US-ISRAEL: Rabin Assassination Sparks Fears for Future

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Nov 6 1995 (IPS) - President Bill Clinton led U.S. mourners at the funeral of Israel’s slain Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin Monday while American jews, and others, pondered the future of the deeply divided Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

Joining Clinton in Israel was a virtual who’s who of U.S. heavyweights, the latest testimony to Israel’s impact on American politics. Among the mourners were former president George Bush and Jimmy Carter while former Secretary of State George Shultz represented Ronald Reagan.

Others who travelled to Israel to pay homage to the slain leader included Sen. Robert Dole, Senate Majority Leader and frontrunner in the race for the Republican nomination and the Speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich.

In New York – home to roughly a third of the more than six million Jews in the United States – hundreds of people have been outside the Israeli consulate since Saturday night after after the bews broke of Rabin’s assassination by a right-wing Israeli law student.

The consulate’s offices have in recent months been the site of protests by Orthodox Jews and right-wing activists who accused Rabin of treachery against Israel for launching the 1993 Oslo peace process with the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO).

One Orthodox New York rabbi, Abraham Hecht of the Rabbinical Alliance of America, went so far as to call Rabin a “traitor” in speeches this summer – echoing similar charges by leaders of the right-wing Israeli settler movement opposed to returning any Israeli-controlled land on the West Bank of the Jordan River to Palestinian hands.

Hecht had argued that Jewish religious law permitted Jews to kill leaders who acted against their people’s interest. Rabin responded by calling the rabbi “an ayatollah.”

But the Israeli leader – the first native-born Isareli prime minister and a war hero in Israel’s first three wars against the Arabs – could not satisfy many hard-line Jews here. During his last visit here just two weeks ago, he angrily walked out of a press conference after an Orthodox Hasidic questioner accused his government of digging up Jewish cemeteries and sacred lands.

Nor did Rabin please many Jewish New Yorkers when he called his former nemesis, PLO Chairman Yasir Arafat, “a partner with my government in the peace process” when the two men addressed the U.N. General Assembly.

The report on Israeli Radio that the apparent killer, Yigal Amir, has said he committed the assassination “on orders from God” has laid bare the scars between Jewish citizens here who saw Rabin’s peace efforts as heroic and those who deem them a betrayal.

The conference of Major American Jewish Organisations (MAJO), the leading umbrella of U.S. Jewish groups, called the assassination a “senseless act of violence, completely against Jewish values.”

MAJO Chairman Leon Levy condemned the “campaign of verbal violence” he blamed for Rabin’s death. He called for a clampdown against right-wing rhetoric against the peace process, both in Israel and the United States.

Rabbi Abraham Foxman, director of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, said the killing “was not a surprise,” given the heated rhetoric of foes of peace with the Palestinians.

But not everyone in New York’s Jewish community was sad. One woman, speaking on condition that she not be identified, argued the killing “should have been done sooner.” In Brooklyn’s Orthodox neighbourhoods, many praised the assassination.

That rift was matched by Arab and Muslim communities in the United States. James Zogby, president of the Arab-American Institute in Washington, said, “Like everyone else, I fear for the future.”

But some Arabs here appeared torn between fear of a breakdown in the peace process and happiness that Rabin – who, as Defence Minister under a coalition government urged a policy of “force, might and beatings” against Palestinians who resisted occupation – is now gone.

The divisions prompted many experts to wonder Sunday whether peace in the region will outlive Rabin. For now, the consensus of among most U.S. officials and politicians is that it will.

“If what he did had any meaning at all, it cannot depend on him alone,” a visibly shaken Henry Kissinger, former U.S. Secretary of State, said on television. “It cannot and will not end with him.”

The key, he added, was to follow Rabin’s work to build “a grammar of coexistence between two suffering peoples. That is the key to the process, and not some document signed in a dramatic ceremony.”

In a statement issued by the White House before Clinton’s departure, the message was very much the same. But the killing still sparked fears over whether peace can last.

One Arab man in Brooklyn, who asked not to be identified, said he was skeptical. “I don’t trust the peace process,” he said.

US-ISRAEL: Rabin Assassination Sparks Fears for Future

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Nov 6 1995 (IPS) - President Bill Clinton led U.S. mourners at the funeral of Israel’s slain Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin Monday while American jews, and others, pondered the future of the deeply divided Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
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