Rabin’s true legacy

Caroline Glick

It is notable that the same week that Israel marked the twentieth anniversary of the assassination of prime minister and defense minister Yitzhak Rabin, Palestinian Authority President and PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas went before the UN Human Rights Commission and asked the UN to establish “a special regime of international protection” for the Palestinians against Israel.

“It is no longer useful to waste time in negotiations just for the sake of negotiations. What is required is the ending of the occupation in accordance with international legitimacy,” said the man who has never held good faith negotiations with Israel in his life and has refused to even pretend to hold them for the past seven years.

It is ironic that Abbas issued this latest salvo in his diplomatic war against Israel the week that Israel marked Rabin’s assassination. As our putative peace partner was slandering us on yet another international stage, yet again our introspection around the anniversary of the murder showed that we have learned very little over the past twenty years.

As is the case every year, the Left used the anniversary of Rabin’s murder to accuse the Right of responsibility both for Rabin’s assassination and for the failure of the peace process with the PLO.

For their part, nationalist commentators restated the obvious fact they repeat every year: there is a world of difference between solicitation of murder and a policy dispute.

Israel’s annual national self-flagellation around the anniversary of Rabin’s murder is a twofold travesty. It is a travesty first because it prevents us from coming to terms with the true reason that Oslo has failed. And it is a travesty because it distorts to the point of non-recognition Rabin’s record as a leader and his lifelong dedication to Israel’s national security.

The Left’s claim that Yigal Amir killed not only Rabin but the chance of peace rests on the assumption that unlike the five men who have served as prime minister since Rabin was killed, Rabin would have reached a final accord with Yassir Arafat if he had lived to finish his term in office.

This claim ignores the nature of the Oslo process and distorts Rabin’s position on it.

Contrary to what Oslo’s architects and supporters claim, the Oslo process never could have brought peace between Israel and the Palestinians. It never could have brought peace because the PLO was never interested in peace.

Right after Yassir Arafat concluded the initial deal with Israel in September 1993, he flew from Washington to South Africa. There he told a Muslim audience that the peace process was a fraud. Arafat explained that the Oslo process would weaken Israel while strengthening the Palestinians. They would use this improved position to achieve their goal of Israel’s destruction through jihad.

This wasn’t a one-time fall from grace on Arafat’s part. It was his consistent message to both the Muslim world writ large and to the Palestinians.

After Israel embarked on what it viewed as the peace process with the PLO, the Education Ministry began changing the school curriculum. Beginning in 1994, Israeli children were taught that the PLO was a moderate force and a peace partner.

On the other hand, following the formation of the Palestinian Authority in 1994, the Palestinians changed their school curriculum to indoctrinate their children to view Israelis as subhuman and to view the murder of Israelis as the highest moral calling. The suicide bombers of 2000-2005 were the products of this school curriculum.

So too, while the Rabin government embraced the Israeli peace movement, the PLO hunted down and murdered Palestinians who peacefully coexisted with Israel, by among other things, helping Israel to catch terrorists and prevent terrorist attacks on its citizens. The PA glorified murderers in every possible way, down to printing baseball-type cards with terrorists rather than sports stars pictured as national heroes.

The situation has only grown worse under Arafat’s successor Mahmoud Abbas. Under Abbas, Palestinians who merely engage in commerce with Israelis or buy Israeli products have been arrested and discredited by name.

In other words, Oslo didn’t fail because Rabin was killed. Oslo failed – and continues to fail – because it was based on false assumptions about the Palestinians and the nature of their conflict with Israel.

Aside from the faith it placed in Arafat as a peacemaker, Oslo assumed that the absence of peace owed to the absence of a Palestinian state and was therefore Israel’s fault. If Israel would just give the PLO sufficient lands to make it happy, then there would be peace.

Shlomo Ben Ami, who served as foreign minister when the Oslo process ended at Camp David in July 2000 and at the start of the Palestinian terror war that followed, explained just how wrong this assumption was. The Palestinians, he said were never interested in settling their dispute with Israel on any terms.

As Ben Ami explained to Haaretz in September 2000, “Arafat’s concession vis-à-vis Israel [at Oslo] was a formal concession. Morally and conceptually, he didn’t recognize Israel’s right to exist. He doesn’t accept the idea of two states for two peoples. Neither he nor the Palestinian national movement accept us…More than they want a state of their own, they want to spit out our state.”

In other words, Oslo was never a peace process because the Palestinians saw it not as a means to build their own national homeland but as a means to destroy Israel. The notion that the peace process died with Rabin is absurd because the peace process never existed outside of the Left’s imagination.

This brings us to the second travesty at the heart of Israel’s annual self-hate fest. Not only does it distort the nature of the Oslo process, it distorts Rabin’s life and legacy.

Rabin was not a peacenik. He was not a starry eyed ideologue. Rabin was a security hawk who dedicated his life to Israel’s defense and security. True, Rabin believed that the absence of peace with the Palestinians was the root of the larger Arab world’s rejection of Israel. But he also believed that there was a limit to what Israel could offer the Palestinians.

Rabin foresaw the outlines of a final deal with the Palestinians as laying more or less along the lines set out by Yigal Allon in his peace plan in 1967. Rabin believed that the endstate of the peace process would involve an autonomous Palestinian governing authority rather than a state presiding over around half of Judea and Samaria and a large part of Gaza.

Jerusalem, in his view, would remain united under sole Israeli sovereignty. The Israeli communities in Judea, Samaria and Gaza would remain in place. Israel would maintain its control over the areas not ceded to the Palestinians, including the international borders with Egypt and Jordan in perpetuity.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but Rabin’s vision of a final deal looked much more like to the Jewish Home Party’s diplomatic plan than the Labor Party’s position.

Rabin was also not enamored with Arafat or the PLO.

Rabin was not the architect of the Oslo process. Shimon Peres and his associates negotiated the initial deal at Oslo behind Rabin’s back. Rabin felt compelled to adopt their deal after the fact because he had promised voters in the 1992 elections that he would pursue peace with the Palestinians. Once Peres and his associates pressed ahead with the PLO in Oslo, the peace process Rabin oversaw (and knew about) in Washington had no chance of succeeding. He would have broken faith with his constituents if he had rejected Peres’s Oslo accord.

But even as he adopted it, he maintained a healthy skepticism of its chances of success. And as the terror attacks mounted in the months that followed the signing ceremony on the White House lawn, Rabin began considering cancelling the process.

As left wing commentator Amnon Abramovich explained in an interview shortly after Rabin’s assassination, Rabin “liked the fact that the Oslo agreement was not a done deal, unlike a deal with Syria which would be irreversible. Rabin emphasized the fact that Oslo was a process that could be reversed at every point.”

By the eve of his murder, due to mounting Palestinian terrorism, Rabin was seriously considering abrogating the Oslo process entirely. In an interview on the 15th anniversary of her father’s murder, Dalia Rabin explained that her father was on the verge of cancelling the deal and turning back the clock.

In her words, “People who were close to my father told me that on the eve of his assassination he considered ending the Oslo process. He wasn’t a blind man who sprinted forward.”

Abbas’s actions at the UN this week, where he called for the world to protect the Palestinians from Israel while back at home he simultaneously continued his calls for Palestinians to take up knives and take to the wheel of their cars to murder Israelis cannot come as a surprise.

They are of a piece with the PLO’s previous diplomatic machinations from 2000 to 2003 in the wake of its terror war against Israel.

Those machinations led the US to form the so-called Quartet with the UN, Russia and the EU and embrace the Roadmap for Peace, the most anti-Israel diplomatic document to have ever seen the light of day in 2003.

Today Abbas uses terror at home to convince the UN to dictate the terms of Israeli surrender in Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem to the PLO.

Abbas and Arafat succeeded 12 years ago and may succeed today for a number of reasons beyond Israel’s control, but also for one reason that Israel does control.

Abbas is able to succeed at the UN in part because Israel refuses to acknowledge that there never was a peace process. Arafat lied to us, and to the world about his intentions and we lied to ourselves about the nature of the Palestinian war against us. So long as we continue to play along with this tired charade, we will be unable to conceive and implement a diplomatic defense that is coherent and effective against the mountains of lies and murder on which the PLO has based its war against Israel for the past 55 years.

Israel contributes to the PLO’s diplomatic success at the UN because it refuses to do what Rabin recognized was necessary 20 years ago. Rather than learn from his record, Israel has spent the past twenty years distorting his record. The time has come to do justice to Rabin and end the Oslo process once and for all.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

October 26, 1994, Israel and Jordan Sign Peace Treaty

Photo Credit: Baloons are released during the
Israel-Jordan Peace Treaty signing ceremony.

Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Jordanian King Hussein sign a peace treaty at the Wadi Araba Border Crossing between Eilat Israel and Aqaba, Jordan. The treaty is Israel’s second with a neighboring Arab state and the signing is attended by more than 4,500 guests and witnessed by President Clinton.

For decades, going back to the 1930s, Zionist/Israeli and Jordanian leaders held sporadic secret talks. Both countries saw peaceful relations with the other as inherently in their respective national interests.

The agreement settled border disputes, put in place water resource sharing protocols and agreed to cooperation in areas of trade, tourism and protection and freedom of access to religious and historical places.

Read more about the treaty at Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs

Helen Mirren: I love Israel, it’s a great country

Amir Bogen

Award-winning British actress honored at 29th Israel Film Festival (IFF) in Los Angeles alongside American screenwriter Aaron Sorkin. ‘The great thing that Israel has is Israelis, and they will guide it through,’ Mirren says upon accepting Career Achievement Award.

Mirren, 70, received the Career Achievement Award at the IFF, which opened Wednesday. She used the occasion to recount her memories from Israel, first after the Six-Day War when she lived in Kibbutz Ha’on with her Jewish boyfriend at the time and toured the country from the north to Eilat, and later on a couple of

“This morning I was thinking about Israel and my relationship with that beautiful country,” she said in her speech. “My visit to Israel in those early days is one of the building blocks that have made me into the actress that I am, doing the kind of work that I do, that I seek to do, and the way in which I seek to do it.

“Likewise, I was thinking about the building blocks that make Israel the great country that it is. And the courage and the commitment of those early people working on the kibbutz that I was lucky enough in those days to meet and work alongside briefly.

“I love Israel. I think it’s a great, great country. I think that through all the difficulties and all the pain that Israel has suffered in the past and will in the future, the great thing that Israel has is Israelis, and they will guide it through.”

Helen Mirren opens the Israel Film Festival
in Los Angeles (Photo: Getty Images)

Queen Elizabeth in “The Queen,” for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress in 2007, and for her performance as police detective Jane Tennison on the acclaimed ITV series “Prime Suspect,” for which she won several Emmy Awards. In the 2010 film “The Debt,” she played the role of a retired Israeli Mossad agent.

The IFF award was presented to Mirren by actress Diane Lane, her co-star in “Trumbo,” which may bring her another Oscar nomination.
Israel Film Festival founder Meir Fenigstein with Helen Mirren and Aaron Sorkin (Photo: Getty Images)

Sorkin, 54, received the IFF Film and Television Achievement Award. He is considered one of the most accomplished screenwriters in Hollywood today. His works includes television series “The West Wing” and “The Newsroom,” as well as the films “A Few Good Men” (1992), “The Social Network” (2010), for which he won an Oscar, and “Moneyball” (2011). He also wrote the screenplay for “Steve Jobs,” which is considered a leading candidate for winning at the upcoming Academy Awards.

“It couldn’t be more important to support Israel,” Sorkin said after receiving the award.

The festival also honored Dr. Sharon Nazarian, founder of the UCLA Younes and Soraya Nazarian Center for Israel Studies and president of the Nazarian Family Foundation, with the 2015 IFF Humanitarian Award.

The program of the IFF, which will run till November 19, includes as many as 29 Israeli films, led by Israel’s entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 88th Academy Awards, “Baba Joon.”

“Some 1,200 people came to pay their respects for the State of Israel and Israeli cinema,” IFF founder Meir Fenigstein concluded. “On such difficult days, I am glad we succeeded in recruiting three of the leading names in the race to the Oscar season, who arrived to pay their respects to Israeli cinema, which serves as a honorary ambassador of Israel in the US and in the entire world.”

KING SOLOMON’S WALL EXCAVATED

Gordon Robertson explores the ruins of the palace of King David and the wall of King Solomon in Jerusalem.

Ten Revelations From a Master Class With Claude Lanzmann

by Judy Maltz

The filmmaker did not consider his Holocaust epic ‘Shoah’ a documentary; calls the exodus of French Jews to Israel ‘a posthumous victory for Hitler.’

Now nearly 90, Claude Lanzmann still has a soft spot for certain individuals. Credit: Emil Salman

To mark the 30th anniversary of the epic Holocaust film “Shoah,” the Haifa Film Festival is honoring its creator Claude Lanzmann with a Lifetime Achievement Award. The annual film festival, which takes place this week, will also be holding special screenings of the French-Jewish director’s films.

In a “master class” open to the public as part of the festival events, Lanzmann met earlier this week with fans and admirers in what was more of a question-and-answer session than an actual lesson in filmmaking. It provided an opportunity, however, to learn some new things about the legendary filmmaker and his landmark work. Here are 10 takeaways from that event:

1. Lanzmann does not consider “Shoah” a documentary. In fact, the mere suggestion that this nine-and-a-half-hour Holocaust film might belong to that genre is enough to get his blood boiling. When a member of the audience referred to his best-known film as a documentary, here is how Lanzmann responded: “I want to be nice to you, but if you use that word documentary once again to describe ‘Shoah,’ I will hit you.”

He then went on to explain why ‘Shoah’ was not a documentary. “In a documentary, you recall something that pre-existed,” he said. “But in ‘Shoah,’ nothing pre-existed.” Indeed, what was considered revolutionary about the film when it was first released was not only its length, but also the fact that it did not use any archival footage whatsoever.

2. “Shoah,” lauded as one of the greatest films of all times, was not his initiative. The person who first broached the idea of making the film was Aluf Hareven, a former high-ranking military intelligence and Mossad operative who at the time was running the public diplomacy division of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. As Lanzmann recounted, Hareven had been impressed with his previous film “Porquoi Israel?” – a documentary very sympathetic to the Jewish State – and promised that the Israeli government would assist him in producing the new film if he agreed to accept the challenge.

“I spent a whole night thinking about it, and I got back to him and said that yes, I would do it,” recalled Lanzmann. “The assistance from the State of Israel was a very important factor in my decision.”

3. His mandate was not to make yet another film about the Holocaust. As Lanzmann described it, the idea was for him “to direct the Holocaust – not make a film about it.” In other words, the film had to be powerful enough for viewers to feel they were experiencing the Holocaust.

4. Although he interviewed many Jewish survivors from Poland, Lanzmann initially had no intention of traveling to that country, where ultimately some of his most memorable footage was shot. “It was clear to me that I would not go to Poland when I first started making the film,” he said. “I didn’t want to go there, and for more than four years into the making of the film, I avoided going there.”

The person who changed his mind was a survivor who insisted there were things he would never understand if he did not set foot in Poland. This premonition proved correct. One of his first stops in Poland, noted Lanzmann, was the site of the Treblinka death camp. “I felt nothing when I first got there,” he recalled. “At the time I was like a bomb full of knowledge. We started traveling around the vicinity, and suddenly I saw a sign with black letters and a yellow background, and it said ‘Treblinka’ on it. That sign was the fuse that set off the bomb in me, and after that I exploded.”

5. The film “Pourquoi Israel?” was in many ways Lanzmann’s response to growing anti-Israel sentiments among French leftists after the 1967 Six-Day War. “I wanted to shut their mouths,” said Lanzmann, who belonged to those same leftist circles. “What they were saying about Israel did not fit my ideas about the country.”

The premiere of the film, at a New York film festival, was not as well attended as might have been expected, though. There was good reason for that, as Lanzmann revealed: The date of the premiere was October 6, 1973, the exact day that the Yom Kippur War broke out.

6. Would Lanzmann consider making a sequel to “Pourquoi Israel?” today considering Israel’s dire image problems around the world? The legendary filmmaker did not even pause to think when presented with this challenge by one of the audience participants. “Yes,” he responded. “Are you hiring me?”

7. Lanzmann met with the late Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser three months before the outbreak of the Six-Day War. As he recounted, he was invited to the Arab state together with his close friends Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, the cofounders of the cultural review Les Temps Modernes, of which Lanzmann serves to this day as editor-in-chief. Recalling their meeting with the Egyptian leader, Lanzmann had this observation to make: “He had no intention of going to war with Israel at that point.”

8. Not a word about de Beavoir. When a young participant asked to hear more about Lanzmann’s relationship with the famous French philosopher and feminist, with whom he had a well-known affair, the event moderator looked rather concerned. “He’s not going to like that question,” he warned the woman who posed the question in Hebrew. And he was right. As it was being translated into English, Lanzmann shook his head and said in no uncertain terms: “No.”

9. The distinguished filmmaker is not pleased, to put it mildly, by the recent exodus of French Jews to Israel, referring to it as a “posthumous victory for Adolf Hitler.” And here’s what he had to say about anti-Semitism in his home country: “Yes, it exists in France, and it existed when I was a child, too. But it’s something that you get used to.”

10, Old and gruff as he may be (Lanzmann will celebrate his 90th birthday in November), he still has a soft spot for certain individuals, as one unusual exchange revealed. At one point during the question-and-answer session, a rather shy, middle-aged woman raised her hand to say she had no questions but just wanted to thank Lanzmann for also making the film “Sobibor, October 14, 1943, 4 P.M.” – a documentary about the Jewish revolt at the concentration camp by same name. “It’s important to tell the stories of heroism during the Holocaust as well,” she noted quietly before sitting down. The 2001 film was based on a lengthy interview with Holocaust survivor Yehuda Lerner, one of the leaders of the Sobibor uprising.

When the moderator was about to move on to other questions, a voice from the back of the room interjected: “Mr. Lanzmann, she didn’t tell you this, but that woman is the daughter of the late Yehuda Lerner, and she is here today with her sister because they wanted to see you.”

Visibly moved, Lanzmann responded: “Bravo. Your father was a great man.”