Yesterday, 19 October 2021/12 Hesvon תשפ"ב marked the 26th anniversary of Yitzak Rabin’s assassination.
As usual, Rabin’s family and followers praised the man’s achievements while carefully overlooking his disgraces.
At least one family member, Rabin’s grandson, remembered to trash Benjamin Netanyahu who, the family apparently believes, incited Rabin’s murder.
In the beginning
Rabin was one of Ben Gurion’s favorites. This is supported by the fact that when Ben Gurion reneged on his agreement with Menahem Begin to share arms and ammunition Begin’s Irgun people brought to Israel on the ship Altalena. Ben Gurion sent Rabin and Hagana troops to seize the weapons for Ben Gurion’s Hagana, leaving Begin and his Irgun fighters defenseless.
When the Altalena finally started to off-load people and materiel, Rabin ordered his troops to open fire on fellow Jews. Sixteen men were killed and scores of others wounded, initially with small arms fire which progressed to heavy machine gun and mortar fire. https://tinyurl.com/us7ejs5y Began ordered his people not to return fire, thus limiting the number of dead and injured.
Begin ended the murders by surrendering the weapons to Rabin and Ben Gurion.
Oslo
Although Benjamin Netanyahu criticized Rabin’s cave to Arafat at Oslo, he added that Rabin was not a traitor. He was wrong, but he was not a traitor.” https://tinyurl.com/y38p4yuf
Netanyahu does admit that I have heard this false claim that when extremists within the anti-Oslo camp did call him this, I stood to the side, I was silent, did not respond and even encouraged it,”
It is unclear if the “false claim” was that (a) Rabin was a traitor or (b) that he did nothing to suppress the traitor accusation.
Yonatan Ben-Artzi, a Rabin grandson, attacks Netanyahu on this point at every opportunity.
Foreign bank account
Lea Rabin, wife of Israel's Prime Minister, was fined about $27,000 today (April 18, 1977) for her role in maintaining bank accounts in Washington in violation of Israeli currency regulations.
Newspaper disclosures of the accounts, and the Rabins' subsequent statements about how much they contained, resulted in Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's resignation as the candidate of the ruling Labor Party for a second term in office. Today Rabin told his Cabinet that beginning Friday, the day after Israel's independence day celebration, he would take a leave of absence for the remainder of his current term. https://tinyurl.com/2pdfm2c2 At the time, Israelis were forbidden to have foreign bank accounts. The Rabin’s simply “forgot” about the account and failed to close it before returning to Israel.
Precursor to Abraham Accords?
Rabin's second term as Prime Minister was marked by two historic events - the Oslo Agreements with the Palestinians and the Treaty of Peace with Jordan . Working closely with Shimon Peres, the Foreign Minister and his longtime rival, he masterminded negotiations on the Declaration of Principles signed with the PLO at the White House in September 1993. This won Rabin, Peres and Arafat the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize and opened negotiations with the Palestinians on autonomy in Gaza and some areas of Judea and Samaria and on the establishment of a Palestinian Authority. Then, in October 1994, a Treaty of Peace was signed with the Kingdom of Jordan. This encouraged the development of ties with additional Arab countries in North Africa and the Persian Gulf. https://tinyurl.com/yr5mumwu
How many Arab countries in North Africa and the Persian Gulf joined Jordan in a peace agreement — or even recognition of Israel? The answer is “zero to none.”
Military genus?
According to Uri Milstein, once considered a leading military historian in Israel, Rabin is a coward who abandoned his troops on the field of battle, was removed from operational missions in the War of Independence and suffered a breakdown during the Six-Day War. https://tinyurl.com/v6fm5v4z
Labor Party leader Yitzhak Rabin has admitted he did suffer a brief “breakdown” on the eve of the Six-Day War in 1967.
Rabin was Israel Defense Force chief of staff in May 1967, a time of tension in Israel. Egyptian President Gamel Abdel Nasser was said to be massing troops in Sinai and U.N. Secretary-General U Thant had ordered U.N. truce observer forces out of the Israeli-Egyptian border zone.
Rabin told Hadashot that he was working under intense military and political pressures at the time. Responsibility for keeping the IDF instantly ready for battle rested entirely on his shoulders, he said.
One night, his wife Leah insisted he must rest. She called an army medical officer who administered a sedative. Rabin said he slept for the next 24 hours to regain his strength.
Rabin’s 24-hour breakdown was disclosed in 1974 by Gen. Ezer Weizman, who was deputy chief of staff in 1967. Weizman was trying at the time to convince Labor to choose Shimon Peres instead of Rabin as its leader. https://tinyurl.com/e5vydsfe
Unprepared to lead
As Rabin’s biographer asserted, the Intifada caught him by complete surprise. That is why the defense system arrived at that challenge with the IDF unorganized, unequipped and untrained for the type of war that occupying a hostile nation entailed. And since by that time Rabin had headed the system for more than three years; and since a defense minister’s task is first and foremost to set the defense establishment’s goals – that failure was wholly his.
Rabin displayed in those days the same historic shortsightedness in another arena – South Africa.
The issue was not Israel’s attitude toward the apartheid policy, which Rabin loathed. At stake were Israel’s arms exports to South Africa. Those who saw where history was heading, like then-Foreign Ministry director-general Yossi Beilin, demanded that Israel stop all arms sales to Pretoria. Rabin resisted that effort, assuming Israel could continue to have its cake and eat it, too.
Just as he did not feel the tectonic movement that would soon shake Gaza and the West Bank, Rabin didn’t see, even in 1987, that the apartheid regime was ready to collapse. https://tinyurl.com/5h6wzdvm<,/SUP>
Whose side was he on?
When terrorists murdered settlers, Rabin condemned “the extremists from both sides”; when thousands protested his policy, he said “I don’t care about them”; and when asked about Golan settlers’ opposition to a territorial deal with Syria, he said that as far as he was concerned “they can rotate like propellers.” https://tinyurl.com/5h6wzdvm
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