30 years ago, a gunshot echoed through Tel Aviv’s King of Israel Square and shattered more than a life. It shattered a sense of possibility that the Jewish people could argue fiercely, dream boldly, and still remain one. One people. One nation.
Yitzhak Rabin was a soldier who became a statesman, a man who believed peace required not naivete, but courage. His signature on the Oslo Accords was for some an act of vision, for others an act of betrayal. When he pushed forward without a Jewish majority in the Knesset, many felt he had gone just too far and the country’s fractures spilled into the streets.
His assassination on November 4th, 1995 wasn’t just a political murder. It was a moment of heartbreak that forced Israel to look inward. It made Israelis ask themselves, who are we? What unites us? What kind of future are we willing to fight for?
Three decades later, as Israelis again wrestle with war, identity and impossible questions, we return to Rabin. The promise of Oslo, the pain of its aftermath, and the enduring challenge of building a people that can disagree and maybe still stay together.
To help us unpack this legacy, we turn to my good friend and friend of the show, historian, educator, leader, Haviv Rettig Gur, whose insight helps us trace how the wounds of 1995 still shape the Israel of today. Haviv, thanks so much for being here with me.
Haviv: Noam, it’s great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Noam: All right. So here’s what we’re going to do. It was September of 1993. The Oslo process reached a climax. You saw Rabin shaking hands with Yasser Arafat on the White House lawn. What a weird, awkward moment where like Rabin like slowly inched to shake Arafat’s hands. And you saw President Bill Clinton just like glowing in the background. And then two years later, Rabin is assassinated. What happened? Three minutes.
Haviv: There was a divide. There was a divide in Israeli society on one fundamental profound question. And the question was, essentially, was the other side capable of ever accepting us here permanently and seriously? Arafat, Rabin himself said, would say one thing, the thing Bill Clinton wanted to hear, and in Arabic would say radically different things, literally just explicitly that the war would not end, that eventually, you know, the Palestinian’s great weapon was the Palestinian woman’s womb, was how Arafat talked about basically pushing the Israelis demographically out, in other words, preventing there from being a Jewish state, even if there is a Palestinian state, would he give up on the right of return of a permanent infinite for all time of all generations, not right of return into a Palestinian state, which is something Jews have, but a right of return to the geography from which people had left in the forties, which is something Jews do not have. Ad the question of, is this peace or are we handing guns and legitimacy to what are essentially genocidal terrorist organizations bent on our complete and total destruction, because we’re very silly people? That was the debate.
Noam: Haviv, what’s interesting is you’re not even talking about, I know Hamas was part of this at this time, but that’s not what it was exclusively about. We saw terrible moments in leading up between 93 to 95. I remember the Baruch Goldstein massacre killing Palestinians in Hebron in 1994, think it was February. I remember major major Palestinian suicide bombers just ripping through Israel. I remember the capture of Nachshon Waxman in 1994 also and I remember that whole just waiting on TV to see if he would be saved by Israel. So it was, but it wasn’t just Hamas. It was also, you’re talking about the PLO as, as a terrorist entity at that time, right?
Haviv: Yeah, yes, Arafat was was a major agent of terrorism in the world. I mean, one of the one of the really big and serious terror organizations, the Fatah that was at the head of the PLO established in 1964 in Cairo, not in 1967. It was not a response to Israeli military rule in the West Bank. It was a response to Israel’s very existence.
Arafat was very much a terrorist who hijacked planes, who murdered people, who ordered and organized the mass murder of Israelis, including children, civilians, and was committed to Israel’s total destruction, to a genocide of Israelis.
He had been forced out of Jordan by the Jordanians after essentially leading a kind of coup against the Jordanian monarchy. He then relocates to Lebanon, helps bring about the collapse of Lebanon throughout that period and the Lebanese Civil War, and then is forced by the Israelis in the 1982 Lebanon War out of Lebanon, relocates to Tunisia. And in Tunisia, he’s basically sidelined by everyone. All of his hosts hate him.
Nobody wants to deal with this Palestinian cause. The Arab world doesn’t love Israel anymore. You know, in 1979, you have the Israel-Egypt peace treaty. Jordan is basically an Israeli military protectorate from the 70s onward because it’s Israel’s longest border, stability in Jordan, non-war, non-hostility, non-aggression with Jordan is a massive Israeli existential desire. The Jordanians are eager to comply and help the Israelis because it also stabilizes Jordan.
And nobody cares about the Arafats and the crazy anti-imperial effort to destroy an Israel that year on year gets more and more powerful.
And then comes the Iraq War. And in the Iraq War, Saddam Hussein was one of the great supporters of the PLO left. Because it was an ideological stance, And it saw the Palestinian cause as a mobilizing cause for Arab nationalism. And then came the war and Saddam shot Scud missiles at Tel Aviv during the war. He tried to drag Israel in the Bush administration, the first Bush administration, did everything they could to prevent the Israelis from going in, literally refusing to coordinate to make sure the Israelis don’t fly into Iraq and join the war. They thought that would have possibly broken up the American coalition, which included Arab countries because it was to save Kuwait from a Saddam invasion of Kuwait. So by then, you know, Saddam crashes out, right? And the Palestinians last great defender in the Arab world is deeply, deeply weakened.
And during that war, Palestinians, I mean, of course, the Fatah and PLO mechanisms under Arafat went to great trouble to support Saddam in every way, now, immediately after that war, Kuwait kicks out several hundred thousand Palestinians who had made their homes in Kuwait out of this–
Noam: Yeah. By the way, I view this story as one of the greatest, I love what ifs in history. Like what if this is such a great what if I think. But one of the greatest eff-ups of Arafat’s leadership was choosing Saddam Hussein’s side. And in this fight, what a tremendous mistake geopolitically. Just awful.
Haviv: Absolutely, no question, but he didn’t have like six other options. It was his only supporter and also he had to survive and he would continue to support him. So Arafat now finds itself at the end of the war with Palestinians in a much worse position. And so they were now friendless and lost in the world.
And that was a moment of such weakness that there was this pressure from the Americans, from the Bush administration during the Shamir term before Rabin, before 1992 and Rabin’s election, to have a peace process. And they had this kind of halting kind of Madrid peace talks in a city called Madrid that was not very, it wasn’t going, it wasn’t clear that it was even real.
And then Rabin is elected in 1992 and he sees a huge opportunity. The Palestinians are sufficiently on their back feet. They’re sufficiently isolated, including in the Arab world, because of Arafat’s disastrous choices and terrible strategy and genuine belief that if you just murder Israeli children, Israel will evaporate one day because that’s basically what happened in Algeria to the French. And none of it ever works and the Palestinians are just in worse and worse situation.
And Rabin now sees an opportunity to finally settle the great problem. The great problem is military rule. We rule another people. Now we don’t want to rule another people. It isn’t a good thing for Israel. It has tremendous costs, every kind of cost you can imagine, cost in terms of outsiders looking at it and saying, what the hell is this? Cost in terms of soldiers patrolling it, moral costs, economic costs, massive costs.
And what Rabin thought was now that the Palestinian cause has been set back so much that it is reasonable to think that maybe they actually are reassessing and now want a different path. And if they want that different path, it’s there. It’s not a crazy idea.
Just one last point and then, sorry this is taking too long. The Israeli-Egyptian peace was very, very difficult. But in an important sense, it was very, very easy. They’re over there, we’re over here, a big desert divides us, you draw a line in the sand, you’re done. You’re done. We never have to look at each other.
Noam: But with Jordan also, Jordan also, there’s that ability. There’s a divide. By the way, many would argue that Oslo brought the opportunity for the Jordan peace agreement with Israel 94 as well.
Haviv: It opened that window. Absolutely. Yeah.
Noam: But it’s different. Yeah. So there’s Jordan, there’s Egypt, but the Palestinians is different. Say why it’s different.
Haviv: We’re just we’re completely intertwined. Palestinian Arab majority East Jerusalem lives with Jewish majority West Jerusalem in a totally in the old city. We walk through each other’s, you know, back back alleys and you can’t separate. And by the way, East Jerusalem is the biggest Palestinian city, whether you count it as a Palestinians do as part of the West Bank or you count it as Israelis do as part of Israel, it’s the biggest Israeli Arab city.
Noam: But here’s the thing that’s so interesting about this. If you go to Jerusalem, it’s not like there’s a divide. It’s not like that’s not like the Berlin Wall. It’s you just keep on walking and you’re in East Jerusalem. You keep on walking. You’re in West Jerusalem. It’s just a different part of Jerusalem.
Haviv: It’s impossible to extricate. And they’re divided by Israel into two territories. And there’s no way to get away from each other. And so the only way to move forward is reconciliation. If you’re reconciled, if you don’t hate each other, then any line in the sand will do. And if you hate each other, no line in the sand is going to work. There’s no policy solution as long as there isn’t reconciliation. And that, Rabin thought that reconciliation was possible because Palestinians were reassessing.
Now, I’ll just say for the record, he was mistaken. He was tragically, horrifically, in Arafat specifically, totally mistaken. But the debate was a debate that felt deeply existential. That real fear, real fear that Rabin was taking this territory, Judea and Samaria, the West Bank of the Jordan River. That’s why the Jordanians gave it the name the West Bank. From Jordan, it looks like the West Bank. And it’s the highlands that overlook most of Israel’s major population centers, it shrinks Israel down to nine miles wide. This is a desperately risky idea that this would become a state given to a Yasser Arafat or a Hamas. That’s an incredibly risky idea.
Now, you might argue that it’s necessary, but you can’t ever pretend that it isn’t massively risky. And by the way, everything Israelis have experienced since then tells them, including left-wing Israelis who still to this day want a Palestinian state, that it might not be doable. We don’t know how to hand it over without it going to Hamas, without it becoming dangerous.
So that was the debate in 1995 when one guy from the right-wing edge of the religious Zionist movement over on that edge of the right, not representative of the center-right at all, but over on the edge, decided to take it into his own hands. As he later would put it, Yigal Amir in an interview, he said, you know, Rabin didn’t run on the specific peace deal he negotiated. He ran generally on left wing and maybe on the occupation being a problem. I wanted a vote on the deal because I knew the people wouldn’t accept it ,and the only way to force that vote was to kill Rabin and that’s what he did and that’s where, how that happened.
Noam: I want to talk about Rabin as a person because one of the things that you said that I think is just interesting that you said, he’s mistakenly viewed as someone who is very dovish, but he actually wasn’t a major dove. He wasn’t. I think it was Henry Kissinger who said that one of the things he can’t stand about how Rabin is remembered is like he was some like left-wing hippie child. It’s not what he was. It’s not who he was.
He was a person who actually consistently deeply believed in security. And he believed that the best way, maybe mistakenly, but he believed that the best way to arrive at security was through peace with the Palestinians.
He was a man of paradox. He was a man of paradox. If you go through the history of Rabin, you could see it. He was a man who in 1948 was incredibly important in the war of independence. He is somebody who led Israel’s astonishing six day assault against the coalition of Arab armies in 67, ultimately bringing the West Bank today in Samaria and Gaza and the Sinai and the Golan into Israel’s control. That’s what he did. He was the head of the army.
He was the defense minister in the eighties. He ordered an aggressive, aggressive crackdown against the Palestinians in the late eighties during the first Intifada. He has a famous line of something like we break their bones, something like that. He was not some lefty hippie, you know, rah rah, socialist kind of, it’s not who he was.
Haviv: He was socialist. But all the rest you’re right. Yes.
Noam: Okay, yes, he absolutely was an Israeli socialist, when the labor movement was a thing in Israel, we’ll get to that later. And at his funeral, people like King Hussein of Jordan said, you lived as a soldier and you died as a soldier for peace.
Haviv: Not a New York socialist. Those are very different kinds of people.
Noam: I’ll tell you what I love. And let me say a little bit more about Rabin, about who this person was. He was a North Tel Aviv kind of guy. For people who don’t understand. Someone in Alabama right now listening. What does it mean that he was a North Tel Aviv kind of guy? Listen, this is going to be fun to get your description of that.
Haviv: Problem with it is that he is a North Tel Aviv guy, he literally lived in North Tel Aviv, but he moved there before North Tel Aviv was the North Tel Aviv you’re referring to.
Noam: You sound like my father describing living the fact that he grew up in the five towns in New York, but before the five towns became the five towns. That’s what you sound like right now.
Haviv: Yeah. Rabin lived in a neighborhood called Ramat Aviv, it was very much Northern Tel Aviv when he moved there, I believe in the seventies. It was a new neighborhood. It’s important to remember Northern Tel Aviv today is where rich people live. People who made a lot of money in tech, the smallest apartment there costs three times what my apartment costs and is a third the size. So what is that? Ninefold?
Northern Tel Aviv is extraordinarily expensive. There’s a soap opera in the 90s called Ramat Aviv Gimel, which is a neighborhood adjacent to Ramat Aviv where Rabin lived. And it was Beverly Hills 90210. In other words, because it is fancy and rich and these people have no problems except their feelings about each other, therefore it makes for a good soap opera setting.
But the thing about Rabin was he grew up in the socialist, very much egalitarian Israel where everyone was kind of poor. And then he becomes this important political figure in a period in the eighties where there’s an economic collapse, but also massive economic reforms led by the, driven by the collapse that suddenly drive in the early nineties, beginning basically with his government, a massive growth in the economy and wealth. And Rabin therefore is a man who comes from nowhere, nowhere, I mean, he was always an important guy in the Palmach and the IDF.
Noam: Well, he was born in Israel, which is interesting, he’s a sabra.
Haviv: He was the first prime minister to be born in Israel. But he comes from a poor socialist Israel and rides Israel’s growing wealth and influence as the prime minister, basically, as a political leader, and arrives at a moment where he thinks, like, for example, when he says, look, it’s worth taking risks because we are very powerful, which he says in the Oslo process. He would not have said that in the 70s, but the Israel that he experienced when he was prime minister in 77, his government fell in 77, but the Israel he now leads in 92, the long story short is he had seen that Israel get powerful. Now that’s also the story of Northern Tel Aviv. He moves to Northern Tel Aviv when they’re literally just building a new non wealthy suburb of a Tel Aviv that’s growing quickly. And there’s too many people trying to move in. And so they’re just building fast.
My grandparents, by the way, bought two buildings down from him in the 70s, brand new apartment in 1972 in the building next door.
Noam: Wow, Haviv. Amazing. I didn’t know you came from North Tel Aviv stock. It’s pretty good.
Haviv: So all the protests against him over the years, they had to hear from their window. They did not realize that when they were buying that Mr. Rabin was buying in the building next door. As he, for a very brief period, as he, his own personal life of going from basically socialist willful poverty and egalitarianism to kibbutz egalitarianism and poverty, to well-to-do Tel Aviv neighborhood and Israel going from a poor socialist country to a powerful one. These all track very, very closely. So yes, he’s absolutely a product of Northern Tel Aviv, but he’s a product of that whole arc of Northern Tel Aviv becoming that wealthy, powerful area that it is now.
Noam: Yeah, and I’ll say a little bit more about North Tel Aviv and why this matters to me and in the story of Rabin in general. A lot of people who, if you haven’t been to Israel or if you go to Israel, you only see one side of Israel, there are Israels within Israel. There’s the North Tel Aviv Israel. There’s the West Bank Jew, Judean Samaria kind of Israel. There’s the Jerusalem Israel. There’s the Kibbutz Israel. There’s all different types of Israel and they…It’s a huge mosaic.
But the North Tel Aviv, the way it’s described often is as academic, as highbrow, often secular, maybe an elitist sort of Judaism that sometimes looks down upon the religious, certainly the settlers. Maybe not now anymore, but certainly in the times that that is the perception in the 80s and early 90s. And he’s like an old school, early secular Zionist. That is who Rabin was.
And here’s what I love about Rabin though. Ready for this? I like when we talk about someone’s history and we don’t just talk about their, you know, major moments or major, major foibles, but something about them. You know what else I, in all my research about Rabin that I saw is what I love about the guy. He despised small talk. He hated it. He hated small talk.
Haviv: He was apparently really bad at it. He was deeply uncomfortable in small talk. He couldn’t do it.
Noam: I’m just saying like I know he had this like intense monotone voice and he had the most distinct voice ever like I can’t do an impression but it was a voice and Slow slow, but his small talk like he didn’t like it. I kind of like that about him, he just wanted to the real stuff.
Haviv: I read a description of his personality that he was so introverted and uncomfortable with like bubbly social settings that when you got him to, because of that introversion, when you got him to smile it felt like a victory. He got something out like he was this very introverted quiet guy which is such a fascinating thing for a guy who rose up the ranks of the army, was chief of staff of the army, was defense minister, prime minister, came back 15 years later, prime minister again. And all of it while being extremely non-personally charismatic, but somehow that very introvertedness was very charismatic in the Israel of his day.
Noam: Yeah, there’s something about it, exactly. He smoked so many cigarettes that he had yellow stains in his fingers also. So part of that like anxiety maybe, like he had these yellow stains. He had a major rivalry with Shimon Peres. Also as part of his story, they went back and forth, back and forth about who’s going to lead, who gets the credit. They, you know, the story of Entebbe of 1976, they went back and forth with who gets the credit is that Peres got very upset that Rabin took the credit for it. Peres, like, this was all my idea.
Haviv: Peres, by the way, lived down the street in northern Tel Aviv, four buildings down.
Noam: Amazing. So, this is part of the story of how we get to the moment of, of Rabin’s assassination. So let me get to the day of Rabin’s assassination. He gets to the podium to speak and they used to call Rabin, Melech Yisrael, Rabin, King of Israel. He was very nervous that night. He thought there would be a low turnout. Well, there were a hundred thousand people there. And this is what he declared in his monotone, which I will not again try to imitate, but he said, I was a military man for 27 years. I fought as long as there was no chance for peace. I believe there is a chance now, a great chance, and we must take advantage of it.
Shimon Peres, the guy who I said was his ultimate rival who grew up, who lived down the block from him. He said it was the happiest he ever saw Rabin. Like that moment. It was the happiest he ever saw Rabin.
There’s a song called Shir le’shalom, Song for Peace, which I want to just say in English. I’ll say part of it. He said part of it, is in English. It doesn’t have the same feel in Hebrew, but let’s say it in English. Here’s part of it. So just sing a song for peace. Don’t whisper a prayer. Just sing a song for peace and a loud shout. Don’t say the day will come. Bring on that day because it is not a dream. And in all the city squares, cheer only for peace.
He put the lyrics of that song into his jacket pocket. He walked down the stairs towards his car when suddenly Yigal Amir, like you said, a Kippa wearing Jewish person on the fringe of the right walks up to Rabin and we’ll check what I just said in a bit. Okay. Cause I want to check us on that. Cause someone that might check us and they might be right to and fired three bullets towards him. He was murdered. Within 40 minutes, it was declared that he was, he was dead, assassinated.
The first politically motivated assassination of a Jewish leader since 1933, when Haim Arlosoroff was assassinated on the beach, and not since the murder of Gedalia Ben Achikam, which we still commemorate now 2,500 years later, was the leader of the Jewish people killed by another Jew. And this was a major, major moment.
I want to present two different perspectives on this right now. Perspective number one is that when Yigal Amir, the argument is that this killed the Oslo peace process. It was not only a prime minister who was killed, it was the belief that peace might actually be possible. And when Rabin was a soldier, he was a soldier who earned the right to take risks for peace. And even if you disagreed with him, you trusted him. When he was murdered by a Jew, something broke down inside the country. lost, the left ultimately lost its moral compass. The right became defensive.
And after that, peace stopped being a shared national dream and became a political slogan. In that sense, Rabin’s assassination did not just end a life, it ended the era of peace. That’s one argument that that assassination ended it.
Another argument, the opposite is that no, it did not kill Oslo. The peace process was already collapsing. Hamas bombings were destroying Israeli psyche in cities. The PA wasn’t stopping the violence. Like you said before, what was said in Arabic by Arafat was the opposite of what was said in English. Rabin himself slowed down and was clear that he opposed a full Palestinian state. Polls showed that Israelis were losing faith in Oslo. So yes, the assassination was a national tragedy, but the peace process was in deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep trouble. It did not die that night in Tel Aviv.
What’s your take on that night and whether or not you view that night that when Rabin was murdered by Yigal Amir, whether or not that night ended the peace process or whether or not the peace process was in full decline anyway?
Haviv: The Rabin assassination for me was just like you described it, was a pivot of my life. It was a trauma I still in some senses live in. It was my political awakening. It was big, it was enormous. But specifically on the question of did it end the peace process, I think it was the opposite. I think the Rabin assassination saved the peace process, which was in freefall. Every poll from that period shows that Rabin losing the next election. And losing the next election without even a clarity that who the Likud leader is going to be, without even a relevance of not losing to a Netanyahu, just losing as a referendum on him.
And the reason was that all of this stuff, it wasn’t coming together. The Palestinian side was not fulfilling the requirements explicitly, literally, just in basic ways, of Oslo. Rabin was growing, as you said, and his last speech in the Knesset, people can Google, it’s all about his skepticism. So he’s saying, yes, it’s worth taking this risk, but he’s also saying, I’m actually deeply skeptical. I don’t know that all of this is working out the way we hope and dream. And all of that’s happening all at once, and the public is growing a little bit worried.
And then he’s assassinated, and the polling numbers of the left rise instantly. And they look like they’re going to win the next election because they’re riding the wave of the support for Rabin’s legacy. And there’s a little bit in the center, people who could go either way, of kind of horror at the right for delivering an assassination of a prime minister. And not a, you know, a beloved prime minister, a respected prime minister, the hero of 67, a man who kind of embodies the Israeli ethos in many of his, literally just the personality that we were talking about. And then they go into the election, the 1996 election between Shimon Peres, who’s now the head of the Labor Party after Rabin, and Netanyahu on the Likud. And Peres runs a terrible campaign. He’s absolutely convinced he can’t lose to this upstart, you know, Netanyahu guy nobody’s ever heard of.
And he ends up, and because of, just like you said, a series of Hamas suicide bombings in the lead up to the election. The votes tilt away from Peres and Peres loses by, if I’m not mistaken, the narrowest margin in the history of an Israeli election. I think he loses by 30,000 votes. And so the left was very nearly saved and the Oslo process was very nearly saved from collapse at the polling booth by Rabin’s assassination.
And one of the ways you understand that that’s correct, that that’s true, is that Netanyahu’s coalition is a very uncomfortable, complicated coalition with including, for example, the Shas ultra-Orthodox party, which at the time was not opposed to Oslo, willing to push it forward, and in fact did not vote against it in the Knesset vote to validate it, to ratify it in 1995. Netanyahu ends up actually implementing in those three years of his government most of the things that Rabin agreed to under the Oslo agreement, much more under literally Oslo too, the 1995 actual sort of treaty between Israelis and Palestinians.
But then when Netanyahu falls in 99, his government falls, who wins that election? Ehud Barak. Like Rabin, a former head of the army, like Rabin now the head of the Labor Party, and he’s already in 1999 talking much more explicitly about taking the peace process all the way to the finish line, even Palestinian statehood, even all the things you know, we’re missing.
So if you can win an election talking about Palestinian independence in 1999, Palestinian independence wasn’t killed by the Rabin assassination. It was probably saved, was put on life support and preserved through literally those suicide bombings delayed a continuation of that peace process.
So that’s my view. It’s a pessimistic view. But all the data we have and all the polling actually bears it out. And if people look up those polls, you can’t avoid that conclusion. I don’t think that this idea of the left that because the right killed Rabin then there further isn’t peace. The left was still able to win an election promising peace.
By the way, in 2006, Olmert from the right wins an election promising a West Bank withdrawal. In other words, there’s still very much this Israeli public desire to separate, to have Palestinian events, to end the military rule. Rabin’s assassination advances that. As tragic as it is to say that, just literally in the polling, it advances that.
Noam: That’s such a fascinating take. In many ways, it’s so counterintuitive, but I love a good insight, love a good chidush, and that’s exactly what that was.
So I want to now think about the climate, and the climate of 1995, and the climate of 30 years since 1995.
There are arguments that it’s not Yigal Amir who should be guilty of the assassination of Rabin, but the religious Zionist movement. And the reason for that is there were rabbis who would teach this idea that if a Jew hands over the property, the land of another Jew to somebody who isn’t Jewish in the land of Israel, it’s called Din Moser, the law of giving over. And if you commit this sort of crime, then you’re what’s called a rodef, a pursuer. And the Jewish law, if you are a pursuer, you are what’s called in Hebrew, chayav mita, you deserve death. Okay? Got it.
Well, here’s the thing about this. That law, like all religious law in Judaism without commentary, commentary, commentary is not meant to be carried out practically. In any context whatsoever. There were those though, who on the religious Zionist right, they would write about this concept. They would talk about the concept of din moser and din rodef.
And Yigal Amir took what they said. And he said, this is a quote from him, the Torah is the brain. If the Torah tells you to do something that runs counter to your emotions, you do what runs counter to your emotions. Din moser and din rodef are halachic rulings. Once something is a halachic, meaning Jewish law ruling, there’s no longer a moral issue.
Now, what happened was there were rabbis like Aaron Lichtenstein, like Aaron Lichtenstein, who said this, and here’s a quote from him:
Naturally the shame should be felt by our camp, the national religious camp, more than any other. Here was a man who grew up in the best of our institutions, referring to Amir. A day before the murder, he could have been cited as a shining example of success and achievement and a source of communal pride. But if a day before the murder, we would have said proudly, see what we have produced, we must say it now as well. See what we have produced. It is indefensible that one who is willing to take credit when the sun is shining should shrug off responsibility when it begins to rain.
Why am I mentioning all of this? I’m mentioning this for a few reasons. One is that earlier I said that Yigal Amir was part of the fringe religious Zionist right, and not part of the mainstream. And I want to challenge what I said earlier and see if I’m right or wrong from your perspective.
And I want to say something else as well. My own family in Jerusalem, they describe that both the right before Yigal Amir was, right before Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated and right after. They said that to be religious Zionists in Israel was to be a little bit of a stigma. That it wasn’t that a person in other contexts, a person is blamed for the murder of someone or the person is blamed for the assassination of someone. When JFK was assassinated, when Lincoln was assassinated, it’s not that the entire community then gets blamed. But they felt as though that it wasn’t a person who was blamed historically, but a community that was blamed. I want to get your take on all that.
Haviv: This is one of those cases where everybody’s right. Yigal Amir himself is not right. Yigal Amir said that there’s this principle, as you said, that halacha din rodef is a very simple idea. When are you allowed to kill somebody in Jewish law? Well, you are explicitly allowed to kill someone in self-defense. If there’s no other way to save your own life, you’re allowed to kill the person coming after you with a knife to murder you. And then the rabbi has asked this extension to that, which is, what if you see somebody chasing somebody else to murder them? Are you allowed to stop that person? If you can stop that murder, you’re required to.
In Leviticus, it says, don’t stand on your brother’s blood. You cannot just stand by and watch somebody else being murdered. But are you allowed to stop them to the point where you have to actually kill them? And the answer, with din rodef, is which is literally the law of the chaser, is yes, you can kill somebody who is leading to trying to kill others or doing things that are going to lead to others’ deaths. And the argument was that the Oslo process was going to lead to the mass death of Jews and therefore killing the man who was doing it was a requirement of halachic law, of Jewish law.
Now, this was an extreme minority opinion among the rabbis. This was a man elected by Israelis. There was a tremendous disagreement among Israelis over whether it was safe or unsafe, whether it was worth the risk or not worth the risk. By that definition, if literally somebody who leads to the death of people can be killed, there’s not a general in the history of war who should not be killed because they all, every decision they made was the death, Minimal, maximal. So there was this halakhic excuse. And the issue isn’t Yigal Amir’s own excuse. You can find anything in the Torah, literally. You can find anything in any religious canonical work that will excuse anything you want to do. You’re still wrong. That is not what the Torah says to do. You’re not supposed to kill.
And in fact the rabbis institute a day of fasting for 2000 years for Gedalia and Gedalia was killed for being an agent of the imperial ruler and he was an agent for the imperial ruler but the rabbi said if he hadn’t been he was a go-between protecting the Jews but yes he was also absolutely kowtowing to the imperial rulers and therefore we mourn his death and you don’t kill Jewish leaders. That is the position of the Talmud.
Now there was in the right wing campaign against Oslo, tremendous and wild incitement. And if people choose not to remember it, that’s on them. I mean, right wingers choose not to remember, that’s on them. There were demonstrations with coffins. Yeah. From the right against Rabin.
Noam: And I guess what you have in mind, there are pictures of Rabin in a kefiyah, there are pictures of Rabin in an SS unit that like, this is the way he was depicted in coffins. Yeah.
Haviv: And coffins with the word, Rabin is burying Zionism and rabbis who stood outside his home night after night, literally calling down Kabbalistic curses on his head, which I think Maimonides himself would have thought of as idol worship, but whatever. I’m not going to start judging rabbis, but they were–
Noam: So, all right, fine. I will. That’s it’s, it’s either heretical to do that or at the very least odd. Yeah. Not okay.
Haviv: It’s odd. It’s odd, but it happened and it happened in a hundred different ways. And at every rally, there was discourse that was just raging and some of the incitement was just wild and genuinely crazy. And then after the assassination, the left-wing discussion of it, the first thing it did as a political movement was to turn the entirety of the assassination into a right-wing event. The right wing did this.
So for example, now is the 30 year anniversary of the assassination. I covered as a journalist the 25 year anniversary of the assassination back in 2020, in November, 2020. And one of the things that struck me was there was an Israeli actress, Orna Banai, a very famous Israeli comedy actress who gave a talk, gave a speech at the rally, at the big rally for 25 years to Rabin’s assassination. And she said things like, you cannot, in the Bible it says, you murder and also inherit from the person you murdered? She said that, Netanyahu, you are going down. We are going to bring you down. You will not murder and also inherit. Just framing Netanyahu as the literal killer of Rabin. And an Israel of justice and an Israel of peace and an Israel of love and an Israel of joy and happiness and all this stuff is an Israel that you cannot kill with a bullet. And it was blaming an entire camp. And she got cheers and people agreed and loved this.
And then what the left did with Rabin’s memory is transform it into an utterly, totally, comprehensively partisan thing. The religious Zionist movement did not want Rabin’s assassination. Ordinary people in Likud, I don’t know, some rabble rouser, but ordinary people did not want Rabin’s assassination. They were horrified. But they weren’t even allowed to mourn because the entirety of the framing of it by the people mourning it.
Now the mourning was absolutely authentic. And the anger at the right was real. The sense that the right was now, and then it’s, wins after Rabin’s assassinated, felt like the right was at war with democracy. I argue that it, I know for a fact from how the polls went that it was Hamas suicide bombings that drove that pivot by the people in the center. But to the left, it felt that way.
So in a sense, everybody’s right. In other words, the right feels aggrieved by how the left transformed Rabin into a partisan issue. But it was a massively partisan issue. Their leader was defeated on this foundational question that was never put to the ballot box. He was allowed to finish out his term without being assassinated.
If Netanyahu is now assassinated and then the right loses the next election, what’s the right’s narrative of that event? That they genuinely, okay, yeah, he was assassinated, that’s terrible, but also you lost the next election, that’s on you, right?
Noam: That the left caused.
Haviv: No, they would say you destroyed democracy by taking that leader away from us. And so the sense of grievance, the sense that partisanship swallowed up the death of a leader in this very difficult trying, polarized moment is true, on both sides and deep and real and has good reasons for it on both sides.
Noam: This depiction of leaders in the Jewish world and everywhere as satanic and evil, it’s really, I think it’s unhelpful. Netanyahu has been depicted as an evil, satanic figure. There’s a whole poster with him in red and it says, Rotzeh ha-chatufim, the murderer of the hostages. Like those sorts of images have, I believe, are unhealthy for democracy. It’s allowed, but it’s unhealthy for democracy. It’s also, it’s also the case that, and you were saying this, that the Hamas suicide bombs led to the election in Netanyahu. This is, this is another through line throughout Israeli history. When Palestinians thought that they were, Arabs, Palestinians thought that they were going to, you know, end the Zionist dream in 1929 with Hebron massacre, it only invited more Zionism and more, even a right wing form of Zionism.
Haviv: It galvanized the establishment of the militias of the Jewish project, of the Jewish community.
Noam: Exactly. And I like, and what people want to know why, why do a history podcast guys? Because it like, do what are we going to learn? Are we going to learn from history to figure all this out? By the way, what we should learn from the vilification of Rabin, we should learn about the vilification of Bibi Netanyahu. It’s not good behavior, it doesn’t help anyone’s cause. It actually makes people dig their heels in even more.
But I want to go to that and talk about the history, in the, really not the history, but the memory in the last 30 years. I’m an education nerd, as you know, and I was very interested to find out where the story of Rabin’s assassination shows up in Israeli society.
Before I tell you this debate, there’s something that I actually created. Very proud of this. I created something called Israel History Month. November is Israel History Month. I created this for lots of reasons. One of them was I couldn’t stand how little anyone knew about Israeli history. But look at November. I could go through the dates. November 2nd, Balfour Declaration. November 4th, Rabi’s assassination. November 10th, declaration that Zionism is racism by the United Nations UN resolution 3379. November 29th, chuf tet b’November, when the UN declares that there should be a Jewish state and an Arab state. Pretty good, Haviv, right? November should be Israel history month.
Haviv: It’s a packed moment.
Noam: It’s packed. And there are many other moments also. Americans often don’t know a lot about Rabin and his assassination, but there are Jewish schools that have commemorated it. And when they commemorate Rabin, typically it’s just commemorated as like this unbelievable hero who tried to have peace. And that was the focus of Rabin. When I was running a school, we commemorated Rabin every year with this moment, talked about division, talked about unity, talked about, you know, pursuit of peace and the like.
In 2016, think this was Naftali Bennett, there was a debate as to where Rabin’s assassination should go in the Israel curriculum. Should it go where, you know, where political violence takes place in that curriculum. So it would be next to Emil Grunzweig, a left-wing activist who was killed at a peace rally in the eighties. Or, or, or should it be, and I might’ve gotten this wrong, but it’s something like this right next to the Altalena affair, right? Why the Altalena affair? Because what happened there, the Atalena, the argument is, Haviv, you see where I’m going with this?
Haviv: Jews killing Jews.
Noam: The argument is that it wasn’t, there was, over time, there was a shift of blame. In the Altalena, when the Altalena were the quote unquote left, you know, the Ben Gurion, the Rabin, um, they killed the right, meaning the Irgun, they killed 16 or so Irgun members in the Altalena in June of 1948. And so the, the placement of Rabin’s assassination next to the Altalena affair is really saying something.
Haviv: Rabin took part, we should say, in that battle on the beach. Yeah.
Noam: And you got, I should have clarified, sorry, Rabin was the main culprit of exactly. and Yigal Amir explicitly said in his interrogation that Rabin was responsible for the cannon fire and the sinking of the ship of the Altalena, ship Altalena in 1948, carrying weapons for their forces in the land of Israel.
Haviv: would be a right-wing grievance framing of, either way, believe that’s wrong. I don’t think he actually opened fire on the Altalena, but he was one of the people on the beach.
Noam: Okay. And he was super young. He was super young, but he was, there was over time, I’m saying in the political landscape, the shift of blame went from Ben-Gurion ultimately to Rabin because you couldn’t blame Ben-Gurion anymore. It wasn’t fun. He wasn’t alive anymore. There’s no value to that. So placing that educationally.
Haviv: Yes.
Noam: That’s a move. That’s a move if that were the case. And that’s why, like you said, like if you’re just being educational for a second, why on both sides, why, why teach about Rabin’s assassination if you’re part of the right or religious Zionists, if you’re like, wait, I’m being blamed for this. Okay. I’m like, I’d rather just stay away from this topic because like the discourse, the narrative is that I’m at fault.
And so I might want to stay away from it. So the choice to make this story a political story is a choice to only talk about it in a certain context.
And then there’s, and then there’s, we did something interesting. My producer Rivky and I, we went to our team, asked them, in Israel, how was Rabin discussed? How was his assassination discussed? And we have a really interesting team. We have a team that’s religious Zionists, secular Zionists, Haredi. We have all different types of people on the team.
And so some of them said, my kids have no idea what you’re talking about that, who Rabin was. Some said, you know, we commemorated the yard site of Rachel Imeinu, of our matriarch Rachel, and also of Rav Nosson Tzvi Finkel, who was, head of a yeshiva, but I don’t think we spent much time talking about Rabin. But this was a really interesting point. A colleague said a very large and growing sector of society feels that they’re the bad guys in the retelling of the Rabin story. So why would they honor that day? That is such a different way of conceptualizing Rabin 30 years ago in Israel and Israeli society, like Americans, Australians, whomever listening to this, do you hear this? Whereas when we commemorate Rabin, we just commemorate him as kind of this, this national hero of Israel who was killed, assassinated like MLK, like anyone else was assassinated. And it’s not the way it’s experienced in Israel.
Haviv: I think the left’s decision. And it wasn’t even a decision. It was a cultural impulse. It wasn’t that somebody sat and said, you know what we’re going to do? We’re going to screw over all the moderate right wingers by making them complicit in it as well. Nobody had that meeting. As far as I know, I’ve never heard anyone claim to have had that meeting. I don’t think it would have worked if it was artificial. The sense the left had that they had been shunted aside by the murder of an elected prime minister doing something that was actually desired by the vast majority of his base. Prime ministers don’t have to do what all the people, all the time, always agree with. They can do controversial things that their own base supports.
Netanyahu, for example, almost everything he does is supported by a minority of Israelis, sometimes a plurality, but never a majority. That’s not true about all things, obviously. The Iran war was fairly popular, but a lot of his decisions in Gaza, a lot of his decisions in Haredi draft, This idea that you can assassinate him. blaming it on the right as a whole, as a political side of Israel, as half of society. What that actually did was it robbed Israel of the ability to have a Rabin commemoration that placed him, in a shared national ethos and national memory. He became partisan because the people who followed in his footsteps, made it so.
Let me just say in their defense, they had two choices. Their two choices were either to blame the right for killing him and ruining the chance for peace, or to notice the terrible, terrible gaps that undermine the possibility of peace itself. And the very simple point, and again, if people go and listen to Rabin’s last speech in the Knesset, Rabin himself was starting to doubt the Oslo Process. And Arafat was doing everything possible to make him doubt Oslo.
If he hadn’t been assassinated, where would Rabin be today? And I suspect he would be very much much more on the center right on the Palestinian question than anywhere over on the left, technically in the political party that he once led, which is now the basically far left among in Jewish politics, there’s further left in Arab politics, but far left in Jewish politics in the Knesset.
And so I think that to avoid the possibility of looking at his legacy and saying, wait a second, he did great things, great things. He’s one of the biggest contributors to Israel’s safety, security, thriving in the history of Israel. And his last thing, and it was only his last thing because he was killed, but his last thing might have been a big mistake to not have to deal with that. was easier to say, you terrible right-wingers, you don’t want peace. And it robbed Israel of, I think it robbed a lot of Israelis of allowing him into the national ethos and their national memory for all the great and amazing things he did for this country.
Noam: Yeah, I think it’s a hard thing to take someone out of their historical context and place them today because of the butterfly effect of having not knowing what would have what the consequences would be if this happened, if that didn’t happen. But what I can tell you, the numbers look very different. In 1992, the election that brought Rabin to power, Labor had 44 seats. Meretz, right, had 12. That’s 56 combined. So they’re almost at the 60. They’re almost there.
In 1995, right after Rabin’s assassination, 36% of Jewish Israelis defined themselves as left. 29% as right, 28% as center. And there is a radical shift 30 years later. The Israel Democracy Institute shows a huge long-term swing rightward. 11% left. There is no left anymore. 62% right, 24% center. And 2024 polling shows roughly the same numbers.
Haviv: Be careful with those. The terms have changed their meaning.
Noam: Tell me what you mean.
Haviv: Netanyahu’s 2009 speech about Palestinian statehood was Rabin’s policy. So is Netanyahu left? Was he left then and now turned right? On the substance, there’s a problem, military rule over another people. It’s a problem. What are we gonna do about it?
Noam: You don’t want to just say he’s pragmatic?
Haviv: If most Israelis come to the conclusion after the Gaza war and after decades of every single attempted Israeli withdrawal, whether it’s from South Lebanon with Hezbollah or Gaza with Hamas or every time Israel pulls out of a Palestinian population center in the framework of Oslo, that turned into a massive wave of suicide bombings from that city in the second Intifada, including Jericho, which is this incredibly moderate, there were many Christians in Jericho who don’t tend to be in the Islamist camp.
And even Jericho was producing mass terror waves in the second Intifada, which was supposed to be according to most Israelis, what was explained to them by their leaders, by the Americans, even by some Palestinian leaders, this was the height of the peace process. And somehow 140 suicide bombings were blowing up in their cities and murdering their kids.
So given those experiences, what do the polls of left or right actually mean? If you ask Israelis, for example, and all the rest of the agenda of the left, which is basically secular versus religious, the right is more traditional, more religious, the left is more secular, not perfectly, it correlates about 70, 80 percent, it correlates quite a bit. You discover that half of Israel’s left, half of Israel’s right.But if left has become identified with a peace process that failed, a fundamental idea of a peace process that turned out to never have been viable, then yeah, nobody’s going to call themselves left anymore. I don’t think that those words mean a lot.
It’s important to also remember in the coalition, in the 44 seat Labor party of Rabin, there were a lot of hawks who fought a lot of wars and were willing to fight a lot more wars. That left isn’t dovish.All the wars of conquest were fought by the Israeli left. All the withdrawals were carried out by the Israeli political right. The actual withdrawals from Palestinian cities of the Oslo agreement were under Netanyahu fulfilling the things Rabin had committed to during Netanyahu’s own term.
And so you have the terms mean something different, even Meretz. Meretz, when it was 12 seats led by people like Yossi Sarid, included Shinui within it. Shinui was what in American terms would be a center right capitalist free market party, that was in the Meretz far left coalition only because of secularism that it shared in a particular constellation at a particular moment.
So the left was big. Was a lot of coalitions. Had not yet had its civic religion, its fundamental identity, which was the peace process, crash and burn. And so it had not yet gone into the identity crisis that those polls are actually measuring.
By the way, we have polls where if you ask Israelis conditionals and you say to them, do you support a Palestinian state? Well, almost no Israeli supports a Palestinian state. Israeli Jew, by the way, there’s quite a bit of support among Israeli Arabs. Even there though, there’s some skepticism.
But if you say, you support the answer? No. And then you add a conditional. What if it was totally absolutely safe and they recognized Israel as a Jewish state and there was no right of return into Israel? Suddenly it’s half. Now who are these people who say, absolutely not. What are you crazy? Okay. Yeah, that’d be okay. What is that? That is experience. That is history. I think what you were saying before about learning history, was Faulkner, right? Who said, the past is never dead. It isn’t even past.
We live in our history. Our views are our history. We are responding to words like left and right and socialist and capitalist based on certain experiences. And if you don’t know those histories, we’re still going to be living in it. We’re just going to be blindly living in it and not understanding what’s happening to us. And so it’s not that Israelis are no longer left. It’s the left no longer tells a story Israelis understand or that fits reality that Israelis are experiencing.
The left needs to get on that and talk to Israelis’ lived experience. Then, frankly, I think a lot of Israelis would back liberalism, for example, or would back even some kind of separation. We have polls that tell us that.
Noam: Yeah, I mean, you’re spot on that the left and right mean different things and I think it was Chris Rock that said, you know, if you decide your opinion because of your political persuasion before seeing the actual issue, then you are a ridiculous person. But here’s my last question for you.
Do you like small talk?
Haviv: I know I’m bad at it. actually am closer to Rabin on this. Yeah, when people just talk about nothing, I’m always defaulting to like. And the weird thing is that one of my kids is like this. He’s obsessed with like Roman imperial strategy. He’s 11, but he’s like explaining to me the Battle of Cani were Hannibal and the Romans was a terrible, terrible defeat. But everything Hannibal lost he couldn’t replace and the Romans rebuilt their legions.
And I’m like, you’re 11. Go go watch TV. What are you doing? And he also can’t do small talk. And it’s always yes, every time we try to do small talk. What about you? Can you small talk at a party? I always default to like history and politics and the great affairs of the day just because I don’t have the social capacity to small talk.
Noam: So my wife, Raizie likes to say that I, She thinks I’m full of it. She thinks I’m pretty, I pretend to be like somewhat of an introvert when she thinks I’m much more of an extrovert, but I’m right on that line. I think small talk is such a waste of time, but it’s also like, it’s very human.
Haviv: It’s social grease. I’m okay with it. It’s not a bad thing. I wish I could do it.
Noam: Yeah, right. But you know what? You know what? But it’s it’s you know what? It’s like wasteful calories. Let’s do something else during that time. All right.
Haviv: So we’re both on Rabin’s side of that issue.
Noam: On that for sure, and let’s let’s let’s a movement for less small talk. I’m all I’m all for that.
Haviv: Yeah. I do think it’s worth saying because his death meant so much to so many people in so many different ways and some good and some bad. He was one of the great heroes of the Jewish people who ever lived. He built the army that fought 67, an army that should not have been able to do what it did. Israel was a third world economy and he built it. And so just, you know, we should remember his death. His death was a fracture point in the lives of millions of people. And that’s itself we’re talking about on the anniversary of his death. But his life, his life was one of the most extraordinary Jewish lives and most accomplished Jewish lives in the history of Jews. And that’s a long history.
Noam: Yep, absolutely. His memory should be a blessing for everyone.