The inner price Israel pays for its continuing occupation of the West Bank
“YOU were the pillar of fire before the camp and now we are left only as the camp, alone and in the dark”. So said his weeping grand-daughter, eulogising Yitzhak Rabin after he was shot in the back by a Jewish religious zealot 12 years ago. The murder of a strong and popular prime minister appeared briefly to unite the Jewish state. But the Israel of that time was in fact a camp divided. This year's anniversary has brought grim new evidence of how bitter the divisions have grown.
Millions of Israelis continue to mourn the war hero who shook the hand of Yasser Arafat and had seemed poised like a Moses to save the Jewish state by leading it out of the West Bank and Gaza, the lands he had himself conquered as army chief in 1967. But to a large minority of Israelis, Yigal Amir, his unrepentant murderer, has also become a hero. Though he remains in prison, Mr Amir has been allowed to marry and produce a son. A quarter of Israelis say they would not object to his sentence being commuted. At a recent football match, fans of one Jerusalem team horrified respectable Israel by greeting a call to remember the anniversary with chants in praise not of the fallen leader but of the fanatic who killed him.
The resurgence now of Israel's divisions over Rabin is no coincidence. He was murdered by one of those Israelis who say that the Jews have been granted a divine right to the whole of biblical Israel, and that this overrides both the Palestinian right of self-determination and the decisions arrived at by the secular institutions of Israeli democracy. The Oslo peace process of the 1990s convinced Israel's national-religious right that Rabin intended to surrender the God-given land. And now comes a new peace process, stirring new fears of betrayal. Later this month Arabs and Israelis are due to meet at Annapolis in Maryland. To make this more than a photo-opportunity, Israel's present prime minister, Ehud Olmert, will have to endorse the principle of sharing Jerusalem with a Palestinian state and giving up the bulk at least of the West Bank.
Whether some new Yigal Amir is plotting right now to destroy this plan by murder it is impossible to say. But one moral of the Rabin story is clear. Although history let some lucky countries (such as Britain, but not—remember Algeria—France) colonise the lands of others for a while without corroding unity and democracy at home, Israel is not one of those. Its own definition of itself, encompassing not only the location of its borders but also its internal cohesion and its political and moral values, is hostage to the fate of the Palestinian-inhabited territories Israel still occupies by military force.
As the stronger party, Israelis sometimes behave as though they can afford better than the weak and divided Palestinians to postpone the day when historic Palestine must be divided into separate Jewish and Arab states. They are wrong. As the fight over the legacy of Rabin shows, the longer the occupation of the West Bank continues, the coarser, more fractious and more potentially violent Israel's inner life becomes. It is too much to say, as some do, that the survival of Israel depends on finding a safe way to leave. But the survival of Israeli democracy may well depend on it.
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