Notes Preface 1. Reported in Joe Sexton, How a Rabbi s Rhetoric Did, or Didn t, Justify Assassination, The New York Times, December, 3, 1995, Section 1, Page 51, Column 2. 2. The term the Jewish state is often relied on when referring to Israel, although with over 20 percent of the population Muslim, this is less than accurate. Still, my reference to the phrase as a synonym for Israel is in keeping with common usage. 3. Hemda Ben-Yehuda, Attitude Changes and Policy Transformation: Yitzhak Rabin and the Palestinian Question, 1967 1995, in Efraim Karsh, ed., From Rabin to Netanyahu: Israel s Troubled Agenda (London: Frank Cass, 1997), 203 34. 4. Michael G. Kort, Yitzhak Rabin: Israel s Soldier and Statesman (Brookfield, CT: Millbrook Press, 1996), 144. 5. The Fall and Rise of Political Leaders: Olof Palme, Olusegun Obasanjo, Indira Gandhi (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) and Political Restoration in the Twentieth Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 6. The religious metaphor is derived from Talleyrand s aphorism: Soldiers die only once. Politicians die only to rise again. Chapter 1 1. The dialogue comes from an ABC News documentary, Rabin: Action Biography, April 15, 1975, and is cited by Robert Slater, Rabin of Israel: A Biography of the Embattled Prime Minister (New York: St. Martin s Press, 1993). 2. Slater, Rabin, 31 32; David Horovitz, ed., Shalom Friend: The Life and Legacy of Yitzhak Rabin (London: Peter Halban, 1996), 27; Yehudit Auerbach, Yitzhak Rabin: Portrait of a Leader, in D. J. Elazar and Shmuel Sandler, eds., Israel at the Polls, 1992 (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 1995), 288. Rabin was never to show great sympathy for religious settlers in territories later occupied by Israel. 3. Goodman cited in Horovitz, Shalom, Friend, ix.
186 Notes 4. Horovitz, Shalom, Friend, 37. Libby Hughes, Yitzhak Rabin: From Soldier to Peacemaker (Philadelphia: Xlibris, 2001), 29. 5. Cited by Colin Shindler, A History of Modern Israel (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2008), 39 40. 6. Yitzhak Rabin, The Rabin Memoirs: Expanded Edition (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1996), 383 84. At the same cabinet meeting that blocked a return of the Palestinian refugees, Ben-Gurion described the towns as two thorns (Shindler, A History, 47). Whether these expulsions were exceptional events or not is debated by post-zionist Israeli historians. See the discussion in Daniel Gutwein, Left and Right Post- Zionism and the Privatization of Israeli Collective Memory, in Anita Shapira and Derek J. Penslar, eds., Israeli Historical Revisionism: From Left to Right (London: Frank Cass, 2003), 9 42. 7. David Makovsky, Why I Still Miss Yitzhak Rabin, FP (Foreign Policy), November 3, 2010, http://www.foreignpolicy.com/ articles/ 2010/ 11/ 03. 8. Slater, Rabin, 51 52; Michael Bar-Zohar, Shimon Peres: The Biography (New York: Random House, 2007), 296. 9. Linda Benedikt, Yitzhak Rabin: The Battle for Peace (London: Haus Books, 2005), 33 35. 10. Shlomo Ben-Ami, Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2006), 36, 39. 11. Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 46. 12. Dan Kurzman, Ben-Gurion: Prophet of Fire (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983), 309, 340. 13. Robert Slater, Warrior Statesman: The Life of Moshe Dayan (New York: St. Martin s Press, 1991), 139; Slater, Rabin, 92; Bar-Zohar, Shimon Peres, 297. However loyal he was to Palmach, Rabin realized the need to move on. This can be attributed to his serious and analytical mind and perhaps also to Ben-Gurion s inspiration, which prevented him from crediting Palmach as the unit that won the 1948 war. I am indebted to Professor Michael Keren s email to me for this view. 14. This phrase is taken from the title of Conor Cruise O Brien s The Siege: The Saga of Israel and Zionism (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986). 15. Milton Viorst, Sands of Sorrow: Israel s Journey from Independence (New York: Harper and Row, 1987), 84. 16. Ibid., 84 85. In another conversation with Viorst, Rabin said that the purpose of the military strength of Israel was, first, to make sure that we stayed alive and, second, to shift the struggle from the battlefield. Our orders were to defend the country from attack, to destroy the attacking force, and then to acquire as much land as possible, to create conditions to shift the Arab-Israeli conflict to the negotiation table (95). 17. Ibid., 85. 18. Ibid. 19. Guy Laron, Logic Dictates That They May Attack When They Feel They Can Win. The 1955 Czech Arms Deal, the Egyptian Army, and
Notes 187 Israel Intelligence, The Middle East Journal 63, no. 1 (Winter 2009): 69 70, 74, 79. 20. Ibid., 79. 21. Ibid., 79, 84. For the highly critical view that Israel, from its founding to the present, embraced a martial culture of Sparta representing itself as Athens that is, holding an ideology of state militarism with the objective of expanding borders and exploiting the weaknesses of the Arabs see Patrick Tyler, Fortress Israel: The Inside Story of the Military Elite Who Run the Country and Why They Can t Make Peace (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), book jacket. 22. Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 77 78, 80, 84. 23. Bar-Zohar, Shimon Peres, 297. 24. Ibid., 34, 38, 49, 70 73, 83. 25. Rabin, Memoirs, 64. 26. Dayan quoted by Michael Oren, Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2002), cited by Tony Judt, Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century (New York: Penguin Press, 2008), 273. 27. Bar-Zohar, Shimon Peres, 87, 89 90. 28. Bar-Zohar, Shimon Peres, 297; Efraim Infar, Rabin and Israel s National Security (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1999), 14. 29. An example of the miscalculation or error thesis may be found in Judt, Reappraisals, 273 74. 30. Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 93, 94, 96. 31. This is the argument advanced by Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez, The Spymaster, the Communist, and Foxbats over Dimona, Israel Studies 11, no. 2 (2006): 89 130, and Ginor and Remez, Foxbats over Dimona: The Soviets Nuclear Gamble in the Six-Day War (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 2007). It is supported and amplified by Aronson and Oren. The quotation is that of Shlomo Aronson, 1967: Israel, the War, and the Year That Transformed the Middle East, and: Foxbats over Dimona The Soviets Nuclear Gamble in the Six-Day War (review), Israel Studies 13, no. 2 (Summer 1908): 177. 32. Aronson, 1967, 178. 33. Ginor and Remez, Foxbats over Dimona, 89. 34. Aronson, 1967, 180. 35. Aronson, 1967, 181. Chapter 2 1. Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 104, 195, 108. 2. Golda Meir, My Life (New York: Dell, 1975), 358. Curiously, in neither edition of his own memoirs does Eban cite these words that Meir attributes to de Gaulle. 3. Slater, Warrior Statesman, 248 49.
188 Notes 4. Le Monde, February 28, 1968. 5. Rabin, Memoirs, 75. 6. Ibid., 75 76; Kurzman, Ben-Gurion, 451. 7. Moshe Dayan, Story of My Life: An Autobiography (New York: Warner Books, 1976), 297. 8. Rabin, Memoirs, 80 81, 83. 9. Leah Rabin, Rabin: Our Life, His Legacy (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1997), 107 8; Geoffrey Aronson, review of Rabin: Our Life, His Legacy, by Leah Rabin, Journal of Palestinian Studies 27 (Winter 1998): 104; Abba Eban, Personal Witness: Israel through My Eyes (New York: G.P. Putnam s Sons, 1992), 364. 10. Slater, Rabin, 133 34. 11. Shlomo Nakdimon, Zero Hour (published in Hebrew; Tel Aviv, Israel: Ramdor Publ. Co., 1968), 243, cited in Amos Perlmutter, The Life and Times of Menachem Begin (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1987), 287. 12. Slater, Rabin, 151. 13. Slater, Warrior Statesman, 280 83. 14. David Horovitz, ed., Yitzhak Rabin: Soldier of Peace (London: Peter Halban, 1996), x. 15. Nir Hafez and Gadi Bloom, Ariel Sharon: A Life (New York: Random House, 2006), 179 81; Bar-Zohar, Shimon Peres, 306; Ariel Sharon, Warrior: The Autobiography of Ariel Sharon (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001), 164, 189, 341, 347. 16. Perlmutter, Life and Times, 290 91. 17. Matti Golan, The Secret Conversations of Henry Kissinger: Step-by-Step Diplomacy in the Middle East (New York: Quadrangle Books/New York Times Books, 1976), 70 71. 18. Viorst, Sands of Sorrow, 99. 19. Thomas Friedman, From Beirut to Jerusalem (New York: Anchor Books, 1995), 333. 20. Viorst, Sands of Sorrow, 103. 21. Rabin, Memoirs, 119, 121. 22. Shlomo Gazit, translated from the Hebrew as Trapped Fools: Thirty Years of Israeli Policy in the Territories (London: Frank Cass, 2003), cited in Amnon Barzilai, A Brief History of the Misled Opportunity, Ha aretz, June 5, 2002. Chapter 3 1. Eban, Personal Witness, 478 79. The Mapai Party, that of Ben-Gurion in 1968, together with other left-of-center bodies became the Israel Labor Party in January 1968. Rabin anticipated Eban s reluctance ( he s no fan of mine ) and later commented, As is well known, dialogues with Eban have a way of turning into soliloquies, and it was very difficult for
Notes 189 me to sound him out on ideas of my own. Rabin, Memoirs, 122, cited in Yehuda Avner, The Prime Ministers: An Intimate Narrative of Israeli Leadership (New Milford, CT: Toby Press, 2010), 182. 2. O Brien, The Siege, 379. 3. Ibid., 379; Abba Eban, Abba Eban: An Autobiography (Jerusalem: Steimatzky s Agency, 1977), 173. 4. Efraim Inbar, Rabin and Israel s National Security (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1999), 34 35. 5. Rabin, Memoirs, 64. Rabin was not the first Israeli head of government to request US military aid. Ben-Gurion sought American arms after President Eisenhower sent a force to Lebanon in 1958. As foreign minister in 1963 Meir wanted the United States to be become Israel s chief arms supplier, and President Johnson sold weapons to Israel as part of an effort to halt construction of the Dimona nuclear reactor. Tyler, Fortress Israel, 112, 142, 152. 6. Matti Golan, The Road to Peace: A Biography of Shimon Peres (New York: Warner Books, 1989), 1 4; Inbar, Rabin, 36. 7. Rabin, Memoirs, 123, 124. It was Rabin s failure to understand the intricacies of the American political system that led him to overestimate the powers of the presidency and underestimate those of Congress to check those powers. Auerbach, Yitzhak Rabin, 304. 8. Avner, The Prime Ministers, 182, 183. 9. Yeminah Rosenthal, ed., Yitzhak Rabin, Prime Minister of Israel: A Selection of Documents from His Life (Jerusalem: Israel State Archives, 2005), cited in Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 152; Ha aretz Supplement, June 12, 1972, cited in Shlomo Shamir, Review of the Press, Journal of Palestinian Studies 2 (Autumn 1972): 146. 10. Tom Segev, 1967: Israel, the War and the Year that Transformed the Middle East, translated from the Hebrew (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007), 544. 11. Shamir, Review of the Press, 146. 12. Clearly, Golan wrote, Eban had few illusions left about Golda Meir s appreciation of him. Golan, Secret Conversations, 35. 13. Rabin, Memoirs, 220 21; Inbar, Rabin, 57. 14. Rabin, Memoirs, 133. 15. Inbar, Rabin, 38; Horovitz, Yitzhak Rabin, 62. 16. Rabin cited by Yoram Peri in the latter s afterword to Rabin s Memoirs, 344 45. 17. Shamir, Review of the Press, 145 46. 18. Auerbach, Yitzhak Rabin, 292. 19. Inbar, Rabin, 45. 20. Slater, Rabin, 159, 160. 21. Rabin, Memoirs, 134; Slater, Rabin, 162. 22. Viorst, Sands of Sorrow, 124. 23. O Brien, The Siege, 494.
190 Notes 24. Rabin, Memoirs, 154. 25. Gideon Rafael, Destination Peace (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1981), 209, cited in O Brien, The Siege, 497. Rabin later related regarding on one occasion when he went to Kissinger in the White House to ask that the next shipment of bombs be accelerated, I got it like that, he said, snapping his fingers (O Brien, The Siege). Another time, when talking to Nixon, Rabin was shocked by the president s suggestion that Israel might consider attacking Soviet SAM (surface to air missiles) installations in Egypt. Viorst, Sands of Sorrow, 127, 129. 26. O Brien, The Siege, 497. 27. Eban, Personal Witness, 483 84, 487, 490. 28. O Brien, The Siege, 498; Rabin, Memoirs, 197. 29. Rabin, Memoirs, 157 58. The defense expert was Inbar, Rabin, 40 41; Viorst, Sands of Sorrow, 131. 30. Ibid., 192 93. 31. Shamir, Review of the Press, 146; Slater, Rabin, 189. 32. Rabin, Memoirs, 197 98. 33. Inbar, Rabin, 41 42; Eric Silver, Begin: The Haunted Prophet (New York: Random House, 1984), 138, 140. 34. Inbar, Rabin, 42; Shamir, Review of the Press, 146; Slater, Rabin, 189. 35. Cited in Horovitz, Shalom, Friend, 70. 36. Ibid., 71, 73. 37. Don Kurzman, Soldier of Peace: The Life of Yitzhak Rabin, 1922 1995 (New York: HarperCollins, 1998), 277; Jonathan Rynhold, Labour, Likud, the Special Relationship and the Peace Process, in Efraim Karsh, ed., From Rabin to Netanyahu: Israel s Troubled Agenda (London: Frank Cass, 1977), 239 40. The special relationship between the United States and Israel antedated the Nixon presidency. Israel s nuclear ambiguity had persuaded President Kennedy to pave the way for the special alliance between the two countries by providing weapons. In the summer of 1962 he decided to supply the Jewish state with ground-to-air Hawk missiles in hopes of lessening her reliance on the nuclear option. Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 93. 38. Leah Rabin, Rabin: Our Life, 135. Chapter 4 1. Like most Palmach officers, Rabin s name was linked to the leftist Ahdut Ha avoda Party, one of the factions of the Mapam Party (formed in 1948). The Mapam was Marxist oriented and pro-soviet until disillusioned by the Soviet-sponsored Prague Trials in 1953. It favored coexistence with the Arabs and initially favored the right of the Palestinian refugees to return. In 1965 Ahdut Ha avoda joined with Mapai, and these two parties, together with the Rafi Party, in 1968
Notes 191 formed the Labor Party. While in the army Rabin had shunned political activity, and his lack of any clear political identification with any one of the factions comprising Labor was a strong point in his favor when he sought the party leadership in 1974. Slater, Rabin, 90, 108. 2. Auerbach, Yitzhak Rabin, 304. In her history of Israel, Anita Shapira titles the chapter covering the years 1967 72 An Age of Euphoria. Anita Shapira, Israel: A History (Waltham, MA: Brandeis Univ. Press, 2012). 3. Slater, Warrior Statesman, 335. 4. Eban, Autobiography, 488 89, 495; Eban, Personal Witness, 516; Ben- Ami, Scars of War, 120, 122. 5. Eban, Personal Witness, 518. 6. Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 145. Conor Cruise O Brien posited an interesting variation on the causes of the Yom Kippur War. After Dayan s Masada speech in April 1973, in which he affirmed that Israel regarded the Suez Canal as its southern border, Sadat could either accept the loss of the Sinai and the Gaza Strip or go to war. Citing the Egyptian president s national security adviser, Mohamed Heikel, Henry Kissinger, then the US national security adviser (and in September secretary of state) implicitly encouraged Sadat to go to war. According to Heikel, Sadat learned that Kissinger would not want the [Nixon] administration to get more directly involved in the Middle East s problems as long as these were more or less dormant. But if the area began to show signs of hotting [sic] up, that would be a different matter (Mohamed Heikal, Autumn Fury: The Assassination of Sadat [New York: Random House, 1984], 49 50, 63). This was borne out by Sadat himself in his memoirs. Sadat mentions a meeting between his representative, Hafiz Ismail, and Kissinger: The drift of what Kissinger said to Ismail, Sadat wrote, was that the United States regrettably could do nothing to help so long as we were the defeated party and Israel maintained her superiority (Anwar Sadat, In Search of Identity: An Autobiography [London: Collins and Fontana, 1978], 218). In his own memoir, Kissinger wrote that he hadn t called on Sadat to change the military situation but had in fact pointed out that Israel will again defeat you. Whatever Kissinger s intent, Sadat inferred that only by going to war could he induce the United States to put enough pressure on Israel to secure the return of the territories lost in the previous (Six-Day) war. It was the boldness of Sadat s strategy, according to Kissinger, that explained Washington s (and Israel s) failure to anticipate the sudden Egyptian invasion of the Sinai. Henry Kissinger, Years of Upheaval (Boston: Little Brown, 1982), 277, 460; O Brien, The Siege, 513, 518. 7. Abraham Rabinovich, The Yom Kippur War: The Epic Encounter That Transformed the Middle East (New York: Schocken Books, 2004), book jacket.
192 Notes 8. Admittedly, similar predictions of Egyptian encirclement had proved overly optimistic. Kissinger, however, took the threat seriously: As we saw it, he later wrote, keeping [Egypt s] Third Army from being destroyed was the minimum prerequisite for any peace process which no country needed more than Israel... A refusal by Israel to make concessions, he told Prime Minister Meir, risked a superpower crisis. The Arabs would have little incentive to deal with us; it would become impossible to split Egypt from the Soviets; there would be no moderate alternative to Arab radicalism. Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, 621 22; Golan, Secret Conversations, 66 67. Golan s book was initially censored by a government commission. 9. Golan, Secret Conversations, 77 78, 83, 84, 103 4. Golan states that Kissinger wanted more give by the Israelis to protect his (Kissinger s) investment in Sadat, who could prevent Soviet domination of the Middle East. Only later was it learned that Kissinger had promised the Egyptian president that his (Sadat s) Third Army would not be encircled. 10. Rabin, The Rabin Memoirs (Boston: Little Brown, 1979), 186. This comment was deleted from the later edition of the memoirs, which was used for all other citations. Slater, Warrior Statesman, 256, 279. 11. O Brien, The Siege, 536. 12. Jacob Abadi, Israel s Leadership: From Utopia to Crisis (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993), 127. 13. Rabin, Memoirs, 241. Peres was born in Poland in 1921, became a Zionist as a boy, and with his family emigrated to Israel ten years later. As Ben-Gurion s protégé, he climbed higher in Labor Party ranks, reaching that of director general of the Defense Ministry. He helped secure arms from France, including aid in building the Dimona nuclear reactor, and would hold several cabinet posts after the Six-Day War. 14. Eban, Personal Witness, 565 69. Yehudit Auerbach has argued that Rabin s political apprenticeship was too short and that consequently his poor understanding of political and party mechanisms combined with a tendency to mistrust people led him to distinguish good guys from bad guys. The former included those who had served in the Palmach and IDF as well as those opponents (like Menachem Begin) not suspected of intrigue and capable of rising above petty party politics in sharp contrast to Shimon Peres. Auerbach, Yitzhak Rabin, 304 5. 15. Shlomo Aronson, Conflict and Bargaining in the Middle East: An Israeli Perspective (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1978), 258. 16. Bar-Zohar, Shimon Peres, 307 10; Eban, Personal Witness, 583; Tyler, Fortress Israel, 252. 17. Benedikt, Yitzhak Rabin, 89 90. It was the annexation of the Old City of Jerusalem after the Six-Day War by Ben-Gurion s Labor government
Notes 193 (and subsequent annexations of captured territory by Labor prime ministers Eshkol, Meir, and Rabin, supported by their ministers Allon and Peres), and not Likud, that set the precedent for biblically inspired settlements. Friedman, From Beirut, 260. 18. Auerbach, Yitzhak Rabin, 310. 19. In another account describing another Rabin compromise in 1977, Meir Harnoy wrote, Here, at this place and at this hour, the first stake of the revolution in the perception of settlement was driven in. It was also the first stake for the political change that took place when Likud came to power later in that year. Harnoy, The Settlers (published in Hebrew; Or Yehuda: Sifriyat Ma ariv, 1994), 51, 101, 104, cited in Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar, Lords of the Land: The War over Israel s Settlements in the Occupied Territories, 1967 2007 (New York: Nation Books, 2007), 51, 53. Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 151. 20. Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 151. 21. Slater, Rabin, 226 28; Benedikt, Yitzhak Rabin, 79 80. 22. Slater, Rabin, 80. 23. Yael S. Arnoff, When and Why Do Hard Liners Become Soft? An Examination of Israel s Prime Ministers, Shamir, Rabin, Peres, and Netanyahu, in Ofer Feldman and Linda Valenty, eds., Profiling Political Leaders: Cross Cultural Studies of Personality and Behavior (Westport, CT: Praeger Publ., 2001), 194. 24. Moshe Dayan, Breakthrough: A Personal Account of the Egypt-Israel Peace Negotiations (New York: Knopf, 1981), cited in O Brien, The Siege, 545. 25. Golan, Secret Conversations, 218. Kissinger vehemently denied he was delaying arms shipments. 26. Ibid., 25. 27. Ibid., 224 25. 28. Cited in Golan, Secret Conversations, 225. 29. Slater, Rabin, 235. Rabin s and Israel s hostility to Arafat and the PLO was shared by the United States. When serving in the Ford administration, Kissinger pledged that Washington would not deal with the PLO until it renounced terrorism. The State Department banned diplomatic meetings with the PLO, and enforcement of the ban by President Carter in August 1979 led him to fire Andrew Young, his UN ambassador, for talking with Arafat s representative. Tyler, Fortress Israel, 527, n.34. 30. Golan, Secret Conversations, 228. 31. Interview with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, Ha aretz, December 3, 1974, reprinted in MERIP (Middle East Research and Information Project) Reports 35 (February 1975): 31 32. 32. Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 134 35. 33. Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, 1108. 34. Golan, Secret Conversations, 232, 233.
194 Notes 35. Ibid. 36. Cited in Benedikt, Yitzhak Rabin, 85. 37. Rabin, Memoirs, 267. 38. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Power and Principle: Memoirs of the National Security Advisor 1977 1981 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983), 113, cited in O Brien, The Siege, 549. 39. Golan, Secret Conversations, 246, 247. 40. Inbar, Rabin, 43. 41. Viorst, Sands of Sorrow, 206; Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 152 53. 42. Ma ariv, January 16, 1975, cited in Abadi, Israel s Leadership, 93. 43. Viorst, Sands of Sorrow, 213. 44. Inbar, Rabin, 52 53. 45. Golan, The Road to Peace, 132. 46. Ariel Sharon with David Chanoff, Warrior: An Autobiography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989), 346 47, cited in Tyler, Fortress Israel, 253; Rabin cited in Gideon Samt, From the Hebrew Press: Kissinger s Failure, Journal of Palestinian Studies 4 (Summer 1975): 124. 47. Bar-Zohar, Shimon Peres, 311 12; Golan, The Road to Peace, 137 38. 48. Golan, The Road to Peace, 138 39. 49. Bar-Zohar, Shimon Peres, 298. 50. Eban, Autobiography, 583 84. 51. Bar-Zohar, Shimon Peres, 307. 52. Rabin, Memoirs, 271. 53. Argentina s chief supplier was the Federal Republic of (West) Germany (33 percent), followed by the United States (17 percent) and France (14 percent). Bishara Bahbah, Israel s Military Relationship with Ecuador and Argentina, Journal of Palestinian Studies 15 (1986), and Hernán Dobry, Operación Israel: La dictadura argentina y la compra de armas, (unpub. ms., Buenos Aires, 2009), both cited in Raanan Rein and Efraim Davidi, Exile of the World: Israeli Perceptions of Jacobo Timmerman, Jewish Social Studies 16 (Spring/Summer 2010): note 17. 54. Sasha Polakow-Suransky, The Unspoken Alliance: Israel s Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa (New York: Pantheon Books, 2010), 3, 4, 10. The military component of the alliance (to which Meir was never reconciled) would be sealed in 1980 but remained secret until an African National Congress government opened South Africa s archives. Thus far, Israel has refused to do so. 55. Eban, Autobiography, 587 88. 56. Shimon Peres, Battling for Peace (New York: Random House, 1995), 152. 57. Bar-Zohar, Shimon Peres, 316, 319, 322; Golan, The Road to Peace, 144. 58. Bar-Zohar, Shimon Peres, 324; Rabin, Memoirs, 288. 59. Peres, Entebbe Diary, cited by Bar-Zohar, Shimon Peres, 319.
Notes 195 60. Golan, The Road to Peace, 157, 159. 61. Peres, Battling, 155 56; Bar-Zohar, Shimon Peres, 338 39; Rabin, Memoirs, 289. Chapter 5 1. Rabin, Memoirs, 291 92. Rabin denied such Machiavellian motives as seeking an early election and preventing Peres from picking up Labor support. The NRP, founded in 1956, and the orthodox Mizrahi movement out of which it had emerged had been a part of every Israeli government (it later joined Rabin s) since the founding of the state. 2. The two years of Peres s leadership of a unity government between 1986 and 1988 would provide an exception. 3. Rabin, Memoirs, 378, 309 10; Bar-Zohar, Shimon Peres, 306. 4. Perlmutter, Life and Times, 314; Horovitz, Shalom, Friend, 92 93. 5. Rabin, Memoirs, 307. 6. Slater, Rabin, 265 66; Horovitz, Shalom, Friend, 94. 7. Silver, Begin, 151 52. 8. Rabin, Memoirs, 299. 9. Rabin, Memoirs, 295 96; Leah Rabin, Rabin: Our Life, 167. Rabin committed a monumental social gaffe, as recorded by Zbigniew Brzezinski in his autobiography: Carter tried to engage him as a human being; by inviting Rabin, after the State Dinner, to look in on Carter s special pride and joy, his daughter Amy, asleep in her White House bedroom. Rabin declined the offer with a curt, No, thank you, thereby ending his chance of establishing a personal rapport with a proud father. Brzezinski, Power and Principle, 258; O Brien, The Siege, 710, n.44. 10. O Brien, The Siege, 557. 11. Rabin, Memoirs, 295. 12. Cited in Benedikt, Yitzhak Rabin, 96. 13. Slater, Rabin, 273 76. 14. Rabin, Memoirs, 312. 15. Slater, Rabin, 283. 16. Slater, Rabin, 290. 17. Leah Rabin, Rabin: Our Life, 171; Marie Brenner, The Very Strange Life of the Yitzhak Rabins, New York Magazine 11, no. 7 (February 13, 1978), 54. 18. Horovitz, Shalom, Friend, 99. 19. Slater, Rabin, 295. 20. Abadi, Israel s Leadership, 129. 21. Eban, Personal Witness, 585. 22. Shlomo Aronson, Conflict and Bargaining in the Middle East, 256; O Brien, The Siege, 540.
196 Notes 23. Perlmutter, Life and Times, 316, 317. It is difficult not to think of another social-democratic party in another small country and also governing for decades that was similarly pushed out of office by the voters in the late 1970s, Sweden s Social Democratic Party. 24. Rabin, Memoirs, 301; Horovitz, Shalom, Friend, 3, 78. 25. Shindler, A History, 145. 26. Eban, Personal Witness, 580. 27. Shindler, A History, 146. Although the income tax was reduced in July 1975, such exemptions as cost of living increases and car allowances fell subject to taxation. Moreover, indirect taxation underwent reform the following year. Sales taxes were reduced, but a value added tax was added. Taxation as a percentage of GDP rose from 41 percent in 1970 to nearly 60 percent in 1977. The Arab oil embargo crisis and the costs of war were held accountable for the tripling of the inflation rate. Moshe Silver, ed., Economic and Social Policy in Israel: The First Generation (Jerusalem: The Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, 1991), 91, 16. Chapter 6 1. Rabin, Memoirs, 314; Peres, Battling, cited in Benedikt, Yitzhak Rabin, 99; Slater, Rabin, 306. 2. Slater, Rabin, 298 99. 3. Dan Kurzman, Soldier of Peace: The Life of Yitzhak Rabin (New York: HarperCollins), 364. 4. Slater, Rabin, 299. 5. Brenner, Very Strange Life, 51, 53, 55. 6. Kurzman interview with Haber in Kurzman, Soldier, 365. 7. Slater, Rabin, 299. 8. Brenner, Very Strange Life, 54. 9. Bar-Zohar, Shimon Peres, 346, 350. 10. Horovitz, Shalom, Friend, 97. 11. Kurzman, Soldier, 366. 12. Brenner, Very Strange Life, 55. 13. Eban, Personal Witness, 595; Rabin, Memoirs, 317. 14. O Brien, The Siege, 566. 15. Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 167; Rabin, Memoirs, 321 22; Viorst, Sands of Sorrow, 139 41. 16. Rabin, Memoirs, 321. 17. Ibid., 316, 321, 323. 18. Ibid., 322 24. 19. Sadat, In Search of Identity, 364, cited in O Brien, The Siege, 574. 20. Kurzman, Soldier, 367 68. 21. Rabin, Memoirs, 329. 22. Benedikt, Yitzhak Rabin, 104. See also Rabin, Memoirs, 329 30; Perlmutter, Life and Times, 342.
Notes 197 23. Perlmutter, Life and Times, 349. 24. Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 167. 25. Slater, Rabin, 304 5; Rabin, Memoirs, 329 30. 26. Kurzman, Soldier, 373. 27. Kurzman, Soldier, 374. 28. Rabin, Memoirs, 123. 29. Peres never volunteered, pointing to his work with Ben-Gurion and Eshkol at the ministry of defense, but admitted that the army hadn t interested him. As noted, he ultimately acknowledged that not fighting in the War of Independence and so joining the veterans who had was, in the words of his biographer, one of the worst mistakes in his life. Bar-Zohar, Shimon Peres, 34, 72 73. 30. Rabin, Memoirs, 271. 31. Peres, Battling, 144. 32. Bar-Zohar, Shimon Peres, 73. 33. Peres, Battling, 145 46, 5, 309. 34. Ibid., 149 51. 35. Cited in Kurzman, Soldier, 375. 36. Golan, The Road to Peace, 193. 37. Slater, Rabin, 311. 38. Jerusalem Post, October 26, 1979, cited in Slater, Rabin, 313 14. 39. Michael Keren, National Icons and Personal Identities in Three Israeli Autobiographies, Biography 27, no. 2 (2004): 379. 40. Ibid., 380. 41. Benedikt, Yitzhak Rabin, 107; Kurzman, Soldier, 376, 377. 42. Kurzman interview with Lanir in Kurzman, Soldier, 377. 43. Abba Eban, Which Way with Labor? Journal of Palestinian Studies 10 (Autumn 1980): 19. 44. Carrie Rosefsky, Yitzhak Rabin: Toward a Two-State Solution A Genuine Offer, Harvard International Review 5, no. 1 (September- October 1982): 9, 10. Chapter 7 1. Slater, Rabin, 315. 2. Kurzman, Soldier, 378, 379. 3. Slater, Rabin, 317. 4. Silver, Begin, 216, 217. 5. Perlmutter, Life and Times, 372. 6. Eban, Personal Witness, 612; Silver, Begin, 225. 7. Peri, afterword to Rabin, Memoirs, 322. Thomas Friedman insists that like most Israelis Rabin initially shared Sharon s view of the Lebanese invasion and that he and other Labor leaders claimed they were misled only when the war started to go sour. Friedman, From Beirut, 130 31. 8. Perlmutter, Life and Times, 380.
198 Notes 9. Friedman, From Beirut, 148 49; Golan, The Road to Peace, 24. 10. Slater, Rabin, 320. A commission of inquiry found that Sharon and Chief of Staff Rafael Eytan had moved Phalangists into the refugee camp with the mission of clearing out fedayeen fighters imbedded there. The defense minister, the chief of staff, and two senior officers were charged with indirect responsibility for the killings. Sharon initially refused to resign, and Begin did not want to fire him. Finally, Sharon left his post but remained in the government as minister without portfolio. O Brien, The Siege, 630 31. Red Cross officials estimated the total death toll between eight hundred and one thousand. Friedman, From Beirut, 163. 11. Abadi, Israel s Leadership, 147. 12. Meron Benvenisti, The Last Revisionist Zionist: History Left Yitzhak Shamir Behind, Foreign Affairs 74, no. 1 (January February 1995): 172. 13. Meridor cited in Bar-Zohar, Shimon Peres, 417. 14. Leah Rabin, Rabin: Our Life, 190. 15. Inbar, Rabin, 100. 16. Rabin cited in Inbar, Rabin, 130. 17. Rabin cited in Friedman, From Beirut, 518. 18. For the view that Rabin s evolution toward a policy of reconciliation began with the Intifada, see Slater, Rabin, 341 43. For the view that it solidified during the Six-Day War, see Kurzman, Soldier, 14, 168. Rabin himself attached major importance in this regard to the Intifada (Slater, Rabin, 340 41). It was Rabin s school, according to the defense analysts Ze ev Schiff and Ehud Ya ari, Intifada: The Palestinian Uprising Israel s Third Front (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989), 138. Peri, in the afterword to the 1992 edition of Rabin s memoirs, also argues that Rabin began to seek an accord with the Palestinians only after the show of determination in the Intifada. So does Patrick Tyler (who nevertheless argues that throughout its history Israel was and remains a militaristic state). He subtitles his chapter on the Oslo peace process The New Yitzhak. Tyler, Fortress Israel, 334, 349. 19. Kurzman, Soldier, 16. 20. Abadi, Israel s Leadership, 158. To keep Sharon from the defense ministry, Shamir named Moshe Arens, seen as somewhat more moderate. 21. Inbar, Rabin, 74, 83; Golan, The Road to Peace, 236. 22. Friedman, From Beirut, 355 56. 23. Inbar, Rabin, 83, 114 15. 24. Kurzman, Soldier, 297, 400. 25. Unidentified author, Justifying Hijacking a Civilian Airline, Journal of Palestinian Studies 15 (Spring 1986): 152. 26. Polakow-Suransky, The Unspoken Alliance, 132, 156 57, 193. 27. Ibid., 196. 28. Rynhold, Labour, 243.
Notes 199 29. Benedikt, Yitzhak Rabin, 114 15. 30. Yehuda Litani, Settlements: To Build or Not to Build, Journal of Palestinian Studies 14 (Summer 1985): 182 83. Chapter 8 1. Slater, Rabin, 329 30. The exact date was December 7. The previous day an Israeli was stabbed to death shopping in Gaza, and other sources have marked this date as the start of the Intifada; still others, even earlier events. 2. Anita Vitullo, Yitzhak Rabin and Israel s Death Squads, Middle East Report 178 (September October 1992): 42. The Jewish Virtual Library places the number of Palestinian deaths during the four years of the (first) Intifada at approximately 1,100; Israelis, at 162. See The Jewish Virtual Library, http:// www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/ jsource/ History/ intifada.html. Most other sources I have say over 1000 and over 100, adding that Palestinian militants killed over 250 Palestinians for collaborating with occupation authorities. 3. Inbar, Israel and National Security, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences 555 (January 1998): 69. 4. Benedikt, Yitzhak Rabin, 119; Horovitz, Shalom, Friend, 116 17. 5. Inbar, Rabin, 130. 6. Slater, Rabin, 337. 7. Inbar, Rabin, 104. 8. Benedikt, Yitzhak Rabin, 120. 9. Rabin cited in Michael Karpin and Ina Friedman, Murder in the Name of God: The Plot to Kill Yitzhak Rabin (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1998), 55; Slater, Rabin, 341. 10. Eban, Personal Witness, 623 24. 11. Shindler, A History, 208. 12. Vitullo, Yitzhak Rabin, 41 42. 13. Ibid. 14. Inbar, Rabin, 11. 15. Robert O. Freedman, Israel under Rabin (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995), 394. 16. Schiff cited in Horovitz, Shalom, Friend, 111 12. 17. Peri, afterword to the revised edition of The Rabin Memoirs, especially 369. Certainly it marked an evolution from Rabin s initial analysis of the enemy as the Arab states and not the Palestinians. Whether Rabin had to evolve from the notion of trading land for peace is quite another matter. This account points to a belief that was long-standing. 18. Rabin took many of these ideas from a 1988 report submitted by the head of military intelligence. Thirty-two conservatives in the Knesset, led by Netanyahu, opposed the plan as leading to the creation of a
200 Notes Palestinian state and insisted there be no negotiations until the Intifada came to an end. Shindler, A History, 208, 214. 19. Karpin and Friedman, Murder, 53. 20. Benedikt, Yitzhak Rabin, 121. 21. Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 193. 22. Friedman, From Beirut, 389. Palestinian refugees, especially those in Lebanon, desperate for a state of their own and willing to consider any pragmatic solution, also imposed pressure. Friedman also points to a more mellowed Arab world ready to tolerate recognition of Israel s existence. 23. Benedikt, Yitzhak Rabin, 121 23. It is an irony of history that perhaps the friendliest of American presidents to Israel, Ronald Reagan, was the one who extended recognition to the PLO and so gave legitimacy to an organization that the Israelis perceived as their archenemy. 24. Benvenisti, The Last Revisionist Zionist, 172. Patrick Tyler, however critical of Shamir, argues that by keeping Rabin at Defense, he prevented Sharon and other right-wing generals in the Knesset from pushing through reckless schemes of Arab expulsion. Tyler, Fortress Israel, 337. 25. Bar-Zohar, Shimon Peres, 422. 26. Rynhold, Labour, 244, 245 47. Chapter 9 1. Inbar, Rabin, 133. 2. Kurzman, Soldier, 412; Benedikt, Yitzhak Rabin, 122 23. 3. Darawshe interview with Kurzman. Kurzman, Soldier, 412 13. 4. Slater, Rabin, 413. 5. Douglas Little, American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East since 1945 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2002), 300; Benedikt, Yitzhak Rabin, 128. 6. I am grateful to Professor Marianne Sanua for expanding on this distinction between Rabin and the Likud leaders. 7. Bar-Zohar, Shimon Peres, 419. 8. Later Rabin went to them to basically apologize and show that Labor had changed its attitude toward them and was willing to accept them as equal political partners. I thank Professor Sanua for sharing her insight about the Mizrahim. 9. Kurzman, Soldier, 428. Another electoral change approved in 1992 would result in direct election of the prime minister for the fourteenth Knesset in the next scheduled election (in 1996). The successful candidate would require 50 percent plus one in the first or second rounds. 10. Susan Rolef, Israel s Policy toward the PLO: From Rejection to Recognition, in Avraham Sela and Moslhe Ma oz, eds., The PLO and
Notes 201 Israel: From Armed Conflict to Political Solution 1964 1994 (New York: St. Martin s Press, 1697), 263, cited in Shindler, A History, 203. 11. Gerald M. Steinberg, A Nation That Dwells Alone? Foreign Policy in the 1992 Elections, in Elazar and Sandler, Israel at the Polls, 187. 12. Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 199. 13. Shapira, Israel, 457. 14. Bernard Reich, Playing Politics in Moscow and Jerusalem: Soviet Jewish Immigrants and the 1992 Knesset Election, in D. J. Elazar and Samuel Rabin, eds., Israel at the Polls, 1992 (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 1995), 132, 142. In a Public Opinion Research Poll only 1.7 percent of the immigrants identified themselves as a practicing religious believer. Ibid., 129. To assuage their fears of socialist big government, the Labor Party even abandoned its traditional red color, adopting the blue and white of the Israeli flag and the Likud colors. It also campaigned in Likud strongholds and displayed photos of Likud converts to Labor. Efraim Inbar, Labor s Return to Power, in Elazar and Sandler, Israel at the Polls, 35, 36. 15. Horovitz, Shalom, Friend, 132; Slater, Rabin, 384, 402. 16. Horovitz, Shalom, Friend, 130. 17. Slater, Rabin, 399 400. 18. Rabin cited in Slater, Rabin, 402. 19. Mordechai Nisan, The Likud: The Delusion of Power, in Elazar and Sandler, Israel at the Polls, 50. Nisan also points to Likud s 15 years in power and the fact that long-term electoral success contains within it the germ of ultimate defeat, 55. 20. Peres, Battling, 272. 21. Abadi, Israel s Leadership, 130. 22. Cited by Slater, Rabin, 406. 23. Arnoff, When and Why Do Hard Liners Become Soft?, in Ofer Feldman and Linda Valenty, eds., Profiling Political Leaders: Cross Cultural Studies of Personality and Behavior (Westport, CT: Praeger Publ., 2001), 191. 24. Slater, Rabin, 408. Yet a majority of Israeli Jews had voted for Likud and other right-wing parties. Labor and Meretz counted for 55 seats, 5 short of a blocking majority in the Knesset and so required Shas s 6 seats. Shindler, A History, 230. 25. Daniel J. Elazar and Shmuel Sandler, Change and Continuity in Israeli Politics: The Political Behavior of the Rabin-Peres Government, in Elazar and Sandler, Israel at the Polls, 331 32. 26. Peres, Battling, 415. 27. The minister was Haim Ramon, who was close to Rabin. Bar-Zohar, Shimon Peres, 436. 28. Inbar, Labor s Return to Power, 39, 41. There are about a dozen political parties in Israel, and, as noted earlier, to have a majority in the Knesset, the largest party must negotiate with others. The small parties
202 Notes demand concessions and tie the hands of the prime minister, as is usually the case in a multi-party system. Abadi, Israel s Leadership, 171. 29. Peri, afterword to Rabin, Memoirs, 343; Leah Rabin, Rabin: Our Life, 177. 30. Leah Rabin, Rabin: Our Life, 177. Chapter 10 1. Inbar, Rabin, 136 37. 2. Rynhold, Labour, 245. 3. Ibid., 256. 4. Slater, Rabin, 417. 5. Cited in Kort, Yitzhak Rabin, 134 35. 6. Inbar, Rabin, 135. 7. Shibley Telhami, From Camp David to Wye: Changing Assumptions in Arab-Israeli Negotiations, Middle East Journal 53, no. 3 (Summer 1999): 383. 8. Shindler, A History, 232. 9. Ahron Bregman, Elusive Peace: How the Holy Land Defeated America (London: Penguin Books, 2005), 4 5. 10. A detailed account of these negotiations may be found in Dennis Ross, The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004), esp. 126. Rabin eventually conceded on the border issue and accepted the June 4, 1967 (pre Six-Day War) line as not constituting any security threat to Israel. Ross, The Missing Peace, 147. 11. Itamar Rabinovitch, The Brink of Peace: The Israel Syrian Negotiations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1998). A controversy ensued whether Rabin intended to withdraw from the Golon or on the Golon. When TV journalist Charles Enderlin learned of the Syrian talks initiated by the Labor government, he asked the Americans if Israel intended to return all of the Golan Heights and was assured that the promise to do so remained on deposit with President Clinton. Charles Enderlin, Shattered Dreams: The Failure of the Peace Process in the Middle East, 1995 2002 (New York: Other Press, 2002), xiv. 12. Yaacov Bar-Simon-Tov, Peace-Making with the Palestinians: Change and Legitimacy, in Efraim Karsh, ed., From Rabin to Netanyahu: Israel s Troubled Agenda (London: Frank Cass, 1997), 173. 13. That Israel supported Iran in the conflict may be explained by the dictum The enemy of my enemy is my friend, and Iraq was seen as the more immediate threat. There was also a large number of Jews in Iran, and Israel worked to get them out of the country. 14. Shindler, A History, 252 53. 15. Shindler, A History, 232; Kurzman, Soldier, 437, 443. 16. Karpin and Friedman, Murder, 60.
Notes 203 17. Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000), 329, cited in Benedikt, Yitzhak Rabin, 83 84. 18. Jerusalem Report, September 10, 1992, cited in Shindler, A History, 195; Slater, Rabin, 420, 428 29. Rabin (and others) may have exaggerated AIPAC s power. As Christopher Hitchens pointed out, Jewish power in Washington is overstated. If it is Israel that decides on the deployment of American force, he finds it odd that the first President Bush had to order them to stay out of the coalition to free Kuwait, even more odd there has been no attack of Iran, as Israeli hawks have been urging, and that it lost the argument over removing Saddam Hussein in 1991. Christopher Hitchens, Overstating Jewish Power, Slate (March 27, 2006), reproduced in his anthology, Arguably: Essays (New York: Twelve, 2011), 569 72. 19. David Makovsky, Making Peace with the PLO: The Rabin Government s Road to the Oslo Accord (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996), 14, 20. 20. Kort, Yitzhak Rabin, 138 40. 21. Oslo would bring no end to settlers and settlements. Between 1992 and 1996 the Jewish population grew by 48 percent on the West Bank and 62 percent in Gaza. Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 216, cited in Shindler, A History, 278. Oslo said nothing on the settlements, but Rabin refused to support twenty of them straddling the Green Line (Israel s 1948 frontier) and cancelled ten road and tunnel projects connecting Jerusalem to West Bank settlements. Shindler, A History, 269. 22. Rabin cited in Kurzman, Soldier, 465. 23. Uri Savir, The Process: 1100 Days That Changed the Middle East (New York: Random House, 1998), 26. 24. Makovsky, Making Peace, 37; Bar-Zohar, Shimon Peres, 430. 25. Bar-Zohar, Shimon Peres, 435, 437. 26. Telhami, From Camp David to Wye, 391. 27. Gerald M. Steinberg, Yossi Beilin, Touching Peace, Foreign Policy 109 (Winter 1997 98): 156. 28. Myron Aronoff, Labor in the Second Rabin Era: The First Year of Leadership, in Robert O. Freedman, ed., Israel under Rabin (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995), 133 34; Makovsky, Making Peace, 38. 29. I am grateful to Professor Marianne Sanua for the Time Bomb reference and its significance. 30. Makovsky, Making Peace, 45, 113 14. 31. Ibid., 51, 69. 32. Eban, Personal Witness, 643. 33. Helena Cobban, Israel and the Palestinians: From Madrid to Oslo and Beyond, in Robert O. Freedman, ed., Israel under Rabin (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995), 77, 107. 34. Noa Ben Artzi-Pelossof, In the Name of Sorrow and Hope (New York: Knopf, 1996), 173.
204 Notes 35. Rabin cited in Makovsky, Making Peace, 107. 36. Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 221. 37. Daniel Lieberfeld, Efraim Inbar, Rabin and Israel s National Security, International Journal of Middle East Studies 32 (November 2000): 584 85. 38. Peres, Battling, 285; Kort, Yitzhak Rabin, 141 42. 39. Benedikt, Yitzhak Rabin, 138. 40. Inbar, Rabin, 25 25. King Hussein maintained warm relations with Rabin in contrast to most other Arab leaders. 41. Inbar, Rabin, 27, 28, 30. 42. George E. Gruen, American Jewish Attitudes toward Israel..., in Ofer Feldman and Linda Valenty, eds., Profiling Political Leaders: Cross Cultural Studies of Personality and Behavior (Westport, CT: Praeger Publ., 2001), 56, 57. 43. Arnoff, When and Why Do Hard Liners Become Soft?, 191. 44. Ibid., 195; Inbar, Rabin, 162 63; Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 209. Rabin may have been too harsh in his criticism of Israeli fears. His countrymen were used to wars fought on several fronts, but with population centers relatively secure. Now they were subject to not only terror attacks on the streets but missiles raining down on them. Friedman, From Beirut, 543. 45. Yehudit Auerbach and Charles W. Greenbaum, Assessing Leader Credibility during a Peace Process: Rabin s Private Polls, Journal of Peace Research 37 (January 2000): 32. The deportation of four hundred Palestinians followed the murder of three soldiers and a policeman by Hamas militants and was ordered by IDF chief of staff Ehud Barak. Rabin s defenders argued he had little choice but to support the action. Tyler, Fortress Israel, 357 58. 46. Peres, Battling, 291. 47. Shapira, Israel, 431. 48. Kort, Yitzhak Rabin, 144, 146. 49. Ian Bickerton and Carla Klausner, Rabin Statement at Signing of Accord, in I. Bickerton and C. Klausner, eds., A Concise History of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 2nd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1995), cited in Kort, Yitzhak Rabin, 146. 50. Kort, Yitzhak Rabin, 144. Chapter 11 1. Auerbach and Greenbaum, Assessing Leader Credibility during a Peace Process, 32, 40, 48. 2. Peres, Battling, 291. Rabin s envoy to Damascus in 1993, Itamar Rabinovitch, in his book, The Brink of Peace, regretted that Rabin s commitment to President Clinton to yield the Golan Heights was not followed up. Rabinovitch acknowledged Syrian President Hafez
Notes 205 al-assad s lack of a response and Rabin s decision to pursue the Oslo track instead but still calls the episode a missed opportunity to achieve peace. Interview with Rabinovitch by journalist Amos Harel in Ha aretz, November 3, 2012. 3. Bar-Zohar, Shimon Peres, 451. 4. Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 210. Arafat s closed-door speech is in Raphael Israeli, From Oslo to Bethlehem: Arafat s Islamic Message, Journal of Church and State 43 (Summer 2001): 423. 5. Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 212, 214. 6. Ross, The Missing Peace, 208. 7. Ross, The Missing Peace, 736, 757. 8. Bar-Zohar, Shimon Peres, 431. 9. Benedikt, Yitzhak Rabin, 145, 148. 10. Ross, The Missing Peace, 169. 11. Ross, The Missing Peace, 734, 735. 12. Ha aretz, March 7, 1994, cited in Ehud Sprinzak, Brother against Brother: Violence and Extremism in Israel from the Altalena to the Rabin Assassination (New York: The Free Press, 1999), 263; Shindler, A History, 263. 13. Harnoy, The Settlers, 121, cited in Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 307. This was the explanation for not taking steps against the Hebron settlers that Rabin gave to Yoram Peri. Cited in Peri s interview with Linda Benedikt, in Benedikt, Yitzhak Rabin, 149. 14. Harnoy, The Settlers, 123, cited in Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 307. Harnoy is also frequently cited in Zertal and Eldar, Lords of the Land. This book offers a history of Gush Emunim, 186 87. 15. Friedman, From Beirut, 570. 16. Ehud Sprinzak, Israel s Radical Right and the Countdown to the Rabin Assassination, in Yoram Peri, ed., The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 2000), 100, 103, 106. 17. Makovsky in the Jerusalem Post, International ed., July 17, 1999; Robert O. Freedman, Israel under Rabin (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995), 137 38, 183. 18. Bar-Simon-Tov, Peace-Making with the Palestinians, 177. 19. Peres found it strange that we Israelis are now granting the Palestinians what the British had granted us more than seventy years ago, a homeland in Palestine, but he couldn t acknowledge that the entity created might one day become a sovereign and independent state. Peres, Battling, 409, cited in Bar-Zohar, Shimon Peres, 444 45. 20. Karpin and Friedman, Murder, 137, 138, 183. 21. Kort, Yitzhak Rabin, 149; Tyler, Fortress Israel, 368 69. 22. Arab writing on Israel, in the view of an Arab political scientist, is not objective. Many were in self-denial. Israelism, the style of writing on the Jewish state, by and large failed to make use of Israeli sources, resulting in an inherent bias and the suffering of Arab scholarship. See
206 Notes the discussion in Hassan A. Barari, Arab Scholarship on Israel: A Critical Assessment (Reading, UK: Ithaca Press, 2009). The PLO Covenant (in 1968 the term was changed to Charter ) was never formally revised despite Arafat s September 9, 1993, letter to Rabin promising that the offending clauses denying Israel s right to exist would be amended. On April 23, 1996, the organization voted to set up a committee to redraft the charter, but the date to do so was not specified. In a January 1998 letter to President Clinton, Arafat claimed that the clauses had been nullified, and that December the PLO reaffirmed the cancellation. Yet a copy of the charter cannot be found on the PLO s own official website (which itself is no longer available only its National Affairs Department is). Israeli sources and the Zionist Organization of America deny that any changes took place. See the following two web sites for more information on the charter: The Palestinian National Charter: July 1 17, 1968, MidEast Web Historical Documents, accessed January 23, 2013, http:// www.mideastweb.org/ plocha.html; The Infamous PLO Covenant, by M. Zimmerman, International Wall of Prayer, accessed January 23, 2013, http:// www.internationalwallofprayer.org/ A -077 -The -Infamous -PLO -Covenant.html. 23. Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 233. 24. Sprinzak, Brother against Brother, 253, 254. 25. Karpin and Friedman, Murder, 105 6, 108, 111. 26. Horovitz, Shalom, Friend, 169 71; Kurzman, Soldier, 482. The economy had always taken second place (behind defense) in Israel, and most members of the Knesset were less interested in it. Rabin, despite his efforts, lacked expertise. 27. Elazar and Sandler, Change and Continuity, 323. 28. Aronoff, Labor and Howard Rosen, Economic Relations between Israel and the United States, both in Robert O. Freedman, Israel under Rabin (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995), 211 13; Kort, Yitzhak Rabin, 136. Rabin benefitted by inheriting an economy on the upswing. The number of immigrants had fallen (although 77,000 had arrived in 1992), and integration was well under way. The economy, measured in gross domestic product, nearly doubled from the previous year, rising to 6.6 percent in 1992, the highest of any industrialized nation. Inflation in 1992 fell to under 10 percent for the first time since the 1970s. 29. Peter Beinart, The Crisis of Zionism (New York: Times Books, 2012), 16 17, 25. 30. Shindler, A History, 326. 31. Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 231 32. 32. Yoram Peri, Introduction: The Writing on the Wall, in Yoram Peri, ed., The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 2000), 5 6.