On Saturday, November 10, 1997, as soon as the Sabbath ended, I rushed to Tel Aviv. I was going to a painful, public commemoration. It had been two years since Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination on November 4, 1995. Tens of thousands would gather at the site where this crime took place, now renamed Kikar Rabin, Rabin Square.
Israel has suffered many tragedies since I arrived in 1986. But this murder of our prime minister by one of our own may have been the worst moment I witnessed, and one of the most dreadful incidents in Israeli history. When I first heard the bad news, I felt our entire Zionist enterprise was crashing.
I had a warm personal relationship with Rabin, though I never idealized him politically. I first heard “Yitzhak Rabin” as one of those magical, romantic, ever-so-Israeli-sounding names of the 1967 war heroes, like his partner Moshe Dayan. Rabin’s name came to us in the song “Nasser Michakeh LeRabin”—Nasser, Egypt’s dictator, “awaits Rabin,” who was Israel’s chief of staff. The song was sarcastic enough to capture our imaginations, and simple enough for our teachers to use in our underground Hebrew classes.
Many of our American Jewish “tourist” friends told us of meeting Rabin when he was Israel’s ambassador to the United States from 1968 to 1973. He had charmed many of them, played tennis with some of them, and worked behind the scenes to help free Soviet Jews with most of them. As ambassador, he befriended the Refuseniks’ foe, Henry Kissinger, who prioritized détente with the Soviet Union over human rights, and our hero, Senator Henry Jackson, who prioritized human rights, including our freedom of emigration, ahead of the warming diplomatic relationship détente sought.
Following the popular backlash against Golda Meir after the Arab armies surprised Israel on Yom Kippur 1973, Rabin became prime minister. He was the one to approve Israel’s heroic hostage rescue in Entebbe. Just as we magically linked Rabin’s name after 1967 with Moshe Dayan’s, after 1976 we Jews behind the Iron Curtain linked his name with Yoni Netanyahu’s—Bibi’s brother who fell fighting to free the hijacked Jews in Uganda.
When I arrived in Israel, Rabin was not one of those Johnny-come-lately politicians suddenly interested in Soviet Jewry. He was happy to continue helping, when and if he could be useful—especially if he didn’t have to socialize too much. We first met at a formal program, after I had been in Israel for about three months. Characteristically, he went tieless and sockless, wearing those open-toed, “biblical” Israeli sandals.
After that, we met periodically, at official events championing Soviet Jewry and at social events organized by mutual American friends. Unlike most politicians, he was informal, understated, a man of few words. He was happy when catching up with real buddies and unhappy when working the crowds. When he spoke, he was direct, down-to-earth, sometimes abrupt, a real Sabra from Leon Uris’s Exodus. When our Zionist Forum lobbied for Israel to recognize the Soviet Jewish veterans who had fought during World War II, Rabin, as defense minister, understood. He helped us finance a monument on Mount Herzl.
As I entered politics, I would end up working with—and sometimes criticizing—Rabin and other Zionist heroes. But, overall, no matter how frustrated I might have been at any given time with any of them, I always felt incredibly privileged to be working side by side with these larger-than-life pioneers. I never forgot that people like Rabin, Shimon Peres, Ariel Sharon, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Ehud Barak were building Israel, defending it, and leading it while I was still worrying about my professional career in the Soviet Union, cemented in doublethink, and hesitating about whether to cross the line toward dissent so I could embrace my Jewishness and my freedom.
By December 1987, Rabin’s name was mired in controversy. What the Palestinians labeled the First Intifada had begun, with many young rioters challenging our soldiers, mostly by throwing stones and lighting fires rather than by shooting guns or blowing up buses. Rabin was defense minister during this first, confusing Palestinian rebellion against Israeli rule. He declared that the IDF would respond with “force, might, and beatings.” Soldiers claimed he ordered them to break the protesters’ arms and legs.
I was not naive. I knew we were facing serious waves of violence. It was clear to me that stones could kill or maim for life. And I knew that during these ever-escalating confrontations, bones could be broken and brutal force could be used. But that was violence as the consequence of the battle, not at the leader’s command. As defense minister, Rabin was not a sergeant speaking to his soldiers in the heat of the battle. He was one of the country’s leaders, speaking in our name. His words embarrassed me.
Rabin later said he didn’t remember using that expression. He claimed that, at worst, he may have been using army slang to say, “Don’t shoot, but subdue them,” and that it was heard incorrectly. But the defense minister’s words are not heard with subtlety. I knew of soldiers disciplined by the army—some kicked out, others imprisoned—who thought they were acting as Rabin ordered. The mixed messages left them feeling double-crossed.
When he ran for prime minister in 1992, Rabin promised to help new immigrants as an essential part of his Zionist mission. “Aliyah is one arm of my Zionism,” he told us once, raising his arm for effect, “and security is the other.” By 1993, frustrated that the Labor Party had broken all its promises to assist immigrants, some of us in the Zionist Forum met him after our big broom protest. He tried sounding interested, but he seemed preoccupied. That September, I realized what had happened: Security had trumped immigration. The secret negotiations that culminated in the Oslo agreement had begun.
Rabin never seemed to buy Shimon Peres’s utopian illusion of a “new Middle East.” In an embarrassingly childlike book by that name published in November 1993, months after negotiating the Oslo Accords, Peres predicted that neighboring dictators would suddenly accept Israel’s right to exist so they could concentrate on delivering peace and prosperity to their people.
Rabin bought into a different delusion: that Arafat could be “our dictator,” only targeting the right enemies, not us. Both visions struck me as simplistic and dangerous.
Although well aware of my critique, Rabin nevertheless invited me to join the delegation to Oslo city hall, where he received the Nobel Peace Prize in December 1994 along with Shimon Peres and Yasir Arafat. I declined politely. Much as I shared the desire for peace, I couldn’t toast a process I feared would bring disaster. And I couldn’t backslide to my former life of doublethink by joining the civilized world in applauding Arafat, the master terrorist still wearing combat fatigues.
Nevertheless, despite disliking Oslo, I despised the anti-Oslo campaign’s harsh rhetoric. The now-infamous posters—with Rabin wrapped in a kaffiyeh, or Rabin’s face above an SS uniform—were particularly despicable. In those early days of the Internet, we weren’t used to that kind of photoshopping. That made the offensive images even more memorable and unacceptable.
I knew the accusations that Benjamin Netanyahu was behind such imagery were groundless. But neither Bibi nor his Likud Party did enough to denounce such viciousness, or to distance themselves and their political campaign from it. I was discovering that many Israeli politicians, when they’ve crossed red lines, apologize for overstepping the day after Election Day, having benefitted from the votes their demagoguery attracted.
November 4, 1995, made whatever criticisms I had of Rabin absolutely irrelevant. I confess, I wasn’t paying that much attention to the increasingly ugly debate about Oslo. We in the immigrant community were absorbed in building our own political party, which became Yisrael B’Aliyah. Anticipating the elections everyone knew were coming—and would occur in May 1996—we were swept up in the excitement of the new democratic experience of political campaigning. On any given night, we might be brainstorming about slogans, planning strategy, or participating in a seminar about political organizing.
During one of those evening seminars, the telephone rang. The caller shouted, “Turn on the television!” That was how I heard that a fellow Israeli had shot our prime minister. It was a catastrophe. I feared we were sliding into the abyss. Suddenly, our electoral efforts seemed unimportant, all our policy divisions seemed small. I couldn’t shake this feeling that everything we had built was threatened.
It took two thousand years to move from dreaming and praying to building the state. Jews then joined a deep debate, arguing how to make the new Jewish democracy feel like a safe home for all. The debate was difficult and passionate, yet we had no choice but to fight it out. Then, one person came along and decided he was God. Trashing all the rules, he shut down the debate by murdering our leader.
I wasn’t interested in trying to understand the killer’s motives. He deserved an old-fashioned herem, total excommunication, along with life in prison with no hope of parole. Still, I figured, we are Jews, the world experts at turning national tragedies into nation-building opportunities. I expected that we would turn this crime into a renewed sense of unity, resilient enough to absorb the daily political debates with a little less shouting and a little more listening to one another. Unfortunately, partisan furies proved much stronger than my metaphysical hopes.
At Rabin’s funeral, the sloganeering didn’t express my nonpartisan fear that democracy was endangered; instead, it emphasized the Left’s fear that Oslo was endangered. Listening to the eulogies by President Bill Clinton and Shimon Peres unnerved me. “Now, it falls to all of us who love peace and all of us who loved him to carry on the struggle to which he gave life and for which he gave his life,” Clinton said, calling Rabin “a martyr for peace.”
The funeral turned into an event consecrating the cause of Oslo. Rabin’s legacy became a headstrong rush into “peace now,” without recognition of the growing doubts he had and the pauses he advised. In their grief, good, sincere people politicized the tragedy. Somehow, the only way to mourn Yitzhak Rabin was to support the Oslo peace process blindly.
Likud’s unexpected victory in 1996 further fouled the atmosphere. The morning everyone realized that Shimon Peres had lost, the finger-pointing escalated. Peres’s disappointed supporters blamed Netanyahu and Likud for the rhetoric that killed Rabin. “Gam ratzachta, v’gam ganavta,” some Peres supporters cried, echoing Elijah the Prophet’s charge against Ahab and Jezebel about murdering, then seizing land: “First you murdered, then you stole” the election.
Although only a few made this awful accusation publicly, many from the pro-Oslo camp believed it privately. Nearly everyone on the Israeli Left blamed anyone on the Israeli Right for Rabin’s death—and anything else that went wrong with the Oslo peace process. This orthodoxy ignored Rabin’s worries, in the last weeks of his life, about Hamas’s bombs and Arafat’s lies threatening the fragile peace. All of Rabin’s growing doubts were buried with him. Peres’s gullible version of peace became the only virtuous game in town.
Politicizing the death in this way was a gift to the extremists on the Right, a free pass to those who wanted to avoid soul-searching. It was easier to deny the ridiculous accusation that they had killed Rabin than to answer the hard questions: Did we cross the line? Did we dehumanize our opponents and our leaders? Did we contribute to the lynch-mob atmosphere? I believe that a fuller moral accounting at the time might have avoided some of the problems now with extreme rightists whose fury often turns them anti-Zionist.
At the ceremony commemorating the first anniversary of Rabin’s murder, the new prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was the main speaker, naturally. Many Rabin and Peres people cringed, just as naturally. As the official ceremony ended at Rabin’s grave site on Mount Herzl, I lingered, looking at Shevah Weiss. A professor who became a politician, Shevah preferred talking with me about Russian history and other intellectual interests to fighting over politics. He had served as Speaker of the Knesset under Rabin. I respected him as one of the Labor camp’s most rational and positive thinkers.
As people filed passed Rabin’s grave, Shevah stayed longer than most. He stood there, stricken, as his eyes stared blankly. After the ceremony, he asked me, in agony, “Natan, do you also feel like these speeches, this whole ceremony, is an unbelievable farce? It cannot be real. Who thought they could kill our dream?” I felt nauseous. His “they” scared me. This normally cool, analytical intellectual sounded like he believed a coup d’état had occurred.
My grounded, thoughtful friend saw our government, and the coalition I had joined, as forces of evil celebrating their victory over the forces of good. We, from Bibi on down, were cast in this us-versus-them framework as the villains in an old-new Jewish Shakespearean tragedy: the Brutuses of Israel.
The vile killer’s crime was monstrous. No doubt the Right’s hysteria demonizing “the Oslo criminals” helped inflame the assassin. But rather than trying to de-escalate and humanize their opponents, many good people were reescalating and dehumanizing, treating their political opponents as the enemy and any political debate about the peace process as a betrayal. Showing how this spiral of mutual demonization can always spin out of control, right-wingers started peddling conspiracy theories blaming Rabin’s assassination on the Security Service that protected him.
I know many people feel the assassin killed the hope for peace along with Rabin. I believe they are wrong. The killing of Rabin was an evil act of historic proportions intended to derail Oslo. I believe the assassin’s plans backfired. Retzach Rabin, Rabin’s murder, artificially extended Oslo’s shelf life.
The Oslo peace process showed its true nature as the Oslo war process long before Rabin’s murder. Contrary to most people’s memories, Hamas’s suicide bombings preceded this awful crime. But the assassination made Oslo holy, untouchable. A political debate became a theological one. It was as if we were desecrating Rabin’s name and validating his murder whenever we demanded progress from the Palestinians, protected ourselves from terrorism, or questioned Oslo’s flawed assumptions.
The polarized debate left me feeling more torn politically than ever. I shared the widespread, deep despair about Rabin’s murder. But I also shared the Right’s skepticism about the Palestinian regime and the failing peace process, which the Left renamed “Rabin’s legacy.”
During the first year of mourning Rabin, and especially after I joined the government, I kept wondering how to wrench Rabin’s murder out of its new partisan orbit. On the first Rosh Hashanah after Rabin’s assassination, I was struck once again by how religious Jews plunge from the joy of the New Year’s celebration to a fast the day after. Called Tzom Gedaliah, Gedaliah’s Fast, this minor dawn-to-dusk fast mourns a moment 2,500 years ago when some Jews killed a Jewish leader, a now-forgotten governor of Judah, after the Babylonians destroyed the First Temple. The Talmud says the fast teaches “that the death of the righteous is likened to the burning of the House of our God.”
I thought about our rabbis’ wisdom. Few remember just why Gedaliah was killed. But the fact that Jews killed their leader justified a cautionary, penitential fast. The cleansing would teach people that essential, eternal lesson.
In the Gulag, we political prisoners also used fasts to make moral statements and remind ourselves of what was important to us. Every December 10, the Soviet Union ignored International Human Rights Day. By fasting that day in prison, we made it meaningful and memorable. I decided to fast on the first anniversary of Rabin’s murder, without waiting for our rabbis. I did not make a big deal about it.
By the second anniversary in 1997, the polarization had intensified so much that some people did not want to attend the official commemorations, because our government and our prime minister would lead the events. Rabin’s relatives and Labor Party friends controlled the biggest memorial, in the heart of Tel Aviv. No Israeli government representative was invited to speak at that independent event.
When a colleague at the Ministry of Industry and Trade, who was also a Labor Party activist, discovered that I fasted on the anniversary day, he asked, “Then why don’t you come to our rally?”
“It’s unfortunate,” I replied, “but no one from the government was invited to participate.”
A half hour before Sabbath began, I received a phone call saying that Leah Rabin was inviting me to attend the rally as “a friend of the family.”
So, there I was, driving to Tel Aviv, wondering what to say. Should I speak in the name of the government? I had no mandate. Should I speak as “a friend of the family” and echo the politicization of Oslo? Of course not. Should I criticize the pro-peace-process approach? Yes, but gingerly, sensitively.
Then it occurred to me to go back to the Entebbe rescue of 1976, which linked the two powerful names of Rabin and Netanyahu in history and heroism. I would speak about how our tragedies, not just our victories, should unite us. The one criticism I would offer would be to say that many people mourning today, from all across the political spectrum and all over the country, did not feel welcome at this rally.
None of these subtleties mattered. The moment it was announced that the minister of industry and trade from the Netanyahu government would be speaking, the booing started. As I approached the podium, facing one of the largest crowds in Israeli history—over two hundred thousand—boos, whistles, and catcalls overwhelmed me.
Some later insisted that a minority of attendees shouted. Looking into the darkness, I could only see a first row of faces and hear tremendous noise. I could barely hear my own voice. It felt like two hundred thousand people wanted to drown me out and shout me down.
One main speaker, Ehud Barak, rushed to help. I waved him off. I didn’t want to look like I needed rescuing or that I feared my own people, my fellow Israelis. I made my speech.
I spoke very slowly, as deliberately as I had in my closing speech to the court in Moscow in 1978. Back then, I wanted to help my brother Leonid memorize every word, hoping the world would hear me. This time, I wanted to speak over the din, hoping anyone might hear my words.
I have stood in front of hundreds of thousands at solidarity demonstrations and felt empowered. I have stood in front of small, loud, hostile crowds, who shouted slogans in a KGB-organized expression of the people’s anger, and also felt empowered. Now, standing in front of this huge Israeli crowd, I felt drained. I worried: Had Rabin’s murderer killed our dialogue? Would we ever be able to mourn together, or even talk together, again?
As soon as I finished, Barak approached the podium. Trying to be my advocate, he emphasized my time in the tsinok, the punishment cell, which always fascinated him. But his reaction suggested the attacks were personally against me, when they weren’t.
“Aren’t you sorry you came?” journalists asked me as soon as I walked down from the stage.
“On the contrary,” I replied. “It reminds us how much work has to be done.”
People kept asking if I had hard feelings. I had sad feelings. A tragedy had happened to our people and we weren’t learning from it.
The next day, Rabin’s sister, Rachel Rabin Yaakov, called me. Rabin’s son, Yuval Rabin, visited me with his youth movement Dor Shalom, or Peace Generation, to discuss how to renew our democratic dialogue.
For his part, my prime minister needled me. That Sunday morning, I attended the weekly cabinet meeting. Bibi sent me a note: “Natan, are you flirting with the opposition?” I knew what he was doing. He was often suspicious, testing loyalties even of old friends. His suspicions would grow with the years. Back then, he expressed them with a lighter touch.
I wrote back curtly emphasizing one word: “Nonsense.”
I still mark the anniversary of Rabin’s death by participating in bridge-building discussions with activists and students. The educational efforts often echo our approach to Tisha B’Av, the national-religious day of mourning, commemorating the Holy Temples’ destruction in 586 BCE and in 70 CE. On Tisha B’Av, many Jews fast too.
My fear is that, if Rabin’s murder remains tied up in Oslo peace process politics, it will be forgotten when the peace question becomes irrelevant in twenty, thirty, or fifty years. In 1977, everyone seemed to know what the Helsinki Accords were. But the Soviet Union fell. Today, if you mention Helsinki, most people give you a blank stare or rush to Google it.
Instead of building the commemoration of this tragedy of biblical proportions around current political events, we should ritualize the memory, as the rabbis did with Gedaliah’s murder. Let’s focus on the eternal moral lesson about continuing to raise our voices, flap our arms, and clench our bodies when debating, without turning violent or even giving up on one another.
Meanwhile, I fast every year, hoping one day it will become a national fast day, uniting secular and religious Jews, Left and Right, “to establish that the death of the righteous is likened to the burning of the House of our God.”
Any Israeli prime minister elected in 1996 would have had to rebalance Oslo, including Yitzhak Rabin, had he lived. By then, most Israelis recognized the dangers resulting from this process. Palestinian terrorists would murder more Israelis in the five years after Oslo than in the five years before it. The Dizengoff Street bus bombing in Tel Aviv, the Kfar Darom bus attack, and the Jerusalem Bus 26 bombing all preceded Rabin’s assassination. Two suicide bombings on Jerusalem Bus 18, along with another bombing at Dizengoff Center and several other attacks, preceded Netanyahu’s election. If you ignored such facts, it was easier to blame Israel, especially from afar.
But Netanyahu was elected to clean up the mess. After winning the election by a margin of barely thirty thousand votes out of three million cast, Netanyahu faced the democratic dethroner’s dilemma. The victorious opposition takes power with a broom to sweep out some old policies. But most policies are like mold, not dust: you can’t just wipe ’em away.
It was an impossible juggling act. Our new government had to fulfill Israel’s legal obligations to the Oslo peace process, to the Palestinians, and to the international community. Yet none of us around the cabinet table believed in Oslo, albeit for various reasons. We agreed, however, on one goal: we wanted to neutralize the new and worsening dangers.
Back in 1996, as he formed his government, Netanyahu believed that the only way out of this Oslo trap was to slow the process down. By examining each obligation the previous government had undertaken—one by one, one step at a time—we could see if the Palestinians were reciprocating. By necessity, the government was forced to be tactical, not strategic.
Although we all looked united against Oslo, behind the scenes it was obvious the members of the coalition were split. I was one of those who regretted Israel’s control over millions of Palestinians and wanted it to end as quickly and as safely as possible. Increasingly, even many traditional security hawks accepted the inevitability of a Palestinian state at the end of the process, as long as it remained unthreatening and demilitarized.
Others on the Right believed that, with more than twenty Arab states already existing, there was no reason to create another threatening Arab state, especially on Israel’s historical and biblical lands. But taken to its logical extreme, this stance would require millions of Palestinians to live permanently under Israeli control—or leave their homes.
Of course, members of both factions considered my talk of democracy naive. But the security hawks and I at least shared a common language and a common endgame. For me, the never-Palestinian-staters crossed a line. If Israel controlled millions of people permanently, without giving them full democratic rights, we would indeed lose our right to call Israel democratic.
This tension would burst into the public after the Wye River negotiations of 1998, eventually dooming Bibi’s first government. Today, while the never-state maximalists are increasingly marginalized, this debate erupts anew whenever we come close to any kind of negotiations.
Frustrated by Rabin’s murder and Peres’s narrow loss, the international media blasted Netanyahu whenever he resisted Western pressure. With Oslo deemed sacred, we were under even more scrutiny. Reporters branded any skeptics of this failing process as anti-peace. It was easier for critics to blame Netanyahu’s intransigence than to imagine Rabin following a similar path. Increasingly, critics viewed our strategy gap as a values gap. We had no faith in Oslo, so they lost faith in us.
In their pursuit of peace, many sincere people fell for the Palestinian manipulations, making Oslo’s “land for peace” formula a one-way street. Israel relinquished territory. Arafat didn’t deliver on his promises, yet their pressure on the Israeli government grew. Negotiating with Arafat was like a shopkeeper paying protection: the more you pay, the more the thugs demand—or else!
“What do you want from him?” Oslo’s apologists said. “You can’t expect more. Yasir Arafat risked his life by signing onto Oslo. Israel is the powerful one. Israel must end the occupation and end the conflict.” Year by year, that sacred commemoration of Rabin’s murder became a day of recriminations in Israel and the Diaspora.
Mutual exasperation grew, even as American Jewry’s pro-Israel consensus held and American support for Israel increased. Along with their Israeli counterparts, many American Jewish liberals had a hard time believing that, finally, there was a chance for peace, yet Israel wasn’t pursuing it enthusiastically and proactively. Although a minority, these internal critics became louder, bolder, and more likely to be covered by the media. Many Israelis resented that, after they had taken such risks for peace, some Jews abroad couldn’t give Israel credit for trying.
We spent many cabinet hours brainstorming about how to redirect the growing pressure on Israel toward the Palestinians. Remembering how the Moscow Helsinki Group monitored Soviet human rights policies in the 1970s, I proposed launching a trilateral committee of Americans, Israelis, and Palestinians to monitor incitement on all sides. The committee met regularly until Ehud Barak downgraded it. Shortly thereafter, the Palestinian suicide bombing campaign made the whole initiative look ridiculous.
But the process backfired long before that. Rather than exposing Palestinian rejectionism, the monitoring process exposed the free world’s unwillingness to distinguish between democracy and dictatorship. Whenever we detailed official Palestinian incitement at the highest level or in educational curricula against Israel, the Palestinians quoted anti-Palestinian rhetoric from the most marginal edges of Israel’s right wing. “You see?” Arafat’s people said. “Both sides have their extremists.” Confusing democratic debate with dictatorial indoctrination, guilt-ridden Westerners nodded meekly.
Such moral equivalence was farcical. Comparing the official propaganda a dictator must use to incite hatred with the fringe voices a democracy must tolerate to be free is like a jury acquitting a known arsonist because random sparks can also start fires. To maintain the illusion, you have to compare word for word, without noting that some words come from the leaders at the center of the regime and others come from unpopular, marginal extremists.
I opposed making more concessions without a committed peace partner. I insisted on tying withdrawals to Palestinian progress. Those stands put me to Bibi’s right in some debates. I even voted against one phase of territorial withdrawal.
“How can we decide what we’re giving away and what we’re keeping without an endgame?” I asked. “In chess, you build your strategy by understanding where you want to end up from the beginning and determining what moves will get you there.”
When I explained my approach in cabinet, Raful Eitan, the former chief of staff, joked, “It’s so complicated. Let’s play checkers instead.”
“That’s precisely our problem,” I said. “Arafat is playing chess, willing to sacrifice some pawns—make some concessions—while still seeking Israel’s destruction. We’re just playing checkers, thinking short term and tactically, hoping that somehow it will end well.”
Looking abroad, I worried that Israel and our friendly critics were watching two competing movies. Israelis felt caught in a recurring horror show of violence perpetrated by Palestinian bad guys. Israel’s critics saw a preventable tragedy, provoked by an Israeli extremist assassinating the saintly Yitzhak Rabin and worsened by Israelis electing uncompromising right-wing governments dominated by the real villains, the settlers. Long before the harsh debates about Barack Obama, then Donald Trump, divided the Jewish community, the lack of a healthy dialogue between the Diaspora and Israel fueled these growing tensions.
Netanyahu ended up in an excruciating position. The Right kept pressing him to cancel the Oslo Accords—blindly, as if Israel’s leaders did not feel bound by their predecessors’ international agreements. The Left kept pressing him to keep advancing Oslo—blindly, as if Palestinian leaders felt bound by the agreement. Bibi’s first tenure as prime minister ended after three years amid this political standoff. When Israel’s most decorated general, Ehud Barak, defeated Netanyahu in 1999, pundits declared Bibi’s career over; he vowed to return.
When I joined Ehud Barak’s government, I found myself in a unique laboratory, a broad right-to-left cabinet. Barak himself was an interesting, wide-ranging cultural mix. Israel’s number-one soldier—as his best-selling biography called him—he had also studied physics, mathematics, and economics at Hebrew University and Stanford. This skilled and courageous war hero, who had led many spectacular counterterrorist operations, was also a refined piano player and sharp logician who loved disassembling and reassembling clocks effortlessly.
Barak was famous for loving puzzles, and seeing reality as a series of codes to decipher or puzzles to put together. All that time I spent in the punishment cells playing chess in my head caught his imagination. I could see that his disciplined mind kept trying to figure out, “What did you do?”—meaning what would he do.
Barak assembled a cabinet that was stunningly diverse. The National Religious Party was to the right of Likud. The ultra-Orthodox Ashkenazim and Mizrahim from United Torah Judaism and Shas were to the right religiously of the NRP’s Religious Zionists. And Meretz was to the left of Barak’s own ruling Labor Party.
In this unique bridge-building laboratory, I enjoyed finding common ground with allies from across the spectrum. The Interior Ministry was a huge ministry that was involved in almost everything in Israel to do with land, municipalities, and the personal status of citizens and noncitizens. It was therefore a bonus of my job in Barak’s government to work closely with almost every minister.
When I was easing the process for entering Israel and getting citizenship for those not covered under the Law of Return, when I was redrawing municipal boundaries to help Arab villages become more functional, or when I removed the restrictions preventing many Arabs who had worked overseas for many years from returning to their Jerusalem homes, the left-wing members of the government applauded. And when the Education Minister Yossi Sarid of Meretz said he wanted to build new schools for Bedouins in “unrecognized villages,” within twenty-four hours my team and his were already translating this political proposal into reality. Yossi was also the rare cabinet minister who didn’t roll his eyes and actually perked up whenever I linked the pursuit of peace with democracy and human rights.
At the same time, the right-wing members of the government applauded when I helped establish and improve communities throughout the Land of Israel. In 1999, I was surprised to discover that there had been no new civilian settlements established in the Negev desert in fifteen years. We worked hard to plan, develop, and launch new communities there in the south and in the north too. My allies on the Right and I also knew we had to slow Barak down in his rush to complete deals with the Palestinians and the Syrians at almost any price.
The fact that all these different camps were at one table created a unique opportunity for dialogue. At the same time, it helped define the boundaries of the Zionist democratic tent. It was obvious that, for at least some of my partners on the Left, the Jewish state was only a tool improvised to escape persecution. They viewed Israel’s Jewish character as a passing phase on the way to a normal state for all its citizens. To them, even the Law of Return, the central symbol binding Israel to every Jew throughout the world, was a temporary measure that would eventually fade into irrelevance.
For some of my partners on the Right, Israel’s democratic character was the optional tool, improvised for establishing the state, that should only remain if convenient. After all, they reasoned, there are many democracies in the world, but there’s only one Jewish state.
While most of us ministers, like most Israelis, remained squarely within the Jewish-democratic tent, we could see how, for some, “Jewish” was a temporary adjective, not a defining noun, and for others “democratic” was the adjective. Ultimately, then, my Barak cabinet experiences also highlighted some of the limits to our dialogue.
Still, this laboratory could have kept experimenting, testing to see which issues enabled these different Zionist voices to build some kind of consensus. But this government was short-lived, doomed by Barak’s impatience in trying to disassemble and reassemble the Middle East puzzle in record time.
With President Bill Clinton set to leave office in January 2001, Barak kept his eye on the political calendar. He set the Democratic convention in the summer of 2000 as his deadline for peacemaking, before Clinton became a lame duck. Trying to fix the Middle East in a technical way—in a too-brainy, not-soulful way, just like he fixed his clocks—Barak was anxious to reach quick, sweeping peace deals with Hafez al-Assad and Yasir Arafat.
Understanding Barak’s aspirations, during the coalition negotiations I insisted that a special letter be attached to the coalition agreement. The letter specified Yisrael B’Aliyah’s position that Israeli concessions to Syria required openness, transparency, and democracy in the country. I believe it is the only formal document in Israeli governmental history making any kind of territorial withdrawals or other diplomatic progress contingent on our opponent achieving substantive human rights progress.
Everybody, from left to right, mocked my party’s naivete. But Barak knew that if a peace treaty came to a vote, he would have a problem with me and my party. I watched him trying to figure out how to get us on board.
Early in my tenure as Barak’s interior minister, Shimon Peres’s confidante S. Daniel Abraham approached me. Abraham—a self-made and generous billionaire who founded SlimFast—was an Oslo enthusiast. I had heard that he had often lent his private plane to ferry Peres’s team secretly to Norway for the negotiations that produced the accords.
“I want you to meet Syria’s future leader, who will help modernize the Arab world,” Abraham said. “He thinks exactly like you. He wants to bring democracy to the Arab world, quickly. He believes in human rights. He’s modern, sophisticated. He studied in London. He surfs on the Internet.” Abraham wanted to fly me to Paris secretly to meet this wunderkind and glimpse the new Middle East he, Peres, and now Ehud Barak were midwifing.
“How do you know this guy is Syria’s next leader?” I asked mischievously.
“Well, he’s going to inherit it from his father,” Abraham replied.
I winced. So much for democracy. After his father died, Bashar al-Assad “won” the election in July 2000 with 99.7 percent of the vote. Today, he is known as the butcher of Syria, who mass murdered and even gassed his own people.
I chose to skip Paris.
Barak seemed to envy the success of Peres, who had secretly negotiated the original Oslo deal in Europe when he was foreign minister, presenting it fully cooked to his prime minister and fellow Labor Party member, Yitzhak Rabin, and to the American president, Bill Clinton. In the spring of 2000, a reliable source in Washington warned me that Barak was secretly negotiating a new deal in Europe. Despite serving as interior minister and sitting in the security cabinet, I hadn’t heard about the talks or the deal.
I felt I had to do something. I challenged the prime minister during a cabinet meeting. Barak dismissed the rumors as wild. I agreed that many of the ideas I was hearing about seemed far-fetched. But multiple sources had fed me details about troubling proposals that had already been tabled. They entailed dividing Jerusalem, giving away most of the Old City including the Temple Mount, and withdrawing from almost all the 1967 territories.
Under Barak’s proposals, the Jewish Quarter and the Western Wall would be surrounded. If Palestinians controlled the Temple Mount, the Kotel would be a lonely prisoner, encircled from the left, the right, and above, as the Al-Aqsa compound looms over the Western Wall. Jewish worshippers would be vulnerable to rocks raining down on them from on high. One scheme would even bus Jews to visit our holiest site under United Nations or an international commission’s auspices.
In cabinet, I told Barak that although I served nine years in prison for being an American spy, the charges were false, so it never bothered me that I hadn’t mastered what agents call tradecraft. “I never thought that I would one day need those skills as a minister in my own government to build an international network to find out what my own prime minister is proposing to the Palestinians.”
After rechecking the details of the proposals with my sources, I wrote the prime minister a letter and copied other key ministers, detailing the concessions to Arafat that Barak had already made.
Cornered, Barak suddenly went public. He said he was going to Camp David at the Americans’ invitation to complete an agreement with the Palestinians. Trying to placate me, he proposed I join him in the United States. “Look, Natan, we in the country are badly split,” he said. “But if it all works out, I will bring peace. Even if you and your friends will not like it, it will be a real, final peace that the Israeli people want. And if Arafat refuses, at least our people will be united and fully supported by the world.”
“There’s no way you will bring peace by demonstrating how desperate you are and offering up our most precious assets, especially Jerusalem,” I warned. “Readiness to give everything to a dictator, when he needs to go to war against us for his own survival, is a major sign of weakness. You will only bring the war closer.”
Beyond the pressing questions of military strategy and diplomacy, this was about identity. Jerusalem isn’t just a piece of real estate. It has been our capital for three thousand years and is so central to our story that the very movement to return to Israel, Zionism, is named after Mount Zion, in Jerusalem.
In 1967, when the Israeli colonel Mordechai Gur announced that his troops had reunified Jerusalem, he said, “The Temple Mount is in our hands” and repeated it a second time in his excitement. This tikkun (repair) of Jewish history was so powerful that it roused us in Russia. We didn’t know what the Temple Mount was. We barely knew what Jerusalem was. But, suddenly, the newest headline in our ancient story returned us, the lost Jews of Russia, back to the Jewish nation.
Years later, I learned that Jerusalem’s liberation wasn’t just a profound event for the beleaguered Soviet Jews. It roused American Jews, too, from the Jewishly ambivalent to the Jewishly engaged. The excitement they felt in winning back Jerusalem surprised many of the most Americanized Jews. Israel’s triumph deepened “a very personal existential sense of the particularity of what it is to be a Jew, the specificity of being a Jew as a member of an ethnic community,” the Reform theologian Eugene Borowitz explained in 1977. When “Old Jerusalem was captured and was somehow, to use that marvelous word, ‘ours,’” he wrote, “it hit us with an impact which we couldn’t imagine, and suddenly we realized the depths of roots we had in a very specific place.”
“There has been a mysterious power in Jewish history which again and again came to crush occasional indifference to Zion and Jerusalem,” Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, the mystic and teacher who marched with Martin Luther King Jr., wrote in Israel: An Echo of Eternity, chronicling his trip to Jerusalem weeks after its reunification. “Whenever we tend to be forgetful, history sends us a reminder.… In those great days we discovered a spiritual underground in the hearts of the Jews of America.”
The war shocked Jews: They had thought they were universalists, but suddenly felt proudly particularistic. They had thought they were individualists, but suddenly felt they were one—united, interconnected, not alone. Heschel recalled, “We sensed the link between the Jews of this generation and the people of the time of the prophets.”
Jerusalem, the Temple Mount, and the Western Wall all play starring roles in our story. They have been the building blocks of our identity for the last three thousand years, connecting Jews across time and space, fusing past, present, and future. Jews could live for thousands of years, united in sorrow by the story of being forcibly exiled, and united in the hope of return. Our story sits at the core of our identity. I was not willing to throw it away.
The fact that Ehud Barak was making such an indiscriminate move unilaterally and secretly bewildered me. I chided him for trying to bypass the security cabinet, the government, the Knesset, and the Jewish people. “This is a dangerous process you are risking,” I warned, “and I believe a vast majority of the Jewish people, sitting in Zion and abroad, will not be able to accept this.”
While I was confident in my ideological stance on Jerusalem, I again worried about my responsibility to my party. We had united over quality-of-life immigrant issues, sidelining any disagreements we might have over philosophy or the peace process. Finally, we were running the all-important Interior Ministry, as another founding member of Yisrael B’Aliyah, Marina Solodkin, filled the critical role of deputy minister of immigration and absorption. Would my colleagues be willing to risk our long-sought practical power for yet another fight over the peace process?
We discussed it and all agreed, from right to left: resignation was the only option. Marina, our resident lefty and a passionate advocate for immigrants, read my correspondence with Prime Minister Barak. She said, “I sign off on every word.”
We were the only coalition partners to resign before the Camp David negotiations began that July 2000. At the time, I wondered why we, the party of new immigrants, bolted first, before the more established ideological parties, such as the National Religious Party, Shas, and David Levy’s Gesher Party. I think it is because we immigrants were the most recent newcomers to the Jewish story. For us, the connection linking our identity with the liberation of Jerusalem and the Western Wall was fresh. We hadn’t been around long enough to take it for granted. Maybe we were also the most protective of Jerusalem’s centrality to the Jewish story. After all, our renewed identity, our old-new connection to our people’s ancient capital, had propelled each of us forward in the journey home.
Before Barak jetted off to Washington on his way to Camp David, I informed him that Marina and I were resigning from the cabinet and our party was leaving his coalition. When the summit deadlocked, Barak started working the phones, trying to save his coalition. He called me and said, “I am sitting here alone and thinking about you alone in your punishment cell in the Gulag. I think of all those decisions about life and death you had to make yourself. And I feel a great sense of responsibility to make these decisions about war and peace, myself.”
“I just heard on the radio that Arafat said that before he makes any concessions on Jerusalem, he is going to consult the leaders of the Muslim and Arab world,” I replied. “Because, he said, ‘Jerusalem belongs to all of us.’ Why don’t you go to New York and convene a conversation among Jews there? Ask them what they think about giving up the heart of Jerusalem, which is most central to our identity.”
Barak had no interest in listening to anyone. He didn’t consult the Jews of New York. He didn’t consult his own government. He didn’t consult anyone else. He tried negotiating single-handedly.
Arafat didn’t even respond with a counteroffer. Believing Barak was weak and the Jews divided, Arafat instead responded with that ugly bout of terrorism that Palestinians called the Second Intifada and that killed one thousand Israelis. When I resigned, I warned Barak that, just as the 1967 victory had strengthened the Jewish people and deepened the Jewish bond with Israel, his proposed changes would weaken the Jewish people and diminish their ability to identify with Israel.
I moved into a protest tent in front of the prime minister’s residence in Jerusalem. I demanded a national unity government. All kinds of people visited the tent, some to support me, others to try swaying me. An impressive delegation of generals lobbying for peace showed up. Led by Shlomo “Cheech” Lahat, the former Tel Aviv mayor and major general, the generals told me, “You and your friends won a heroic battle back in the Soviet Union, but we won the battles here. We know our enemies very well. And we know that Barak will bring peace. You must support him.”
“I know how dictatorships work,” I replied. “Arafat needs war for his own survival. All we are showing him is our extreme weakness at this moment. There is no way Barak will bring peace with his proposals.”
The generals came well equipped, with Israeli TV camera crews filming their lobbying efforts all over Jerusalem, the City of Peace. After their segment aired, Israel’s most beloved news anchor, “Mr. Television,” Haim Yavin, visited me to follow up. He arrived late on a Friday afternoon. All my fellow protesters had gone home to prepare for Sabbath. I was about to leave.
“What happened to you?” Yavin asked sympathetically, directing the cameraman to sweep the empty tent. “I remember the day you arrived in Israel, the whole country was with you. And now, you sit here alone in the empty tent. The whole country is with Barak because everyone wants peace. Don’t you feel abandoned?”
A few days later, Barak returned from Camp David empty-handed. Most of the other coalition partners soon resigned. Within two months, Arafat and the Palestinians had launched their war of terrorism against Israeli civilians. Within eight months, Barak was out of office, repudiated by the Israeli public for his failure.
The morning after Ariel Sharon defeated Barak, winning 62 percent of the vote to Barak’s 38 percent, Haim Yavin interviewed me once again. This time, I participated in a panel discussion in his TV studio about the upcoming coalition battles. Not wanting to embarrass him, I waited until I was off camera to say, “A few short months ago you told me I was alone. You said Barak will bring peace. Today, Barak’s alone. Practically the whole country abandoned him. And we are stuck in a war. Maybe there’s something I know about Arafat that you didn’t take into account then?”
“But Natan,” Haim said, “if only you had stayed with Barak, it could have been different.” I imagined that famous picture from Camp David, where Barak was pushing Arafat into the negotiating room. If only I, with my bookworm’s muscles, had been able to join Barak, Israel’s most decorated war hero, in pushing Arafat to sign the agreement, then we would have peace.
I had so many “if only, then” conversations like this. It was much easier to decide that one ingredient or condition in the experiment was off than to question the underlying hypothesis, even amid such dramatic failure.
Eventually, President Bill Clinton saw through the Arafat charade, having hosted him thirteen times in the White House, more than any other foreign visitor. But Clinton continued to personalize the problem. When violence erupted, Clinton flipped, blaming Arafat for the breakdown of the Oslo peace process and the Palestinian turn toward terrorism. In their last Oval Office meeting in January 2001, when the oleaginous Arafat called Clinton a “great man,” the president yelled, “I’m a colossal failure, and you made me one.” Clinton later told the world that when Arafat spurned Barak’s Camp David offer in July 2000, he had rejected “the best peace deal he was ever going to get.”
By 2010, with Netanyahu back in power, Barack Obama in the White House pressing Israel, and the former first lady Hillary Clinton as secretary of state vainly trying to advance the peace process again, Bill Clinton reinterpreted the past. “An increasing number of the young people in the IDF are the children of Russians and settlers, the hardest-core people against a division of the land. This presents a staggering problem,” he told reporters. “It’s a different Israel. Sixteen percent of Israelis speak Russian.”
As proof of his thesis, Bill Clinton mentioned a conversation he and I had had with Ehud Barak during the Camp David peace negotiations in July 2000. Clinton described me as the only Israeli cabinet minister who rejected the sweeping peace proposal. “I said,” he recalled, “Natan, what is the deal” about not supporting the peace deal. Then Clinton remembered me saying, “I can’t vote for this, I’m Russian.… I come from one of the biggest countries in the world to one of the smallest. You want me to cut it in half. No, thank you.”
Bill Clinton cleverly replied, “Don’t give me this. You came here from a jail cell. It’s a lot bigger than your jail cell.” He added that, compared to most Russians, I “was nice about it, a lot of them aren’t.”
I like the line. I appreciate the backhanded compliment. It’s a good story with good humor that undoubtedly entertains the ex-president’s many well-paying audiences. It also blames Israel, ever so elegantly, for the ongoing stalemate.
Unfortunately, the conversation never happened. I was never at Camp David. I was sitting in that protest tent, not in Clinton’s presidential retreat. I never had the opportunity to discuss the plan with President Clinton.
When I first heard his accusation, I was angry. I feared the finger being pointed in Israel’s direction, and I resented the ethnic stereotyping of me and my fellow Russians as thuggish. Having reread Clinton’s entire interview, though, I think I understand what happened. He probably remembered our long conversation at the Wye plantation in 1998. He was essentially correct in that I opposed the Camp David negotiations two years later and was the one minister who resigned before Camp David, although others followed afterward. Clinton probably conflated my presence at Wye in 1998 with a discussion asking Barak where I was at Camp David in 2000. Following American logic, I’m a human rights activist, which means I’m a liberal, which means I should be pro peace, which means advocating maximal concessions to anyone. The truth is, in 2000 as in 1998 and from Oslo’s start, I knew that Arafat would never bring freedom to his people, an essential element of a sustainable peace.
The multiple shocks—Barak’s sweeping concessions at Camp David being met by no counteroffer, followed by Arafat’s return to terror—stripped Barak’s government of its credibility with most Israelis. The result was an electoral anomaly in 2001, Israel’s only special election pitting two prime ministerial candidates against one another without broader Knesset elections. When Ariel Sharon beat Barak, Sharon invited me back into the cabinet as deputy prime minister and minister of housing and construction.
It’s hard to remember now, but the 1990s were a decade of hope and miracles. The Berlin Wall fell peacefully. The Soviet Union collapsed peacefully. The Iron Curtain was raised peacefully. Germany reunited, South Africa’s apartheid regime vanished, and even Northern Ireland seemed on its way to peace. As one problem after another was solved peacefully, the world became impatient to solve the Israeli-Palestinian problem too.
With the Rabin assassination, a Jew, an Israeli, a Westerner seemed to kill the entire peace process and hope itself. We were blamed, not Hamas and its suicide bombers or Arafat and his gangs of killers. Increasingly, many in the world, including many liberal American Jews, grumbled. They wondered why Israel couldn’t magically make this persistent problem disappear along with the Cold War and so many other challenges. Many started asking, “What is wrong with you?”
I saw things differently. What made Oslo different from all the other ’90s miracles? They advanced democracy; Oslo advanced dictatorship. In Eastern Europe, Russia, and South Africa, freedom surged ahead. This peace process depended on keeping the Palestinians unfree. Being enslaved by your own dictator is still slavery. Obviously, history didn’t guarantee happy endings in all those places, but in the Middle East, we doomed ourselves from the start.
Although it looked like it was going with the flow of history at that moment, Oslo went against the stream of the 1990s. Whether it was Peres’s naive “new Middle East” dream, assuming terrorists would transform into pacifists, or Rabin’s cynical “he’s our dictator” approach, Oslo violated the spirit of the times and people’s natural desires. Perhaps now, as terrorism has become a fact of life and many Westerners worry about democracy, people are ready to start understanding why this reckless plan was doomed from the start.