Rabin thought peace with Arafat was only a ‘long shot’

[shira]

Yitzhak Rabin considered the likelihood of reaching a peaceful resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with Yasser Arafat to be only “a long shot.” But he attempted it, reluctantly, via the Oslo process, because he recognized that Muslim fundamentalists were gradually winning over the hearts and minds of the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza, and that their domination would mean “the certainty of no settlement at all.”

That was the explanation offered by Rabin on Wednesday, November 1, three days before he was assassinated, to Yehuda Avner, his long-time English speechwriter and friend, when Avner met with Rabin in his Jerusalem office ahead of a planned return to the prime minister’s employ. “It is either the PLO or nothing,” Rabin said.

Avner, who worked with prime ministers Levi Eshkol, Golda Meir, notably Menachem Begin and, briefly, Shimon Peres, had already worked with Rabin during his first prime ministerial term in the 1970s, and prior to that when Rabin was Israeli ambassador in Washington. As the veteran diplomat, today 81, explains in a new book, he had just completed an ambassadorship to Australia in late 1995 and had been invited by Rabin to rejoin his team.

“I met him at his Jerusalem office on Wednesday, 1 November,” Avner writes in The Prime Ministers: An Intimate Narrative of Israeli Leadership, which is being published this month by Toby Press. “My first question was, ‘Why did you shake Yasser Arafat’s hand?’”

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http://www.jpost.com/ArtsAndCulture/Books/Article.aspx?id=170285

[shira]

1. more from the OP regarding what Rabin thought 15 years ago

“Iran is the banker,” Rabin pointed out, “pouring millions into the West Bank and Gaza in the form of social welfare and health and education programs, so that it can win the hearts of the population and feed religious fanaticism."

Next, Rabin came to the thinking at the heart of his decision to pursue the Oslo process: The Israel-Arab conflict, he said, “was always considered to be a political one: a conflict between Arabs and Israelis. The fundamentalists are doing their level best to turn it into a religious conflict – Muslim against Jew, Islam against Judaism. And while a political conflict is possible to solve through negotiation and compromise, there are no solutions to a theological conflict. Then it is jihad – religious war: their God against our God. Were they to win, our conflict would go from war to war, and from stalemate to stalemate.

“And that, essentially,” the prime minister summed up to his longtime adviser, “is why I agreed to Oslo and shook hands, albeit reluctantly, with Yasser Arafat. He and his PLO represent the last vestige of secular Palestinian nationalism. We have nobody else to deal with. It is either the PLO or nothing. It is a long shot for a possible settlement, or the certainty of no settlement at all at a time when the radicals are going nuclear.”