On the Jewish calendar, today is the 25th anniversary of Prime Minister Yitzḥak Rabin’s assassination at the hands of a fellow Jewish Israeli. Rabin, after a long and impressive career in the military and in politics, had not long beforehand signed the Oslo Accords, and was murdered by a zealous opponent of that decision. Reflecting on the occasion, David Horovitz writes:
The peace effort collapsed in the aftermath of the Rabin assassination. For what it’s worth, looking back, this writer believes it would have collapsed had he lived—foundering on the duplicity of Yair Arafat, destroyed by the terrorism the PLO leader never abandoned; Eitan Haber, Rabin’s most trusted aide, once told me why he disagreed, though he stressed that this was, obviously, only “an assessment.”
What is clear is that Israel hauled itself back from the abyss into which it stared on the night of November 4, 1995. We internalized that our country simply would not survive if it continued to tear itself apart from within, not in this unforgiving region.
A quarter-century later, our streets are again full of demonstrators and counter-demonstrators—reviling and championing a prime minister, with sometimes vicious rhetoric and a worrying clatter of confrontation and violence. . . . We’ve been there, came back from the brink, and owe it to ourselves and our tiny, precious country to remember how greatly what unites us outweighs our divisions, and act accordingly.
Read more on Times of Israel: https://www.timesofisrael.com/25-years-after-yitzhak-rabin-was-assassinated-a-reminder/