he did have a relationship with Rabin. And Rabin was a realist. If Rabin had seen that doing a permanent status deal wasn't possible with Arafat, he might have come up with what was a more limited approach, and that might have managed the process beyond Arafat.

I don't believe, given who Rabin was, that you would have seen this process easily fall apart, although again you have to realize that Rabin himself believed that you had to partition the territory with the Palestinians, and that you had to have a two-state approach in the end, not as a favor to the Palestinians but as a need for Israel, given the demographic trends.

So Rabin is the father of the separation barrier, the separation fence. He preferred negotiations, but if he felt he could not have reached a deal with Yasser Arafat, he would have gone the unilateral route. So we might well have seen an effort at a less than full deal with Palestinians. If that wasn't going to work, then he might have moved in a unilateralist direction, much like what we've seen with the withdrawal from Gaza, but also a withdrawal that would have affected the West Bank as well.

MCEDWARDS: And speaking of the withdrawal from Gaza and parts of the West Bank, given what we have today in the peace process, what do you think Yitzhak Rabin would say about the state of the process, if we can even call it that, as it stands today?

ROSS: Well, again, he was a realist. One thing about Yitzhak Rabin is he was completely honest and he was honest with himself. And if he was presiding over the process that looked like what we see today, where there in effect is no process, I think that he would draw the conclusion that, you know, you have to do what you can as Israel to secure Israel's future, not only from the security standpoint, but from a democratic standpoint.

When Yasser Arafat passed from the scene, my guess is he would have made more of an effort to test Abu Mazan, to see if Abu Mazan was capable of being a real partner, to see about what it is Israel could do to make it more likely he could succeed but also to require Abu Mazan to make his own sets of decisions and to get the Palestinian house in order.

MCEDWARDS: You know, people have been critical of the United States, particularly since the withdrawal. A lot of people expected the U.S. involvement to ratchet up and to try to move this forward, and I know Mr. Rabin believed very strongly in U.S. involvement. Would he be disappointed, do you think, in the current state of U.S. involvement?

ROSS: My guess is -- Yitzhak Rabin was someone who focused very heavily on reaching understandings with the United States, at least in terms of what the U.S. role would be and how it would function, so that Israel would not be surprised by what the United States did.

I would have guessed that probably Rabin, once Arafat died, probably would have wanted to have a dialogue with the U.S. administration about what could be done, what needed to be done, where help for the Palestinians -- might be help for the Palestinians and the Israelis alike, and I guess he would have looked for ways to see Abu Mazan's authority built up.

My feeling is he probably would have liked to have seen a more active American involvement to help build more of a bridge between the two sides.

Rabin didn't want the United States to do for the parties what they had to do for themselves, but when they were having a problem communicating with each other, building understandings together, he would have wanted the U.S. to play to role of a bridge, and I think that's where he would have wanted the United States efforts to be, and I think here he probably would have seen the U.S. efforts falling short.

MCEDWARDS: All right, Dennis Ross, thank you very much for your thoughts on this day. I appreciate it.

ROSS: My pleasure.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

MCEDWARDS: And that is INSIGHT for today. I'm Colleen McEdwards. The new continues on CNN.

END

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