Rabin’s Realism, 30 Years Later
Rabin speaks at the 4 November 1995 Peace Now rally, shortly before his assassination
Yossi Alpher — November 3, 2025
Views and positions expressed here are those of the writer, and do not necessarily represent NJN's views and policy positions.
Q. With the perspective of three decades since the assassination, what in your view is Yitzhak Rabin’s legacy?
A. A secure Israel. A democratic and Jewish Israel, based on Israel’s security dominance and balanced by a readiness to concede territory to the Palestinians and prioritize peace with neighbors like Jordan and Egypt. With Rabin’s assassination on November 4, 1995, the chances for realization of this legacy declined precipitously. None of his successors has proven up to the task. For a generation of Israelis, and for many Arabs as well, Rabin represents a lost opportunity for peace.
Q. First and foremost for Rabin was security?
A. Rabin was a ‘security dove.’ He never trusted the Palestinian leadership but realized early on that Israel had to separate itself from the Palestinians – physically and politically, but not from a security standpoint – if it was to survive as a Jewish and democratic state. Way back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Rabin understood that Israel also had to resolve the Palestinian issue so it could prepare for the far greater threat posed by the Islamist regime in Iran. That concept, too, is part of his legacy.
This is why he reluctantly embraced the Oslo process and (very reluctantly, see the famous photo on the White House lawn) shook the hand of PLO leader Yasser Arafat. Rabin never hid his readiness to remove West Bank settlements in return for peace with the Palestinians – indeed, he openly castigated the settlers (“propellors”) for compromising Israel’s territorial integrity and prioritizing religious ideology over security.
But Rabin would not have endorsed the idealistic “New Middle East” slogan of his successor, Shimon Peres (and, at lease rhetorically, of President Trump today). That was not his approach to the region.
This is also why Rabin understood the need fully to integrate Israel’s Palestinian Arab citizens, inside the ‘green line,’ into liberal Israeli society. In an extraordinary 1992 election speech in Nazareth, Rabin acknowledged to Arab citizens of Israel that the Labor Party he led had been “guilty of discrimination.” He proceeded to rely on Arab party votes in the Knesset regarding the Oslo agreement.
Then, as now, this stance only added to the resentment of right-wing Israelis who thought the 1993 Oslo Accord was treason. Indeed, a Channel 12 survey taken just last weekend found only 51 percent of Israelis believing that Rabin’s contribution had been positive. All Israeli opinion polls of recent years find a majority opposing the emergence of even a demilitarized Palestinian state. Rabin failed to reverse the demographic and ideological right-religious drift of Israeli society.
Q. That is Rabin’s peace legacy. And democracy?
A. For many liberal Israelis, because Rabin was assassinated by the forces of darkness in Israeli society, his legacy must be primarily democracy and human rights. Those are the main missions of the Rabin Center in Tel Aviv. That was the tone of the 30-year commemoration of his death held in Rabin Square in Tel Aviv Saturday night.
All true, all important. But for me, who knew him and served under him, Rabin’s primary legacy is the security of a Jewish and democratic Israel, with the emphasis on security.
Q. What exactly did security mean for him?
A. I have a treasured photo on the wall of my study. Rabin, in 1989 serving as minister of defense, is seated across from me and Aaron Yariv, ‘Aharele.’ Yariv was then my boss at the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies and had served under Rabin as head of IDF Intelligence (and was my boss back then, too). We came to present Rabin with a landmark study we had carried out in our think tank in the midst of the first Intifada, analyzing Israel’s options for a Palestinian settlement and recommending consideration of a path toward Palestinian autonomy.
Rabin served in the unity government of Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir of the Likud, a legendary hawk. Shamir refused to accept a copy of our study, insinuating publicly that Yariv, a national hero since the Six-Day War, was a traitor for examining options like Palestinian autonomy and a Palestinian state. Rabin, who greeted Aharele as an old friend and comrade, leafed slowly through the study we handed him, looked up at us and asked a single question: “What was your methodology?”
Not “What do you recommend?” but ‘How did you do this?’ That was Rabin: cool and methodical. Pragmatic. At times, enigmatic.
But most of the time, outspoken. He had recently vowed to “break the bones” of the Palestinians in the first Intifada, but eventually he would shake Arafat’s hand. Unlike the current prime minister, he always openly spoke his mind. There was nothing calculated in his manner; no PR considerations.
Q. He had some unusual additional character traits, at least by today’s Israeli standards...
A. He was painfully shy. You would spot him at a diplomatic reception (prime ministerial attendance mandatory), hiding in a corner, whisky in hand, obviously dying for a smoke, avoiding mingling as best he could. Yet as far as I can recall, he was the only Israeli leader who ever truly befriended, and was befriended by, an Arab leader. Look at the famous photo of Rabin and Jordan’s King Hussein, enjoying a cigarette break. Read Hussein’s extraordinary and heartbreaking eulogy at Rabin’s funeral, which opened “my brother.”
He had, for an Israeli politician, unusual integrity. Today, with corruption ‘built in’ at the highest levels, it looks both painful and laughable to recall that Rabin’s first term as prime minister ended with his resignation over a bank account his wife neglected to close in the US when he returned from his ambassadorial post in Washington.
It is equally painful to recall his sense of responsibility to the public, for example his mid-October 1994 TV address taking direct responsibility for the failed IDF rescue attempt (two Israeli dead) of an Israeli held hostage in the West Bank. Rabin was not personally involved in the IDF operation, but as leader he was responsible. Compare to the prime minister who doggedly dodges responsibility for what happened on October 7, 2023, when over 1,000 Israelis were slaughtered on his watch.
Q. Bottom line?
A. I have wept twice in the past 30 years over the tragic and dramatic shattering of prospects for peace with the Palestinians. Once, when Rabin was assassinated on November 4, 1995. And once on October 7, 2023. I fear that someday soon I will weep again when a Kahanist-messianic leader in Israel, citing Israel’s release of Hamas terrorists as justification, pardons Rabin’s assassin, Yigal Amir. Already, some 40 percent of the Israeli Jewish public deny that Amir was the assassin. Even now, the Israeli messianic right is busy changing the narrative.
Yitzhak Rabin, a reclusive Israeli leader killed by right-wing incitement as he pursued peace, was a hero.
Photo:: Israel Press and Photo Agency (I.P.P.A.) / Dan Hadani collection, National Library of Israel / CC BY 4.0, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
