An Israeli Prime Minister lay, bleeding heavily, in the back of his limousine as it tried to navigate its way through crowds of supporters. An early winter night rally in Tel Aviv that was meant to break the cycle of internal political violence in Israel had led to the ultimate Jewish taboo being broken. The world watched in horror as scribbled statements were read out by barely believing officials, amid screams from bystanders who had gathered after hearing early reports of the shooting.
Soon Rabin was pronounced dead, killed by a fellow Jew. Israel had had its Kennedy moment. People would remember for the rest of their lives where they were, and who they were with, when they heard the news. A Jewish gunman opposed to the peace agreements with the Palestinians and the subsequent withdrawal from parts of the West Bank and Gaza Strip assassinated the Israeli Prime Minister on 4 November 1995.
Most Israelis were shocked by the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, and what it said about Israel’s flawed democracy and divided society. For Netanyahu, the murder of Rabin was a political disaster. In the days that followed his death, the Israeli media and leftist politicians singled out Netanyahu as being, to some extent, culpable for the tragic events of 4 November.
In retrospect, this was decidedly Netanyahu’s most decisive and his darkest moment. It was what his political enemies, including those in the Likud, had been waiting for. It seemed to confirm that the tactics and strategy he had employed since assuming the leadership of the Likud in 1993 to oppose the Rabin government and its policies was wrong. Tags that were linked to Netanyahu at the time included rabble-rouser and extremist. Rabin’s murder led to a character assassination of the Likud leader, whose political future looked close to being over.
In the immediate aftermath of Rabin’s death, opinion polls indicated a steep drop in support for Netanyahu personally, and for the parties of the right in general. Prior to Rabin’s death, however, all looked to be going well for Netanyahu and the Likud, who had held a healthy lead in the polls for over a year, and had looked well positioned to win the 1996 elections.
The previous two and a half years since Netanyahu’s leadership victory had been one of the most turbulent periods in Israeli history. For Netanyahu, the challenges had started from his very first day as leader of the Likud. What followed included aspects of tragedy, comedy and farce that would have been more at home in a Shakespeare play than in a weak, relatively immature political democracy.
Back in March 1993, safely installed in his new office at Likud headquarters and in his new ‘mini suite’ at the Knesset, Netanyahu soon discovered one particular home truth. The Likud was effectively broke as a result of the 1992 election campaign.1 The election defeat in 1992 robbed the party of a large chunk of its state funds. Netanyahu’s predecessor, Yitzhak Shamir, had never been a great fundraiser, even in the United States, where there were rich seams of Jewish donors to be tapped. There were also laws that, to some extent, governed the financing of election campaigns in Israel.
Through the spring and summer months of 1993, Netanyahu tried to repair the black hole in the Likud’s finances. He was as likely to be spotted heading into a bank, as appearing at a political rally. He opened his black book of contacts in the United States and badgered wealthy American Jews to help clear the debt of the Likud.
It wasn’t simply a case of clearing the overdraft. There was a need to raise funds for the 1996 election campaign, which would have seen Netanyahu run against Rabin in Israel’s first direct election for Prime Minister. Netanyahu’s advisors worked to try to balance the demands of fundraising, which often meant extended trips to the United States, with his management of the reconstruction of the Likud party machine under his control.2
With David Levy and Ariel Sharon, along with their very vocal supporters, continuing to pose an internal threat to Netanyahu’s leadership, he responded by moving the political goalposts in the Likud. In amending the party constitution to make it extremely difficult to challenge the incumbent leader before the 1996 election, he caught both Levy and Sharon off guard and illustrated to both men that his political skills were not to be underestimated. The rank and file of the Likud largely fell in behind him, as they believed that he was the most electable of the senior figures in the party.3
Netanyahu was therefore largely able to reconstruct the Likud party organs and machine under his control, and with donors loyal to him rather than the Likud bankrolling the exercise. Developing tighter control over the Likud did not lead to the end of internal dissent against his leadership, but it created the impression that, at the very least, Netanyahu was a competent party manager. This compared favourably to Rabin who, distracted by affairs of state and a genuine indifference, largely ignored the Labour Party that he was supposed to be leading.
Rabin and his government were busy with managing a peace process with the Palestinians. Initial hopes for progress were soon thwarted. At the start of 1993, while Netanyahu was running for the leadership of the Likud, the situation on the ground was depressing. The British Embassy summarized the sentiment:
The year began badly with a row over the deportation of some 400 Hamas activists to a barren Lebanese hillside. The euphoria of Labour’s election victory and the high hopes for progress at the Washington peace talks had faltered. Hostile Palestinians and a sceptical West could not quite believe that the new policies of territorial compromise and reordered priorities meant a real change of Israeli heart.4
Less than a week after Netanyahu was elected as Likud’s leader, on 30 March 1993, Rabin closed the Occupied Territories. This followed a rise in attacks against Israelis in the month, which led to 15 deaths. As a result of Rabin’s measures, there was an immediate and drastic drop in violence within the Green Line. Naturally, this proved extremely popular with the Israeli public.
It was something of an embarrassment to Netanyahu and the Likud, who argued that the territories were an integral part of Israel and should not be sealed off from it.5 Netanyahu’s campaign message that the Rabin government was soft on terrorism no longer seemed relevant, given Rabin’s robust response to the attacks. While the Israeli public got used to the idea of the Occupied Territories being cut off from the rest of Israel, Netanyahu switched his focus to Israel’s northern borders.
Within the Likud, there was an understanding that Rabin would prefer to strike a peace deal with the Syrians rather than advance the Palestinian track of the peace process. With plans for Palestinian autonomy seemingly put on the back burner, Rabin, and the Chief of Staff of the IDF, Ehud Barak, were keen to explore the potential of reaching a deal with the Syrians with the help of American mediation from the new administration of President Bill Clinton.
During the 1992 campaign, Rabin had pledged that Israel would never come down from the Golan Heights, but few believed this would be the case. It was widely understood in Israel, and internationally, that Syria would demand the return of all of the Golan Heights, which Israel had captured during the 1967 Six Day War, in exchange for peace.
The Heights, with its views into Syria, were seen as strategically important to the security of northern Israel. A withdrawal from the Golan Heights was not unthinkable for most Israelis, but polling at the time indicated that most opposed the idea of giving up the territory.
Netanyahu saw a political opportunity to remind Israelis about what he saw as the dangers of the Rabin-led government agreeing to a full withdrawal from the Golan Heights. The Israeli–Syrian relationship was complex with the countries involved in what amounted to a proxy war with one another in Lebanon. A stark reminder of this came on 21 April 1993 when scores of rockets, fired by Hezbollah, fell on Galilee in northern Israel.
In order to help highlight the Golan issue, Netanyahu decided to hold the Likud Convention in the Golan on 17–18 May. Despite this high-profile event and the usual round of interviews with the local television and print media, Netanyahu was struggling to gain any traction with voters. Quickly dismissed by Rabin as something of a loose cannon, and, at the other end of the political spectrum, distrusted by the Settlers movement – whose political patron remained Ariel Sharon – Netanyahu struggled for political take-off.
His political troubles aside, arguably Netanyahu’s biggest problem during his first year at the helm of the Likud was his lack of access to Israel’s agenda towards the peace process. Rabin played his cards very close to his chest, often not telling his cabinet and Labour Party colleagues details of his diplomatic manoeuvrings. Netanyahu’s instinct that Rabin was planning to offer the Golan Heights to Syria in exchange for peace turned out to be spot on.
Rabin made the offer to the US Secretary of State, Warren Christopher, who passed it on to the Syrians. Details of this diplomatic process that eventually failed are now well documented, but, at the time, the meetings took place under a veil of secrecy. This made it difficult for Netanyahu to attack the government’s policies, as he simply did not have enough information as to what was really taking place away from the public gaze.
In interviews with Israeli media, Rabin continued to make it clear that he favoured a Syria-first option, and that any deal with the Palestinians would not be forthcoming. Netanyahu knew too little, too late, to mount an effective opposition to the government’s policies.6
He wasn’t the only one in this position. Rabin’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Shimon Peres, was equally in the dark as to Rabin and Christopher’s diplomatic efforts with Syria. Rabin trusted few people, and certainly not his long-standing political rival in the Labour Party. Peres only learned of Rabin’s offer of the Golan Heights to the Syrians following the Prime Minister’s death, when Rabin’s aides and the Americans briefed him on the Syrian negotiations.
On the Palestinian front, however, Peres proved to be much more the lead man than Rabin, who continued to divide his time between the Syrian track, domestic issues and trying to keep his quarrelsome coalition government from collapsing. Peres was to help bring about what was hailed as an historic breakthrough in the conflict with the Palestinians, one that was to have far-reaching consequences for Israel, and for the political career of Benjamin Netanyahu.
Unbeknown to Netanyahu (and at this stage Rabin as well) on 20 January 1993 an Israeli academic named Yair Hirschfeld met with a senior Palestinian figure, Abu Ala, in Oslo to start the secret negotiations that would produce the Oslo Accords.7 The first of the resulting agreements were signed before the end of the year. As the British Ambassador optimistically summarized:
1993 will be remembered in Israel as the year of Rabin’s handshake with Arafat on the White House lawn; and the possibility at last of peace to the long standing struggle between Jew and Palestinian Arab for control of the Holy Land.
Before a startled, delighted and nonetheless somewhat doubting world, Prime Minister Rabin and Chairman Yasser Arafat announced that Israel and the PLO had decided to recognise each other’s existence and commit themselves through a firm timetable to negotiate a permanent settlement to a dispute that has led to four wars . . .8
That this should have been done not by representatives of the younger generation who forged the deal but by two grizzled survivors of so many recent years of terrorism and violence was inexpressibly moving to those who watched the television coverage. In Israel, as Rabin said, ‘the mood was of great expectation albeit mixed with deep apprehension’.9
The British Foreign Secretary, Douglas Hurd, described the signing as the Middle Eastern equivalent of the fall of the Berlin Wall in Europe. Nothing, he promised, would be the same again. With the benefit of hindsight it is clear that much of this optimism was misplaced. The key point, however, was that at the time of the Rabin–Arafat handshake on the White House lawn the Israel–PLO deal was backed by the majority of Israelis.
This level of support was to decline as home truths were established during the subsequent months that saw an increase – and not a decline, as had been anticipated – in the levels of violence in the conflict. For Netanyahu, the Rabin government’s agreement with the PLO presented a curious mixture of difficult challenges in political positioning terms, and an opportunity to try to unify the right in Israel under his leadership.
At the time of the signing ceremony, Netanyahu was in Europe fundraising for the Likud. He immediately cut his trip short and returned to Israel. There was much speculation and rumour about Netanyahu’s reaction when he returned to Israel. Journalists from local newspapers reported that Netanyahu and his key aide, Eyal Arad, had held an impromptu ‘panic stricken conversation at a gas station’ near Ben-Gurion Airport.10
Prior to the Israel–PLO agreement, Netanyahu had a clear strategy to win power, which he hoped he would be able to achieve before the date of the next scheduled national elections. The first part was to raise substantial campaign funds that he would use to bankroll Likud candidates in the forthcoming elections. Here, he very much endorsed the American election model, which suggested the larger the campaign funds the greater the chance of victory.
Other political leaders in Israel remained light years behind Netanyahu on this score. The aim here was that the funds would help buy loyalty from those Likudniks who were part of Netanyahu’s expanding political faction. Campaign funding was becoming an increasingly grey area in Israeli politics, with loopholes making it easier for people such as Netanyahu to raise money directly from wealthy donors.
The second part of Netanyahu’s strategy concerned the likelihood that the Rabin-led governing coalition would collapse before 1996 and that elections would have to be moved forward to a date much earlier than scheduled. All of this centred upon the instability of the coalition and a criminal investigation that involved Aryeh Deri, the leader of the ultra-orthodox party Shas, which was part of the coalition. Netanyahu calculated that there was a good chance that Shas would leave the coalition either as a result of a police investigation into Deri, or due to tensions between Shas and the fiercely secular left-wing party Meretz.
In truth, Shas and Meretz were odd bedfellows in the coalition given their opposing views on secular–religious issues. All the issues relating to Deri and Shas’ participation in the coalition were coming to a head just prior to the announcement of the agreement between Israel and the PLO. On 9 August 1993, the Israeli Attorney General had demanded the suspension of Deri from his position as the Minister of the Interior.
Netanyahu’s hope was that he could tempt Deri to leave the governing coalition and rejoin the Likud-led camp. Prior to 1992, Shas had been an important member of the Likud-led governing coalition. Looking ahead to the direct elections for Prime Minister, Netanyahu understood the importance of the ultra-orthodox voters for his chances of success in beating Rabin.
It was widely presumed that these highly disciplined voting constituencies would vote for parties such as Shas in the Knesset (parliamentary elections) and then vote in the direct election for Prime Minister following the advice of their religious and political leaders. On his part, Netanyahu had been extremely proactive in building bridges and deepening his ties to Shas and its leadership.
In doing this, he skirted over his two divorces and admission of adultery in his third marriage, focusing instead on the religious conservatism of the Likud versus the allegedly more secular nature of the Labour Party. Naturally, to sweeten the deal, he made sure that Shas understood just how grateful he would be to them, and that he would ensure they were rewarded politically in any government he led.
Unlike Rabin, who continued largely to ignore the impact of the electoral changes on the politics of Israel, Netanyahu understood that the fundamental impact of the new system was that it shifted coalition bargaining from after an election to before it. Put simply, candidates running for Prime Minister needed to effectively strike endorsement deals from the political leaders of key voting groups.
Of course there was no guarantee that voters would follow the directives of their respective constituent leaders, but in the case of the ultra-orthodox it was thought highly probable that this group of voters would follow the directive of its religious and political leaders.
On 25 August 1993, as the Israeli press, for the first time, started to publish articles about the possibility of an imminent agreement between Israel and the PLO, Netanyahu believed that both Deri and the religious leaders of Shas were well disposed towards him and would support him in the direct election for Prime Minister.
All in all, in the weeks prior to the announcement and signing of the Israel–PLO deal, Netanyahu’s prospects looked very rosy. Ahead in the polls against Rabin, and with the Likud looking set to improve on its disastrous 1992 election result, and with the ultra-orthodox leadership turning a blind eye to his adultery, Netanyahu had good grounds for optimism. What he needed most was to capitalize on his healthy political stock by forcing early elections.
In order to try to help force this issue Netanyahu was set to launch a major public relations campaign across the country calling for early elections. Posters and bumper stickers were produced and billboard space booked up by the Netanyahu team. The aim was to create momentum for the two key municipal elections to be held at the start of November 1993 in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, and to use this as a launch pad for the national elections. Netanyahu and his Likud colleagues believed that the veteran Mayor of Jerusalem, the 82-year-old Teddy Kollek, was vulnerable to a major challenge from a youthful leading figure in the party.
Kollek had first been elected in 1965, but by 1993 the demographic make-up of the city had changed with many young secular Jews abandoning Jerusalem, as the ultra-orthodox population in the city increased. The latter was seen as more likely to vote for a Likud candidate than the secular incumbent mayor. Tel Aviv was a completely different case, but there was a feeling that a moderate Likud candidate could take the city.
In the end, the Likud did take both cities with Ehud Olmert winning in Jerusalem, and Roni Milo in Tel Aviv. Their victories on 2 November 1993 did not have the immediate impact on the Likud at a national level. To some extent, however, they stopped the perception of the decline of Netanyahu and the Likud that had occurred since the Israel–PLO deal had been signed on the White House lawn on 13 September.
While Netanyahu was quick to try to take his share of the credit for the two key successes, it’s important to remember that municipal elections in Israel, as in many other countries, are largely fought on local and not national issues. The success of the Likud in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv was not an endorsement of its national platform towards the peace process or the popularity of Benjamin Netanyahu.
The success of the Likud in the November local elections served as a brief break from the storm, rather than a solution to the problems that had engulfed the party since the signing of the Israel–PLO agreement. Netanyahu’s early election strategy was effectively dead in the water. His advisors reminded him that, in the immediate euphoric period that followed the deal, it would be Rabin and Labour who would benefit from early elections and not Netanyahu and the Likud. The agreement, as well as damaging Netanyahu and the Likud nationally, also opened up a can of worms over the party’s response to the agreement.
Here, Netanyahu appeared to adopt a rigid, ideological approach to the agreement, stating that he opposed and furthermore, if elected, would not implement it. He cited the PLO and Arafat as being unreformed and unrepentant terrorists who continued to wish to destroy Israel. His opposition to the agreement was not only based on his opinion of Arafat and the PLO, but also on his deep-rooted commitment to ‘Greater Israel’, that had been one of the central planks of the Revisionist Zionist movement since the creation of Israel in 1948.
In essence, ‘Greater Israel’ meant the inclusion of the West Bank into Israel. Within the Likud, there were those who cited the legitimacy for this inclusion on religious grounds – the lands had been promised to the Jews – and those who maintained that the lands were vital for security reasons. Naturally, there were those who used a mixture of both rationales to justify their support for retaining control over the Occupied Territories.
The feeling in the party was that the deal with the PLO removed any realistic possibility of achieving the dream of ‘Greater Israel’. For his part, Netanyahu, while well versed in the use of religious imagery and symbolism in his speeches, belonged to the group that emphasized the value of the West Bank to maintaining and strengthening Israel’s national security. For Netanyahu, there was no greater threat to Israel’s security than a PLO-led Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
His opposition to the deal with the PLO was therefore based primarily on the grounds of security and not ideology. The opposition, however, was steadfast and inflexible, a point that irked several of Netanyahu’s senior colleagues in the Likud.
The question of the Likud’s response to the agreement was on the surface very clear: non-acceptance of the agreement, no recognition of the PLO and no negotiations with it. Netanyahu imposed a strong whip on the Likud members of the Knesset when Rabin had brought the deal before the Knesset for the ratification vote on 23 September 1993.
In his speech, on the first day of the two-day debate, Netanyahu warned that the deal with the PLO resembled British attempts to appease Hitler during the 1930s. In press articles published in the same month, Netanyahu pushed the comparison. In a New York Times op-ed entitled ‘Peace in Our Time’, he wrote:
Earlier in this century, Neville Chamberlain thought he could buy ‘peace in our time’ by handing over the mountain defenses of Czechoslovakia to Hitler, who promised to accept a deal of ‘land for peace.’ On his deathbed, Chamberlain said, ‘Everything would have been all right if Hitler hadn’t lied to me.’
The Rabin Government is now betting the security of Israel on Yasser Arafat’s promises. But his promises are worthless. He has violated every political commitment he has ever made. Since his ‘breakthrough’ promise in 1988 to stop PLO terror, his own Fatah faction has launched more terrorist attacks against Israel than any other Palestinian group. Similarly, he repeatedly ‘recognizes’ Israel for some political gain – only to take it back later.
An armed PLO state looming over Israel’s cities and overflowing with returning ‘refugees’ (a million to start with, says the PLO) is a far cry from a responsible compromise that would give Israel security and Arabs autonomy. Instead of giving peace a chance, it is a guarantee of increased tension, future terrorism and, ultimately, war.11
From the outset, Netanyahu’s rhetoric was strong and intended to indicate his belief that the deal with the PLO posed an imminent threat to Israel’s security. He portrayed Israel as a small country that would be in mortal danger if it handed over lands that were vital for its security.
His efforts in the Knesset debate failed. The government won the vote with 61 votes in favour and 50 against, along with eight abstentions and one absent.12 To some extent, the vote itself was overshadowed by the tone of the debate. The use of fiery rhetoric was nothing new to the Knesset floor, but the insults and emotive nature of the debate did not bode well for the future of Israeli democracy.
The signing of the deal and its ratification did not lead to the end of the debate about its merits. The implementation of the initial stages of the Accords and the negotiations over the subsequent agreements provided much opportunity for the rejectionists, like Netanyahu, to make their voices heard.