Prior to the murder of Rabin, Netanyahu’s fortunes during 1995 continued to rise. A spate of suicide bombings throughout the year (20 January at Beit Lid, near Netanya, 24 July in Ramat Gan, and 21 August in Jerusalem) kept the spotlight on personal security. The feeling that there was no end in sight to the attacks by Palestinian rejectionists, and the atmosphere of fear, once again benefited Netanyahu who needed to do little more than recite his stump speech for his popularity to rise.
The only two setbacks for the Likud leader prior to November were his lack of success in bringing down the government to force early elections, and the inauguration of a new political movement by his Likud internal rival, David Levy. Neither of these, however, looked like derailing the Netanyahu bandwagon, which increased the momentum carried over from the previous year.
Within the Labour leadership there was a belief that the strong polling numbers for Netanyahu and the Likud were soft. When the time came, they hoped (but were far from certain) that the voters would back Rabin and Labour. Central to this hope was the strong performance of the Israeli economy, which was related to the peace process. Netanyahu countered this belief, arguing that there had been no peace dividend for the lowest earners in Israel and that the economy was in dire need of a new round of liberalization.
The key economic group that was identified by both Netanyahu and Rabin as vital to their prospects in the next elections were the ex-Soviet immigrants. The economic indicators in 1995 pointed to seemingly paradoxical findings. By and large, the immigrants were doing better economically than almost all previous waves of immigration to Israel. The level of dissatisfaction about their economic plight, however, was increasing – and they demanded that more be done to successfully absorb them into Israeli society.
If the polling data was confirmed, it looked as if this group would desert Rabin and Labour in 1996 just as they had done with Shamir and the Likud in 1992. With the new immigrants comprising nearly 20 per cent of the electorate, this represented a hammer blow to Rabin and Labour.
It wasn’t all plain sailing for Netanyahu. The Likud’s dream that this new wave of immigrants would settle in the Occupied Territories and change its demographic balance was not realized. Instead, the vast majority of the immigrants chose to live within the Green Line in existing communities. The lack of willing new settlers made it impossible for Netanyahu to harbour any realistic hopes of achieving a Jewish majority in the West Bank.
The second complication for Netanyahu came in the form of the announcement, on 7 June 1995, by the de facto leader of the new immigrants, Natan Sharansky, that he was forming a new political movement called Yisrael Ba’aliyah, which aimed to represent the interests of the immigrants.
Netanyahu had originally hoped to incorporate Sharansky and his supporters into the Likud, to help strengthen his connection with the immigrants group. He argued, with some justification, that the political outlook of the immigrants was more akin to that of the Likud than Labour. In general, they adopted a more hawkish position towards the peace process with the Arabs than traditional Labour Party supporters, and were keener on capitalist enterprise than the more collectivist nature that still characterized the labour Zionist movement.
At the time, Sharansky had a good relationship with Netanyahu, although the two would later fall out over Netanyahu’s failure to keep the political promises he made to him. In 1995, Sharansky’s decision to form what was, in effect, a political party reflected the changes in the electoral system that offered better opportunities for sectorial parties to win a greater number of seats in the Knesset. In truth, Netanyahu and his team were not over-concerned about the manoeuvrings of Sharansky and the immigrants.
In private, they understood that gaining the endorsement of Sharansky for Netanyahu in the direct election for Prime Minister was more critical than whatever the new immigrants did in the Knesset elections. In putting his own election prospects ahead of those of the Likud, Netanyahu sent a clear signal of his personal priorities. Putting his own interests above those of the party became a familiar trait in his career. Back in 1995, when the full effects of the new electoral system were not fully understood, the implications of this prioritization were far from clear.
What Netanyahu did clearly envisage was that his route to victory in the direct election for Prime Minister lay in winning the support of the religious voters and a plurality of votes from the new immigrants. He worked hard in honing his message to these key groups, making promises in the socio-economic and secular/religious areas of his embryonic policy platform.
It was largely, however, for external consumption that, in 1995, Netanyahu published his second book in English with the slightly pretentious title, Fighting Terrorism: How Democracies Can Defeat Domestic and International Terrorism. This short book was a reworked collection of past essays, stitched together with a new extended section on the (negative) implications of the Oslo Accords along with the lessons that needed to be learned.
There was nothing new to be gleaned from this work that hadn’t already been said by Netanyahu in Hebrew. The true intention of the book was to help further internationalize ‘Brand Netanyahu’ and to further associate his name with the fight against terrorism.
His previous book, published in 1993 and entitled A Place Among Nations: Israel and the World, had been intended to set out his agenda and vision for Israel. The book constituted a narrative of a very select history of Israel’s conflict with the Arabs and the present-day and future implications. Naturally, the reviews of this work in the United States and Europe were coloured by the political persuasion of the reviewer and the publication.
In truth, the book served as little more than a policy road map, published at the outset of a future leader’s career. The world of politics is full of examples of similar works by young and ambitious leaders, with few selling well or being fondly remembered. The key point about Netanyahu’s work was that many people outside of Israel paid a great deal of attention to it.
Political enemies and allies, scholars and journalists read the book in expectation that it would outline the policies, ethos and vision that would come to constitute ‘Netanyahuism’. Instead, they found a strangely impersonal book in which the sole chapter that offered any meaningful insight was the ninth, entitled ‘A Durable Peace’.1 Even in this chapter Netanyahu clings to what he sees as the injustices suffered by the Israeli state at the hands of the Arabs and the international media.
The one clear message it presents is that peace would only be on (as defined by Netanyahu) Israel’s terms. The book is steeped in a tone of victimhood and loss. It fails to deliver any set of indicators as to where, if elected, he would take Israel. Looking back, it is a strangely dated book, even by Middle Eastern standards.
The book belongs to a bygone era and lacks the depth of understanding, compassion and forwardness. Its main interest remains in its relevance as a snapshot of the Netanyahu mind, if only fleeting, with a smokescreen of pseudo-intellectual camouflage. What is clear is that the book is merely a reflection of Netanyahu’s politics. The words on the page indicate an author who is trying to portray himself as an ideologue, but whose overtly pragmatic instincts are never far from the surface.
To this extent, the book has been used to support two distinct takes on his early career: the first, characterized by his strong sense of traditional Revisionist ideology, and the second, by his overarching degree of pragmatism. Needless to say, the book sold well in the United States, but did poorly in European markets.
Of Netanyahu’s two books, the one on terrorism did at least contain an erudite section on his opposition, in which he revealed for foreign consumption what he saw as the tragic mistakes of the Rabin government. In operational terms he argued that the government had impaired Israel’s capacity to successfully deal with terrorism by making six major mistakes with the Oslo Accords. It is worth noting down the six in Netanyahu’s own words:
1. It tried to subcontract the job of fighting terrorism to someone else – in this case to the terrorists themselves.
2. It tied the hands of its security forces by denying them the right to enter or strike at terrorist havens, thus creating inviolable domains for terrorist actions.
3. It released thousands of jailed terrorists into these domains, many of whom promptly took up their weapons and returned to ply their trade.
4. It armed the terrorists, by enabling the unrestricted flow of thousands of weapons into Gaza, which soon found their way into the hands of the myriad militias and terrorist gangs.
5. It promised safe passage for terrorists by exempting PLO VIPs from inspection at border crossings from Egypt and Jordan, thus enabling the smuggling of terrorists into Gaza and Jericho, and from there into Israel itself.
6. It betrayed its Palestinian Arab informants, many of whom were murdered by the PLO, leaving Israel without an invaluable source of intelligence against terrorist operations in the evacuated areas.2
At the time of the book’s publication point six of the above was arguably the most discussed within the Israeli security services. The loss of Israeli ‘eyes and ears’ in areas controlled by the Palestinians meant that Israel was essentially blind in these areas. When the suicide attacks in Israel started in the autumn of 1994, Israeli forces found it difficult to disrupt the bombers’ support networks, due to a lack of reliable intelligence emanating from Palestinian-controlled lands. It would take Israeli intelligence services the best part of a decade to rectify this problem.
What is perhaps most interesting and revealing about Netanyahu’s comments is that his criticisms and concerns about the security implications of the Oslo Accords might have been written by Yitzhak Rabin and his team of writers. The Prime Minister was still known in Israel as ‘Mr Security’ and he was acutely aware of the security shortcomings caused by the Oslo Accords.
The difference between his viewpoint and that of Netanyahu was that the loss of security would be short-term, and that once a permanent agreement was in place the levels of violence would drop. A constant theme employed by Rabin against Netanyahu was that the Likud leader could offer no viable alternative to the Oslo Accords.
From Rabin’s perspective, Netanyahu was merely a younger model of his predecessor, Yitzhak Shamir. Rabin, in short, saw Netanyahu as an ideologue whose policies of rejection would put the country on a collision course with the United States – just as Shamir had done from 1991 to 1992. Rabin’s view of Netanyahu was flawed and mixed with a dose of realpolitik.
In order to attack Netanyahu, Rabin highlighted his lack of government experience and his inflexibility in accepting the deal with the PLO as evidence of his unsuitability for government. What Rabin and many failed to detect in 1995, however, was that it was the forthcoming election, and not ideology, that dictated Netanyahu’s position towards the Accords. Netanyahu opposed the Accords, but his guiding light was putting in place the correct strategies and tactics in order to win the election.
In executing his carefully laid plans, Netanyahu spent much of 1995 speaking to the right and the Settlers movement. For its part, the Settlers movement was leading a vocal, highly organized and dangerous campaign against the Oslo Accords. The campaign at times verged on the unacceptable for the norms of a democratic state. The demonization of Rabin was intolerable, as were the similar attacks on Shimon Peres, Yossi Beilin and the others responsible for framing or supporting the Oslo Accords.
It was Rabin who bore the brunt of the attacks. Some anti-Oslo campaigners believed that Rabin would see the error of his ways and be forced back on to a more centrist track. Rabin’s predecessor as Prime Minister, Yitzhak Shamir, was not one of the hopeful. He thought that the Rabin of the era of the Oslo Accords was politically unrecognizable from the Rabin who had served as Israel’s Minister of Defence from 1984 to 1990.3
On his part, Netanyahu was not totally convinced that Rabin had passed the point of no return in implementing the Oslo Accords. He was aware of the internal pressure on him from the centrist parts of the Labour Party to postpone the implementation of the Accords until after the election. Netanyahu feared that Rabin would shift back to the political centre on the peace process to take the votes of this important constituency.
He was also aware that the Israeli economy, while showing signs of overheating, was by and large in good shape.4 As the British Ambassador noted, ‘Living standards [in Israel] continued to rise fast to levels greater than those of several EU member states.’5 If Rabin, with Arafat’s tacit help, could keep the violence in check around election time, the government would be able to focus the campaign on the economic improvements that the peace deal had brought much of the country. This was exactly how Netanyahu saw himself potentially losing the election.
On 18 July 1995, the Knesset formally swore in two new Labour Party ministers. The first was the main Israeli architect of the Oslo Accords, the ex-deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, Yossi Beilin, who was close to Shimon Peres. The second was the ex-Chief of Staff of the IDF, Ehud Barak, who was appointed as Minister of the Interior.
Both appointments represented an effort on the part of Rabin to promote generational handover. The timing of Barak’s appointment was particularly interesting, given that he and Netanyahu were from the same generation and that Barak was widely viewed (not least by himself) as Rabin’s chosen successor when he eventually stepped down.
Barak’s reputation was of being one of Israel’s finest generals and bravest soldiers. Intriguingly, Barak had been Netanyahu’s commander when the two men had served in Israel’s elite commando unit, Sayeret Matkal. Israeli political commentators predicted a rosy future for Barak, who had been parachuted into a top cabinet job after his retirement from the IDF. Cast in a similar mould to Rabin, Barak was widely trusted as an expert in Israeli security.
The message his appointment sent to Israelis was that another expert in security was saying that it was all right to continue with the peace process with the PLO. Indeed, Barak, and the IDF, had been heavily involved in negotiating the security aspects of the Accords. Rabin’s clear intention was to undermine Netanyahu – the so-called security expert – by appointing the man who was the real thing in this area.
It also made for good press coverage for Rabin and Barak, as Israelis were reminded that Netanyahu had only been a junior officer in the IDF. Over the years, Netanyahu’s rivalry with Barak would become one of the central features of Israeli politics with their careers seemingly intertwined.
Over the hot summer months of 1995, while Rabin hosted a number of foreign leaders, and was welcomed in overseas visits around the globe, Netanyahu travelled throughout Israel continuing to build his personal election machine and attending anti-Oslo rallies. As a result of the heat, at the beginning of July the country experienced some of the worst forest fires in Israel’s history, which destroyed nearly 5,000 acres of forest in the area of the Jerusalem corridor.6
The political temperature was fast rising in the country as well. With the government negotiating the interim agreement with the Palestinians that would lead to a further handover of land in the West Bank to the Palestinians, the tone of political debate in Israel further deteriorated.
Violence at political rallies was nothing new in Israel. The 1981 election campaign, widely regarded as the most polemical, was characterized by political attacks on both Labour and Likud leaders.
At the start of the autumn of 1995, the levels of threat and actual instances of political attacks were getting out of hand. Some commentators argued that Israelis needed to let off steam and that Israeli democracy was strong enough to withstand the stormy and bitter debate about the implementation of the Oslo Accords.
Netanyahu continued to act as if this was the case. His attacks on the government grew ever more emotive, and his language nastier, sometimes pushing the boundaries of acceptability. He sensed that the decisive battle over the Accords was taking place as Rabin and Peres negotiated Israel’s further withdrawals from the West Bank.
Like most Israelis, Netanyahu believed that once the land had been handed over Israel would never get it back. From his perspective, he felt that he needed to act before it was too late. While the Oslo Accords were officially classified as interim agreements to be superseded by the outcome of the final status talks, few believed that any land Israel handed over during the implementation of the first stages would be returned.
Like most political leaders who were reliant on popular support, Netanyahu needed an audience. In Israel, the one on the street was increasingly controlled by elements linked to the extremist part of the Settlers movement, and political parties that were far to the right of the Likud.
Netanyahu’s fears were further fuelled by the news on 24 September 1995 that Shimon Peres and Yasser Arafat had initialled an Interim Agreement in Taba. Four days later, on 28 September, amid much fanfare, Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat formally signed the agreement in Washington. For the anti-Oslo camp in Israel, the agreement came as a hammer blow. The British summarized its impact:
The Interim Agreement gave the Palestinians control over about 30% of the West Bank. The Zionist dream of suzerainty over Eretz Israel, the undefined area of biblical Israel, was over . . . Rabin was content to give the Palestinian population of the West Bank responsibility for running much of its own affairs. The pull out from the West Bank was real.7
On 5 September, the Knesset started a two-day debate on the Interim Agreement to be followed by a vote on its ratification. The debate was one of the stormiest and bitterest in the relatively short history of the Knesset. Every Knesset member was offered the opportunity of making a short speech, and almost all spoke.
The realization that the Oslo Accords were no longer merely about a withdrawal from Gaza and a tiny area of the West Bank, rather about an eventual Israeli withdrawal from almost all of the West Bank, brought a cold reality to the debate. The British pointed out that a pull-out from the West Bank, which for a generation of Israelis had been unthinkable, was happening before their eyes.
On the first night of the debate, Netanyahu made one of the biggest mistakes of his political career up to that point. It was an error of judgement that would be used by his Israeli political enemies and international detractors alike to seemingly place him well and truly in the camp of the extremists.
Netanyahu attended a rally of around 30,000 anti-Oslo protestors in Zion Square in the centre of Jerusalem. Emotions were running high and many of the demonstrators had been bussed in from settlements in the West Bank. There was also the usual mixture of diehard Likudniks and the supporters of far-right parties demonstrating against Rabin and the Interim Agreement.
In the weeks leading up to the rally, the Israeli internal security services, Shin Beth, and the Israeli media were investigating reports that some Orthodox rabbis and scholars had been making pronouncements that, as Rabin was willing to hand over the West Bank to the Palestinians, it was permissible to kill him.8
At the rally, protestors carried placards with pictures of Rabin that had been modified to dress him in an SS uniform. The crowds chanted ‘Rabin is a traitor’, ‘Rabin is Arafat’s dog’ and, ominously, ‘Death to Rabin’.
Netanyahu was on a balcony overlooking the square, along with other opposition leaders, watching the demonstration and waiting for his turn to address the crowd. In the television broadcast of the event, he appears content, pleased with the turnout and the noise that the crowd were making. Netanyahu later denied that he heard the chants of ‘Death to Rabin’, and argued that had he done so he would have disowned them when he eventually spoke.
For a leader who was a grand master in the use of the television interview and image to further his career, it was a calamitous mistake. The fact that neither he nor his supporters around him condemned the images of Rabin in SS uniform and the chants against Rabin’s life cast a deep shadow over their judgement.
A more experienced and wily politician than Netanyahu would have left the rally when he realized its timbre and radical overtones. Instead, he was introduced to the crowd as the next Prime Minister of Israel and gave his fiery anti-Oslo speech to a highly receptive audience.
Television images of the crowd waving pictures of Rabin in SS uniform, and chanting ‘Death to Rabin’ were broadcast in Israel and across the world. The impression that the television images and photographs published in newspapers gave was of the Likud leader standing shoulder to shoulder with those who were calling for the use of extremist means to rid the country of the government.
Netanyahu’s detractors talked not only of his poor political judgement, but also of his total inability to absorb what was going on in Israel at the time. Members of Shin Beth had allegedly spoken to Netanyahu about the worsening political situation in Israel, and asked him to tone down his anti-government rhetoric.
The Minister of Housing and Construction, Binyamin ‘Fuad’ Ben-Eliezer, a close ally of Rabin, and who had been attacked at the rally, recalled years later in a media interview:
One month before the assassination there was the big demonstration in Jerusalem’s Zion Square, at which all the heads of the Likud party spoke. By chance I happened on the back end of the demonstration, near the Knesset. Suddenly, I found myself surrounded by thousands, the subject of cursing and swearing.9
Ben-Eliezer then went on to describe what happened next.
A young man, who later turned out to be the brother of [Rabin assassin] Yigal Amir, climbed onto my car. The amount of cursing and swearing to which I was subjected was unbelievable and at the lowest levels, including spitting in my face. Luckily for me the police were called and they extricated me in quite a state. I was very agitated.10
As soon as he got back to the Knesset, he went to find Netanyahu to remonstrate with him. He still remembers what he said when he caught up with him: ‘Listen closely, we’re going to have a murder here.’11 Netanyahu reassured him that nothing was going on. The next day, when Ben-Eliezer recalled the events to Rabin at a cabinet meeting, saying, ‘I was almost murdered last night and there is going to be a murder here’, Rabin ignored his warnings and continued with the meeting.12
Netanyahu failed to understand the bigger picture. Lost in his strategies and tactical planning to bring down the government, he missed the simple point that leaders – even opposition heads – have a civic duty to rein in extremists. Unbeknown to Netanyahu there were individuals who were willing to take the rhetoric to heart and carry out an attack on the Prime Minister.
On this point, despite briefings from Shin Beth to the contrary, Rabin also believed that there was little threat from these radicalized Jews. In the wake of the attack on Ben-Eliezer, Shin Beth ordered that security be stepped up for government ministers, especially Yossi Beilin and Shimon Peres who were the two members of the government most associated with having started the Israel–PLO negotiations.
It would be unfair on Netanyahu not to mention that he never endorsed the comments and slogans directed against Rabin by the protestors. On occasions, in the Knesset, he derided the opponents of the Accords who called Rabin a traitor. He described Rabin as a political rival, and during at least one Likud rally reminded his supporters that Rabin was not a traitor. He also spoke on the floor of the Knesset and denounced the posters and placards claiming that Rabin was a Nazi collaborator.
Where he lost his way was in not distancing himself far enough politically from those extremists whose opinion he did not share, and who were using him to gain political legitimacy. His mistakes were not those of a malicious nature, rather they were caused by his inexperience and lack of understanding of the dangerous political temperature in Israel at that time.
In retrospect, he and Rabin should have sat down privately and worked out an agreement to lower the political temperature that would have allowed for a rigorous, cool-headed debate on the Interim Agreement. Such a move would have constituted leadership by both men and sent a clear message that extremist views and actions would not be tolerated in Israel.
In the end, after two days of stormy debate in the Knesset, Netanyahu and the other opponents of the Interim Agreement lost the vote, but only by a whisker. The agreement was passed by 61 votes to 59 with all 120 members of the Knesset casting their votes on this crucial agreement. As a result of the vote, four days later, on 10 October, 950 Palestinian prisoners were released as part of the opening phase of the implementation of the Interim Agreement.
For many Israelis, the release of prisoners was too much to take, with Netanyahu reminding Israel and the world that many of them would, as he had put it in his book, ‘promptly take up their weapons and returned to ply their trade’.13 The release of the prisoners further increased the political temperature in Israel between those politicians who saw it as a price Israel had to pay for peace, and those who viewed it as essentially surrender to Arafat and the PLO.
On 25 October 1995, the IDF started its redeployment from Jenin. It looked at the start of November 1995, as if, following months of political stalemate between the Rabin government and the Palestinian Authority – that resulted in a series of missed deadlines – the peace process was getting back on track. Netanyahu, for one, was not so sure. He sensed that the country was heading more and more towards his way of thinking regarding the Interim Agreement.
In essence, Netanyahu still believed that major problems lay ahead in implementing the agreement, with further Israeli pullbacks to be finalized and implemented, amidst a potential increase in attacks against Israelis by Palestinian rejectionist groups. Riding high in the opinion polls, and with only a year to go until elections, Netanyahu still felt confident that it would be a government led by him that would soon be responsible for dealing with any future implementation of the Accords.
The increasing domestic political violence had shocked many left-wing Israelis out of their overtly defensive political malaise. The absence of large-scale, widespread centre-left political rallies had been a feature of Israeli politics since the signing of the Oslo Accords over two years earlier.
The organizers of the rally in the King of Israel Square in Tel Aviv wanted to make a stand against worsening political violence in Israel. The message of the rally was that enough was enough. The political agenda of the rally was an attempt to take the Israeli streets back from the anti-Oslo protestors, whose huge rallies over the previous two years had dominated news headlines.
At first, Rabin was set to decline an invitation to address the rally. Previous attempts at putting on a pro-Oslo demonstration had attracted small crowds. Once, when told there was a pro-Oslo demonstration at the Prime Minister’s office in Jerusalem, Rabin had rushed outside to discover that it comprised only a couple of dozen people.
He feared the same for the 4 November rally in Tel Aviv, despite a high-profile team of organizers and the presence of Shimon Peres and leading figures from the Israeli music world. In the end, he changed his mind and went to the rally, which was attended by some 100,000 people.
The rally was larger than any anti-Oslo gathering, and Rabin uncharacteristically appeared to let down his guard a little and enjoy himself. As he was leaving the rally, he was shot and killed by a fellow Israeli Jew. What shocked Israelis the most was that his assassin, Yigal Amir, was not a settler, but a middle-class law student from the coastal plain.
‘Rabin was murdered because Israeli opponents of the peace process realised that he meant it when he said he was willing to trade land for peace,’ wrote the British Deputy Head of Mission in Tel Aviv, John White.14 Amidst all the Israeli, Arab and international tributes, White offered a sober addition to his own tribute:
He was insensitive to the fears (and aspirations) of settlers and many on the religious right during and after the negotiation of the Interim Agreement. This helped create a sense of desperation among some individuals, given expression by increasingly violent rhetoric about the peace process that seems to have influenced Rabin’s assassin.15
The 80 heads of state and government, and royalty, who attended Rabin’s funeral echoed Shalom, Haver, goodbye, friend – the memorable phrase used by President Clinton during his eulogy for Rabin. The attendance at Rabin’s funeral was a sign of how far Israel had come internationally since 1993, and a show of support for the continuation of the peace process. The Interim Agreement had become his legacy. White summed it up:
Rabin in his death had secured a depth of affection and understanding from the Israeli public which he did not enjoy in life. His murder broke the quiet of the silent (just) majority. It energised a new generation to political activism.16
For Netanyahu, the assassination of Rabin represented a disaster on multiple fronts. His position wasn’t improved when Rabin’s grieving family accused him of helping to create the conditions that led to the murder. After he had recovered from the initial shock of what happened, he did what he could to try to repair the damage.
He announced that he and the Likud would not oppose the formation of the new government, led by Rabin’s successor, Shimon Peres. ‘In Israel, governments are changed at ballot boxes, and not by guns,’ he proclaimed. It was a powerful sound bite, and he meant it.
The news did not immediately get any better for Netanyahu and the Likud, as the polls indicated that his lead had evaporated, and that Peres looked a shoo-in for victory in the next election, due to be held in 1996.