Last week, Former President Clinton wrote an op-ed making the fanciful claim that there would have been peace in the Middle East had Yitzchak Rabin not been murdered. I showed from the historical record that his claim was not accurate.
But there’s another assumption that’s faulty here. Implicity Clinton is blaming Israel. But by making Yitzchak Rabin the one indispensible person for peace to succeed he ignores that Rabin’s positions and those of current Prime Minister Netanyahu are actually pretty close. It’s a point that Yaacov Lozowick makes in two recent posts. In one he writes:
Mitchell Plitnick and many of his co-activists seem to accept the Palestinian narrative: the peace process was supposed to end with Israel on the 1967 border, Jerusalem divided, and some Israeli accommodation of the refugee problem. This, however, is counter factual. No Israeli government before 2000 ever accepted those positions (Yitzchak Rabin was openly against them); and while arguably some official Israeli negotiators may have come close since 2000, they were never authorized to do so by the Israeli electorate.
In the other he writes, more generally:
But perhaps it might be reasonable for self-proclaimed Israeli champions of peace to recognize that on Jerusalem, their anointed saint the martyred Rabin held the same position Netanyahu does.
But even if Yitzchak Rabin promoted the Peace Now vision of peace there was a major reason even such an accomodating would not have brought peace. Israel wasn’t negotiating with itself to make peace. It was negotiating with an unrepentant terrorist as Meryl reminds us:
The AP also did not cover things that Arafat said that utterly belied his cover of seeking peace:
Our basic aim is to liberate the land from the Mediterranean Seas to the Jordan River. We are not concerned with what took place in June 1967 or in eliminating the the consequences of the June war. The Palestinian revolution’s basic concern is the uprooting of the Zionist entity from our land and liberating it.
There is also the confession from Hamas that Arafat directed them to commit terror attacks during the height of peace negotiations with Israel.
Crossposted on Soccer Dad.
