International New York Times

International New York Times Twenty Years After Rabin, Israeli Politics Have Shifted By Isabel Kershner / Nov. 3, 2015 JERUSALEM — While fiery denunciations and vitriolic rants are all too common on social media in Israel, one Facebook post was particularly chilling given its timing — and its author. It surfaced as the country was about to mark the 20th anniversary of the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. And it was written by Hagai Amir, brother of Yigal Amir, the right-wing extremist serving life in prison for the murder. After the president of Israel, Reuven Rivlin, pledged that he would never sign a pardon for the “accursed” assassin, Hagai Amir, who himself was released from prison in 2012 after serving 16 years for his role in planning the killing, responded that the time would come when God “decides that Rivlin will pass from this world, together with the Zionist state, like Sodom, because of the crimes they committed in the name of the law against their own people.” “That day is not far off,” he warned. That barely veiled threat unnerved many Israelis still traumatized by the assassination on Nov. 4, 1995, which came after Mr. Rabin had made territorial concessions to the Palestinians under the Oslo peace accords. During the period of reflection leading up to the anniversary, which falls on Wednesday, and which has coincided with a surge in Palestinian knife attacks against Israelis and other Israeli-Palestinian violence, many Israelis, including former Rabin aides, said they felt that nothing had changed. Yet the Israeli political map has shifted, according to experts. While angry voices from the extreme right, like Mr. Amir’s, are being amplified by social media, they say, the more mainstream Israeli right and left have gravitated over the last two decades toward a less ideological center, approaching some kind of consensus on the Palestinian issue. For many here, the struggle now is more about how to balance Israel’s security needs with democracy, and the battle against incitement versus free speech. Responding to Mr. Amir at a memorial ceremony with members of the Harel Brigade, a military unit that was founded in the late 1940s around the time of independence and which Mr. Rabin commanded, Mr. Rivlin said: “I do not fear for my life at all, and nor does my wife. We fear for democracy.” Two decades ago, the Israeli right and left were sharply divided between those dreaming of a Greater Israel from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea and the supporters of Mr. Rabin, who subscribed to the formula of land for peace. Israeli analysts say that neither of these paradigms are relevant anymore and cite multiple reasons for the shift. There were the suicide bombings of the second Palestinian uprising that started in 2000 and shattered many Israelis’ faith in peace. Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 ended with Hamas, the Islamic militant group, taking over that coastal territory. Repeated rounds of peace talks failed, while Israeli officials say that growing chaos in the Middle East deters them from taking any security risks. Many also point to the weak and divided Palestinian leadership, and the lack of a strong and charismatic leader — like Mr. Rabin — on the Israeli left. “Israelis are in an age of pragmatism,” said Yoaz Hendel, a former director of communications in the office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “It was very clear in Rabin’s time — you were either for or against giving up territory.” Today, he said, “very few people here believe you can achieve a utopian peace treaty.” So far, the general desire to end Israeli rule over the Palestinians, together with the perceived impossibility of achieving a peace deal in the foreseeable future, has led to paralysis. Mr. Netanyahu, of the conservative Likud Party, is serving his third consecutive term and heads a government coalition dominated by right-wing and religious parties. He has reined in the more hard-line politicians in his cabinet who are trying to promote legislation that their critics consider anti-democratic, like curbing the powers of the Supreme Court. Unlike some of his ministers, he has endorsed the idea of a Palestinian state, with caveats, but has also said that for the time being, Israel cannot relinquish military control of the West Bank. Isaac Herzog, the leader of the Zionist Union, which includes the Labor Party, and the leader of the opposition in Parliament, advocates an end to occupation and the creation of a Palestinian state. In some ways it is Mr. Rivlin, whose role is chiefly symbolic, who exemplifies the redrawing of the political map. A veteran Likud parliamentarian who has long opposed territorial partition and supported Jewish settlements, he has emerged as a strong voice for tolerance and coexistence. Recently, in a meeting with international journalists, he proposed a vague concept of “confederation” as a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, blurring the lines between the old camps and becoming a lightning rod for the extreme right. After Mr. Rivlin expressed shame that the suspects in the firebombing of a West Bank home that killed a Palestinian boy and his parents in July, came from “my own people,” one Israeli wished on Facebook that another Yigal Amir would kill him. In Tel Aviv over the weekend, Mr. Rivlin addressed tens of thousands of Israelis who had gathered for a memorial rally for Mr. Rabin. Like all the speakers, he spoke from behind bulletproof glass. The confluence of the anniversary and the recent wave of violence has brought toxic responses to the fore. At a recent soccer game, fans of the Beitar Jerusalem team, some of them notorious for racism and violence, began chanting “Yigal, Yigal.” Some Israelis gloated online over the death of Richard Lakin, an American-Israeli teacher who had worked for Jewish-Arab coexistence and was stabbed and shot by Palestinian assailants on a Jerusalem bus. And an Israeli Jew was charged this week with racially motivated attempted murder after he stabbed another Jew he mistook for an Arab in what the police said was intended as a revenge attack. “The extreme right has been here all along, sometimes more, sometimes less,” said Yehuda Ben Meir, an expert on national security and public opinion at the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University. Yet despite its heightened exposure on social networks, Mr. Ben Meir said, it has not grown significantly, and studies show that a clear majority of Israelis still view democracy as an essential characteristic of their state. “If Hagai Amir didn’t go on Facebook, nobody would hear from him or pay him any attention,” Mr. Ben Meir said. Instead, many Israelis appear to be seeking a more moderate middle way. The right- wing Jewish Home party, which sits in the governing coalition and promotes settlement construction, proposes annexing about 60 percent of the West Bank and allowing some kind of autonomy for the 40 percent heavily populated by Palestinians, analysts say. In the 1990s there was “a clash between two big ideologies,” said Micah Goodman, an Israeli-American Jewish philosopher and the director of a pluralistic Israeli academy for young adults in the West Bank. The right believed that settling the biblical heartland of the West Bank would hasten salvation and bring on the Messianic era. The left believed that a withdrawal from all the territories conquered in the 1967 war would bring peace and allow Israel to finally become part of the family of nations, which Mr. Goodman describes as another “almost Messianic” idea. “Over the last 20 years, Israelis stopped believing in both ideas,” he said. “The new left does not speak of peace, but of occupation. The new right does not speak of salvation, but of security.” http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/04/world/middleeast/20-years-after-rabin-israeli- politics-have-shifted.html?_r=1 .

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