The sociological phenomena surrounding the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin almost five years ago, on Nov. 4, 1995, will forever gnaw at the marrow of Israeli society.
Why did it happen? What did it say about Israeli society? What were the long-range consequences?
The questions remain. The discourse continues.
Yoram Peri, a former political adviser to Rabin and now the president of the New Israel Fund, a U.S.-based civil and human rights fund-raising agency, has put together a new book to zoom the microscope in even closer.
Published by Stanford University Press to coincide with the five-year anniversary of Rabin’s death, “The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin” analyzes the murder not in terms of the death of a great statesman, but in terms of its causes, meanings and outcomes.
Peri, the book’s editor, is among 15 scholars who examine different aspects of Israeli society — Zionism, the Arab population, the media, etc. — through the lens of the killing. Peri writes four of the chapters; everybody else writes one chapter either alone or collaboratively.
“It really explains what happened before the assassination and after it,” Peri said during a visit last week to San Francisco in his capacity as the New Israel Fund’s new president. He is the first Israeli to hold that position.
“I thought the best thing would be to bring together top professors in different disciplines to analyze it from different angles,” he explained.
The contributors include Aviezer Ravitzky, the chair of the department of Jewish thought at Hebrew University; Tamar Hermann, the director of the Tami Steinmetz Center for Peace Research at Tel Aviv University; and Majid Al-Haj, a sociology professor at Haifa University.
Peri, a professor of political sociology and communication at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, could in no way sum up the many hypotheses and theories in the scholarly text, but he did say a recurring theme in the book is “the propensity of Israelis to use violence in politics.”
Peri, the former editor in chief of the Israeli Labor Party newspaper, Davar, contended that the atmosphere was ripe for a violent strike just prior to the premier’s shooting.
“However, the assassination of Rabin was sort of a scapegoat mechanism that caused the level of violence in Israeli society to go down — and enabled the peace process to continue,” he said.
“Before the assassination, the potential for civil war was very high. Because of the shock that the assassination created, people on the extreme right could not pursue their policies and the majority in the center became very cautious.”
Essentially, Peri said, the killing of Rabin released the steam from a highly pressurized situation.
That enabled important steps in the peace process — such as the Hebron agreement under Benjamin Netanyahu and the withdrawal of some illegal settlers under Ehud Barak — to occur without any massive Israeli public outcry or violent protest.
“I attribute that to the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin,” said Peri, who wrote the afterword to Rabin’s memoirs, which were published in 1996. “The phrase that ‘Rabin was a victim of peace’ is true.”
However, the pressure is building up again.
“It has begun to climb back up and is almost at the same level as it was before the assassination,” said Peri, who also wrote the book “Between Battles and Ballots: Israeli Military in Politics” nearly 20 years ago.
“It’s very high and it’s very dangerous. As long as the question of the territories is not solved, the potential eruption of violence is still there.”
He was referring to violence of Jews against Jews, not what happened in Israel this week.
“If we are not going to solve the problem of the West Bank and the territories and the Palestinians, another eruption could occur,” he said. “It could be people [Jews] fighting each other, or God forbid, another attempt at a political assassination.
Peri is curently on sabbatical from Hebrew University, spending the year in Washington, D.C., and researching the impact of Rabin on U.S.-Israel relations.