I was there, in the square in front of Tel Aviv’s City Hall, on the night Yitzhak Rabin was murdered. It was supposed to be a different kind of rally, different from all the other demonstrations I had gone to in my life.
Instead of a protest, it was a demonstration in support, a demonstration of gratitude to Rabin and Shimon Peres for what they had done for peace between Israel and the Palestinians. We wanted to declare our appreciation for these two no-longer-young gentlemen who had managed to break free of the old patterns of thinking that had fixed their attitudes toward the Palestinians for decades.
It was Nov. 4, 1995. The square was packed with people. Tens of thousands of peace activists and supporters had arrived. We were all aware of the obstacles Rabin faced in moving toward peace. We had seen the angry demonstrations by the right wing, and the venomous vigils each Friday in front of his official residence in Jerusalem. We had heard the incitement of the right’s leaders, Benjamin Netanyahu and Ariel Sharon, and of the right-wing rabbis who considered Rabin a traitor and declared that he should be judged.
Our support for Rabin was neither blind nor automatic. Along with our profound appreciation for his metamorphosis, we never stopped doubting and wondering — even that evening as we talked among ourselves — if Rabin really meant to conclude a meaningful, comprehensive, lasting peace with the Palestinians.
Was he capable of breaking free from the trust in military strength that had shaped his worldview from childhood? (This was a man, after all, who had been accused only seven years earlier of ordering soldiers to break the bones of Palestinian militants at the beginning of the first intifada.) Or would it turn out that he really meant what others had meant before him when they used the word “peace”: A rearrangement of our defenses tailored to meet only Israel’s security needs?
That night in the square, at the height of the Oslo peace process, it was hard not to believe that our struggle was coming to an end and that real peace was only a matter of time. It was as if Rabin had opened a window through which fresh, clear air suddenly began to blow. We knew that the process wasn’t perfect. In the occupied territories, Israel was still confiscating swaths of land, paving roads meant for Israelis alone and moving in Jewish settlers.
That night we wanted not just to thank Rabin for how far he’d come but to encourage him to stride forward, to be more determined and unequivocal. We wanted to remind him that he still had more support among us than he had opponents among those who demonstrated against him and called him a murderer and traitor.
We wanted to remind him that to achieve peace, it is not enough to meet your enemy halfway. Each side must walk the entire way toward the other, because if you don’t walk toward your enemy’s fears, wounds and devastation, you haven’t moved at all. We felt that the peace process was reversible, fragile, almost hopeless, and that for it to succeed, we would have to act against our most profound fears, against the survival instinct we had attained through so many wars.
I remember how he spoke. Short, straightforward sentences, in simple, informal, direct Hebrew. I remember him smiling with bashful delight at the sight of the crowd and self-consciously singing the “Song of Peace,” the peace movement’s anthem. “Don’t just say, ‘A day will come’/Bring that day yourself/For it is no dream!” And a few minutes later — three gunshots, chaos, confusion. In the days that followed, a sense of personal and public loss, the end of an era, the end of hope, a feeling that a polluted, fanatic, violent flood had suddenly welled up from Israel’s subconscious depths and would determine our fate from that moment onward.
Ten years. Rabin’s murderer failed, it seems, to turn the clock back, or to destroy the process of conciliation between the two nations. But he was able to slow it down, to tangle it up, to splatter it with more blood, Israeli and Palestinian.
Today, Israel is ruled by Ariel Sharon, the man who worked against Rabin’s peace policy. Ironically, Sharon has become Rabin’s heir — in his daring, in the political and personal risk he has assumed, but also in his ambivalence about the continuation of the occupation and the possibility of real peace.
These have been 10 grueling, bitter years. How much we hoped, that night on the square, that we were coming close to the end of the conflict, to the beginning of a healthier and saner new era. How innocent we were while the murderer walked among us with a pistol in his pocket.
— Israeli novelist David Grossman is the author of “Death as a Way of Life: Israel Ten Years After Oslo” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). This article was translated by Haim Watzman.
