On November 4, 1995, Rabin was assassinated by a young Jewish religious nationalist, who took the rhetoric about the “non-Jewish” government and its “traitorous policy” to its logical conclusion. In the months before the murder, a vocal campaign led by religious groups had included influential rabbis cursing the government and Rabin personally and discussing his culpability under halachic law15 and the necessity of sentencing him to death. Rabin's assassination provoked deep shock among the majority of the Israel public. People, mainly secular youth, kindling candles and singing songs of mourning and protest, suddenly filled squares and streets, especially in the metropolitan areas. The leitmotif was “How were we [the secularist peace seekers] able to let them [the religious fundamentalists] kill Rabin?” “Where were we during the right-wing demonstrations that depicted Rabin as a traitor?!” For a moment, it appeared that a new kind of civil and secular society was in the making, built around a new secular saint or martyr, Rabin. The mass media amplified the feeling that the murder had crystallized a new generation with a central collective experience and spiritual revelation, resembling that of the “JFK generation” in the United States.
Indeed, the assassination caused the secular right-wing opposition considerable embarrassment and temporarily silenced even the most vociferous and aggressive religious opposition to the peace process.16 For a short time, the murder had an intense political boomerang effect, with a prevailing expectation that “Rabin's legacy” had completely conquered public opinion, to the tune of a continued mandate for the Labor government. This evaluation, along with the desire to receive popular approval for his leadership, and to establish a stronger government coalition without depending on Arab parties, led Rabin's successor, Shimon Peres, to advance the election date by five months. Converting the moral indignation caused by the assassination into political gains proved to be an impossible dream. The assassination served to sharpen social identities and boundaries, but did not legitimize change. On the contrary, as one camp sharpened its boundaries and mobilized its supporters, the political dynamic led to a countermobilization of the rival camp. In fact, as the election campaign began, people slowly returned to their pre-assassination stances. If any change occurred in the 1996 election, it appeared within the two major political blocs, and not between them, as occurred in the 1999 elections.
From the perspective of the “civil” elite, the four years under Labor-Meretz rule were characterized by an accelerated process of “normalization,” “secularization,” and “civilianization” of Israeli politics and society. This “normalization” process included the attempt at historical conciliation with the Palestinians and the strengthening of Israel's political and economic position in the Middle East, as well as a series of internal reforms. The basic perception was that the quality of Israel's internal regime was strongly connected with “normalization” of its external status and vice versa. The Knesset continued to adopt a series of citizens' rights and “human dignity” laws, and the Supreme Court sped up what Justice Aharon Barak called the “constitutional revolution” by rendering several liberal and “enlightened” decisions.17 From the perspective of the religious, traditional, or simply conservative segments of the Jewish population, these four years were perceived as the years of “de-Judification” or “Hellenization” of the state. The Israeli state and society's basic “Jewish” identity became, alongside the Palestinian problem, the hottest public issue, bringing the whole society to the brink of a culture war. The religious-nationalistic conservative streams felt threatened by “decadent Westernized and Americanized” culture, which they feared would take over “Jewish society” and transform Israel into “just another nation.” They saw the 1996 election as the last chance “to save” the Jewish state from destruction and mobilized all their human and material resources to win it.
The basic problem of the Israeli control system, the existence of about five million Jews and close to four million Palestinians within the territory of “Greater Israel,” explains its policy deadlock.18 In the long run, if Israel wants to maintain its basic character as a “Jewish state,” whatever that means, it will be forced to make painful territorial and political concessions. This will have a drastic impact not only on Israel's internal social fabric and culture but on its regional and international position. The results of the February 2001 election for the premiership can be interpreted as a strong backlash on the part of a considerable portion of the Jewish electorate against what were seen as far-reaching concessions to the Palestinians (but with which the latter themselves were nonetheless quite rightly not content). When asked to accept what were perceived as unacceptable losses, albeit mainly symbolic ones, both sides showed themselves to be not yet culturally ripe for reconciliation.
1. On the Old Testament as mythology, see Thompson, Mythic Past.
2. The suicide story is told by the Jewish-Roman historian Josephus Flavius. Nachman Ben-Yehuda convincingly argues in his book The Masada Myth that the supposed group suicide was, in fact, mass murder. A small number of men, he claims, actually slaughtered all the others, including children and women. For a more comprehensive analysis of the Zionist meta-narrative, see Zerubavel, Recovered Roots.
3. Bar-Kochba, or “Son of the Star,” as his followers called him, was also called Bar Koziba, or “The Liar,” by his opponents.
4. Only during the 1980s was an attempt made to equate this rebellion with the insane politics that led to national disaster. See Harkabi, Bar Kokhba Syndrome.
5. Among the 65 million Europeans who migrated to the New World between 1800 and 1850, there were more than 4 million Jews, or 6 percent of the total, compared with their 1.5 percent representation in the total population of Europe. During the first quarter of the twentieth century, about 20 percent of European Jewry migrated to the Americas.
6. See Kimmerling and Migdal, Palestinians.
7. Shafir, Land, Labor, and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.
8. A dunum is a Turkish measure of land commonly used in the Middle East. An acre is equal to about 4.5 dunums.
9. Horowitz and Lissak, Origins of the Israeli Polity.
10. For an excellent overview of the political ingredients in the Jewish-Palestinian conflict, see Morris, Righteous Victims.
11. Small groups within the Jewish community, such as Brit—Shalom, Ichud, and later Mapam, the left-wing Zionist-Socialist party, supported the idea in the late 1930s and 1940s. The vast majority, however, rejected it. The main disseminators of binationalism were intellectuals at the Hebrew University such as Martin Buber and Yehuda Leib Magnes. They met with very hostile reactions by the majority of their compatriots.
12. See Morris, Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949.
13. Some talked in this context about the “banalization of brutality” in Israeli culture. See Lissak, “Intifada and Israeli Society.”
14. The Shas party left Rabin's government partly because of the personal problems of its charismatic young leader Arieh Deri, who was charged with corruption, and partly for political reasons. The party's spiritual leader, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, is regarded as a moderate on issues regarding the Jewish—Arab conflict, but most of the party's supporters are hard-liners.
15. Jewish law in Israel is applied to the sphere of private laws, such as marriage, divorce, burial, and the determination of Jewish ethnic nationality, but not to the public, political sphere (see chapter 6). This is one of the many compromises the Israeli state has made between its basic civil and primordial orientations.
16. Typically, on the right, the shock was expressed by wonder over “how a Jew could kill a Jewish prime minister” and less over the general implications of an assassination for the political system and culture.