THE
RISE OF THE EXTREMISTS - August
of 1993 was a year marking an irrevocable
change in the path of Israeli history.
Among the Israeli public, who had
been unawares up to this point of
the exhaustive negotiations and
landmark Oslo agreements, it was
a staggering revelation. To many
secular Israelis, it was a promising
step in the right direction; to
many Orthodox Jews and conservative
settlers, the Oslo negotiations
were a complete betrayal of the
Jewish state and the very ideals
of Zionism. For them, the obvious
next step was that Rabin himself
was guilty. Amongst the radical
elements of Jewish society, a fierce
opposition to the very idea of peace
began to flourish amongst extreme-nationalist
settlers and the religious right.
Barely a month after the August
announcement of Oslo, a rally in
Jerusalem featured the vitriolic
chant, “Rabin is a traitor.”
It was only the first of many.
Already
a blunt and notoriously pragmatic
leader, Rabin viewed the extremism
of the religious right as barely
an annoyance. He had been intensely
secular his entire life, and could
not comprehend the fervor with which
the radicals opposed any peace or
land concessions to the Palestinians.
Meanwhile, nationalist settlers
and Palestinian civilians began
clashing with increasing frequency
and ferocity, culminating in the
murder of 29 Arab worshippers by
Israeli extremist Baruch Goldstein
in February 1994. The settlers were
further angered by Rabin’s
orders for settlements to pull out
from Palestinian land around Gaza.
His legendary bluntness –
“If that’s a settlement,
I’m a ball bearing”
– did not help matters. By
late 1995, right-wing Zionist rabbis
began urging settlers to resist
the Israeli soldiers sent to evict
them, by force if necessary. When
the Israeli Knesset met in October
to debate ratification of the Oslo
II accords, extremist crowds called
Rabin “traitor”, with
a Likud politician named Ariel Sharon
claiming that Rabin had “collaborated
with a terrorist organization.”
The vehement hatred of the peace
process gradually shifted to personal
hatred of the prime minister. Yitzhak
Rabin, a man who had personally
fought in the battles of Israel’s
birth, a man who had done more than
anyone to bring Israel closer to
peace and acceptance from its neighbors,
was portrayed wearing a Nazi SS
uniform on leaflets distributed
by Israeli followers of the extremist
American rabbi Meir Kahane.
Under
his aloof exterior, Rabin’s
family members saw his genuine pain
at the gaping political divide he
had formed in Israeli society. Peace
supporters, silent so far, had to
make a response of equal conviction
and passion. Unbeknownst to them,
the voice of peace would come to
form a deafening roar against the
extremists’ shrill protests.
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