Yitzhak Rabin (Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak at right)

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Journal Archives

BOSTON

Fourteen years later, the horror of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination is still etched in the Israeli national conscience, a feeling not unlike that felt by Americans ever since Nov. 22, 1963.

For those Americans old enough to remember President Kennedy’s assassination, the 22nd of November is what the 4th is to Israel, a day that shook the foundation of a nation.

We Israelis are no strangers to tragedy, but Rabin’s death was the ultimate; our leader, statesman, friend and hero, who was determined to transform the hypothetical possibility of peace into a full-blown reality, gunned down while trying to promote this peace; it shocked all of us.

But as long-time veterans of adversity, we’ve learned how to get up the next morning and resume the work that awaits. And so it is that we remain committed to pursuing Rabin’s legacy and our own urgent agenda of securing a durable and sustainable peace with the Palestinians.

It is true that many attempts since the assassination to further the peace process have been met with disappointing and in some instances unbearable results. The historic opportunity to reach an agreement at Camp David in 2000 resulted in an intifada that led to the deaths of hundreds of innocent Israelis. Ariel Sharon’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, in 2005, led to Hamas terrorists’ turning an opportunity to build communities into an excuse to destroy them, firing thousands of rockets on innocent Israeli civilians, and then using their own people as shields when Israel had no choice but to respond militarily.

We could focus on these disappointments, using them as a reason to abandon the effort to achieve peace. But the intractable fact is simply this: The status quo is unsustainable. Our government is well aware of that fact, as evidenced by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Bar Ilan University address on June 14, when he elucidated his commitment to achieve a two-state solution, and as shown through the words of President Shimon Peres in a recent speech to the Knesset: “Don’t slow down the negotiations — look for every break, try every option in order to put an end to more than 100 years of quarrel and bloodshed.”

But if we are to finally achieve peace, to finally realize Rabin’s dream, we must begin negotiations without any pre-conditions, and understand that for an agreement to be reached — just as Israel recognizes the future Palestinian state as the home of their people — so too should Palestinians recognize Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people.

There will be plenty of challenges, and they are well documented. But in the face of these challenges, I’m tempted to channel the spirit of a man for whom loss was all too frequent an experience and perseverance a way of life, the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy.

Senator Kennedy always had a sense of what needed to be done, so when he traveled to Rabin’s funeral, he took dirt with him he had dug from his brothers’ graves to place in Rabin’s. There may have been no man there that day who more deeply understood the loss we in Israel experienced than this good man. And so it is that I feel confident in asserting that Senator Kennedy would have fully shared the sentiment put forth by Rabin’s wife, Leah, when she wrote:

“If somehow Yitzhak could have talked about his own death, he would not have spent his time accusing individuals or been paralyzed by fear. His natural instinct would have been to analyze why it happened and to determine what we as a nation were going to do about it now. . . . The tragedy had to hold a lesson for all of us.”

The lesson the tragedy holds for us today is a lesson that has characterized the story of the Jewish people for thousands of years: In the face of great challenges, be not fearful of failure but determined to succeed.

Israel is a country determined to succeed at achieving peace with our neighbors, even at great risk to ourselves. Our history demonstrates that this is so, our future demands it, and we owe it to our late leader, Yitzhak Rabin, to remain steadfast in pursuing it.

Nadav Tamir is consul general of Israel for New England.