Last of the Idealists

It has been 20 years to the day since Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was shot and killed at a peace rally in Tel Aviv's Kings of Israel Square, now Rabin Square. His assassin, Yigal Amir -- a 25-year old law student from an Orthodox family of Yemeni descent -- had become enraged by Rabin's overtures of peace and compromise toward the Palestinians, efforts for which the prime minister won the Nobel Peace Prize the year prior.

Much has transpired, and changed, in the 20 years since Rabin's assassination, both in Israel and the larger Middle East. The violence and upheaval that has consumed much of the region since the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011 has put the Arab-Israeli conflict on the proverbial back burner, and has rendered the phrase "Middle East peace process" inexact, and perhaps too abstract.

Rabin's murder still carries lessons and admonitions for the future of Israeli democracy, and indeed for the prospects of peace with the Palestinian people. In his new book, "Killing a King: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel," award-winning journalist Dan Ephron reviews the political climate that led up to Rabin's assassination, and how the collision course between an old general and a young radical would forever change the political landscape of the country.

"I think Israel was on this trajectory where -- for a couple of decades by 1995 -- where it was moving away from the pragmatists who led Israel for decades and towards the ideologues like [current Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu," said Ephron in a recent interview with NPR. Ephron goes on:

"In some ways, that process was underway anyway. It was underway for decades, but the assassination accelerated it. Now, Netanyahu has been the dominant political figure of Israeli politics in the entire period since the assassination. He was prime minister for nine out of the 20 years since the murder. "

Perhaps no one better epitomizes the post-Rabin mood in Israel than its current prime minister. Arguably the most adept politician the country has ever produced, Netanyahu has successfully tapped into Israeli exhaustion with the peace process, and -- barring one glaring exception -- has adopted a sort of wait-and-see strategy vis-a-vis Israeli national security.

Gone, it would appear, are the idealistic days of land for peace, and although Rabin's own words are so often invoked in the name of compromise, any assumptions about what the late prime minister might think of the current violence and animosities between the two peoples would be mere guess.

Rabin "understood that Israel's defense line had to include the eastern slopes of the West Bank hill ridge, which rose from an area near the Dead Sea which was 400 meters below sea level to hill tops that in one case reached a height of over 800 meters," wrote former Israeli diplomat Dore Gold in a 2012 column for Israel Hayom, referring to Rabin's final speech before the Israeli Knesset.

"What needs to be recalled is that Rabin outlined these Israeli security needs even though his government had signed the Oslo Agreement two years earlier and even added the peace treaty with Jordan a year later," Gold explained. "Seventeen years before the Arab Spring, what Rabin implicitly understood is that political conditions in the Arab world can change and that Israeli security cannot be based on a snapshot of the situation in 1995."

Around the Region

Bygones be bygones? In an interview with The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg, U.S. Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter makes the case for the Iran nuclear agreement, and weds it to Israel's overall security interests:

"Though Carter, in our conversation, was eager to minimize differences between the United States and Israel on defense strategy, I sense that he was looping back to an argument the Obama administration has tried to make, unsuccessfully, to Israeli leaders for many months-that Iran is diminished as a threat to Israel precisely because of the nuclear deal Netanyahu loathes. "The only exception to what I've said concerns Iranian long-range missiles," he noted. "But if they have high explosives on them, they're not materially more damaging than missiles coming from elsewhere. Not to minimize their importance, but what really would have made the apocalyptic rhetoric of Iran fearsome to Israel would have been nuclear weapons [on long-range missiles], and I think that's why we're pretty satisfied to have that danger taken off the table -- not forever, but in a much more satisfactory way than letting it just keep on keeping on."

Chalabi's legacy. The Daily Beast's Christopher Dickey offers a modest defense of Iraqi politician and 2003 invasion advocate Ahmad Chalabi, who died in Baghdad on Tuesday at the age of 71:

"There is a common cultural phenomenon in the Middle East where you lie to me and I lie to you but we understand each other, and we each use the lies as we need to for our own ends. That's why Chalabi, whom I had known for almost 20 years at that point, felt comfortable saying on the record he'd stop at nothing to drag the United States into war with Saddam. He had a line to sell, but he was happy to proclaim caveat emptor, buyer beware, because he knew his clients in the White House and the Pentagon were just so damn hungry for his product they wouldn't pass it up.

"Would you buy a war from this man? The Bush administration did just that. But only because it was the war they'd dreamed of to begin with."

While Chalabi's legacy will always be overshadowed by his part in the promotion of the Iraq War, it's his economic knowhow -- Chalabi was a University of Chicago-trained mathematician -- that will be sorely missed in the country, said former Iraqi deputy ambassador to the U.N. Feisal Istrabadi in an interview with Voice of America:

"Istrabadi said that despite the mixed reviews in Washington, Chalabi's death was 'really bad news for Iraq,' which is going through an economic as well as a security crisis. In recent years, Istrabadi said, Chalabi had recognized that he would never rise to high office and so ‘became a serious parliamentarian' whose intelligence and economic skills will be missed. All in all, however, Istrabadi said Chalabi's legacy was one of ‘failure and squandered potential.'"

Jordan's Putin pivot. Finally, veteran Jordanian journalist Osama Al Sharif examines Amman's recent overtures toward Moscow:

"Jordan, a close ally of the United States, has maintained close contacts with the Kremlin in recent months, especially over pursuing a political solution to the Syrian conflict. King Abdullah visited Moscow on Aug. 25 and reportedly told President Vladimir Putin that Russia had a vital role to play in bringing together rival sides in Syria to seek a solution to a war that has killed a quarter of a million people.

"Relations between Amman and Moscow have been growing rapidly and on March 24, Jordan signed a $10 billion deal with Russia or the building of the kingdom's first nuclear power plant, with two 1,000-megawatt reactors. The deal, a strategic one for the energy-starved kingdom, followed many months of negotiations."

Feedback

Questions, comments, or complaints? Feel free to send us an email, or reach out on Twitter @kevinbsullivan.