THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, November 7, 1995 TAG: 9511070002
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A10 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Medium: 69 lines
Enemies of peace between Israel and its neighbors predictably celebrated the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin after a giant peace rally Saturday in Tel Aviv.
But the countless friends of a credible Middle East peace were shocked, sickened and saddened by a Jewish law student's gunning down of the courageous 73-year-old leader who had devoted his life to realizing fully the dream of a safe and prosperous Jewish homeland.
As a member of the Jewish underground, Mr. Rabin fought to establish a state in which Jews could live free from persecution. As a military leader, he defended Israel against terrorists and armies bent on destroying it. He was the general who directed the Israeli campaign in the June 1967 Six Day War that extended Israel's reach to territories that a quarter-century later as head of state he was yielding to Palestinian control.
As the most prominent Labor Party politician-statesman, he became a negotiator of agreements designed to enable Jews and Arabs to live side by side in peace, security and mutual respect.
Is that so wild a dream? Alas, too many Arabs and Jews still think so. Israel and the rest of the world have long been accustomed to Arabs - Palestinians and Syrians among them - and extremist Arab and Iranian Islamic fundamentalists vilifying Mr. Rabin as a Nazi and likening Israel to the criminal Nazi state that slaughtered 6 million Jews and millions of other innocents. But to their enduring guilt and shame, Israeli right-wing extremists opposed to his peacemaking had lately pilloried the prime minister as a Gestapo agent and traitor to his country. Unidentified speakers claimed the assassination was the work of the ``Jewish Avenging Organization,'' which may or may not exist.
None, however, can doubt the existence of the Israeli extremists who see any negotiated peace with Palestinians as perilous, if not fatal, to Israelis - most immediately, to Jewish settlers in the West Bank of the Jordan River that is coming under Palestinian rule. These Jewish extremists also see a peace deal as a threat to Israel and to their fantasy of a Greater Israel sustained eternally by God's will and indomitable military power.
But his life as soldier, politician and national leader had taught Mr. Rabin about the limits of armed might and the heavy price Israel would continue to pay in blood, treasure and tears if it failed to make peace with the Palestinians and Jordan and Syria as it had with Egypt. He saw most clearly that an Israel protected only by guns, missiles and bombs, an Israel compelled to keep hostile Palestinians under its thumb indefinitely, would be ever at war, as it has been since its bloody birth in 1948; an Israel unable to thrive as it could in a peaceful setting.
A peaceful Middle East? Is such possible in a region where tribal wars were the norm into the modern era, where Israel is the sole democracy amid a sea of states dominated by dictators and kings and where instability and violence are the rule?
Mr. Rabin was great enough, courageous enough, realistic enough, knowledgeable enough to recognize that humans who make war can also erect peace structures rooted less in trust than in justice and mutual interests and enforced by moral, economic and military strength. He insisted - and the evidence is on his side - that most Arabs and Jews yearn for a just and secure peace.
His mission was to seek it. That he was cut down after addressing a mass rally organized by Israelis supporting his quest for peace does not invalidate the truths that motivated him. Nor, we pray, will it arrest or reverse the peace march he so bravely led. by CNB