Rabin, Arafat: Joined by Their Fear of Zealots

Sunday Focus

Leslie Susser, diplomatic correspondent of The Jerusalem Report

Rabin, Arafat: Joined by Their Fear of Zealots — Newsday, 19 September 1993 — Newsday · 19 September 1993

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SUNDAY FOCUS Leslie Susser Rabin, Arafat: Joined by Their Fear of Zealots F OR OVER two decades. Yasser Arafat has been the man Israelis loved to hate. Former Prime Minister Menachem Begin compared him to Hitler. "No one since the Nazis has more Jewish blood on his hands," he used to say.

Deep in the Israeli national psyche, Arafat was a primal force of evil, a prince of darkness, the devil incarnate. There were two main reasons for this: Arafat's Pal- estine Liberation Organization denied Israel's right to exist; and it employed terror to realize its destruc- tive aums.

It killed schoolchildren in Ma'alot, athletes in Munich; it blew up planes and attacked defenseless civilians. It was a faceless enemy without pity and without honor. And, it seemed, it was an enemy with whom there could be no reconciliation. Zionism and Palestinian national aims as represented by the PLO seemed mutually exclusive.

More than any other living Israeli, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin is associated with the nation's struggle for survival against this wall of Palestinian and Arab rejectionism.

For Israelis, he is the epitome of the Israeli-born "sabra" hero: the daring. blue-eyed young commander in the elite Palmach force during the 1948 War of Independence, the brilliant army chief of staff of the 1967 Six-Day War in which the occupied territories were captured, and the long-serv- ing prime minister and or minister of defense who rescued Israelis hijacked to Entebbe in 1976, and who has confronted the Palestinian uprising. the intifada, since 1987.

But for Palestinians, the iconography is reversed. Rabin is the general who said he would "break their bones," a symbol of the Israeli military might used to crush their national aspirations. And, for them, Yasser Arafat, the revered Abu Amar, is the very em- bodiment of those aspirations.

Leslie Susser is the diplomatic correspondent of The Jerusa- lem Report, an Israeli weekly. Mediterranean Sea IRAQ EGYPT SAUDI ARABIA The Palestinian Population The distribution of the 5.8 million Palestinians in 1990-91. 1. Jordan 1.8 million 2. West Bank/ East Jerusalem 3. Gaza Strip 4. Israel 5. Lebanon 6.

Syria Other Arab states Elsewhere 1.1 million 622,000 730,000 332,000 302,000 445,000 450,000 SOURCE: Palestine Affairs Council MILES 500 Newaday: Hichant Comet For both sides, last week's Rabin-Arafat handshake on the White House lawn was fraught with symbolic significance.

Arafat gave Israel the prize that ulti- mately only he could confer legitimacy and accep- tance in the Arab Mideast. And Rabin gave the Pales- tinians a new legitimacy and acceptance as equals on the international stage, with an implied promise of national self-determination at the end of the road.

Yitzhak Rabin made no secret of the fact that for him, personally, it was not easy. In a very deep sense, he was fighting his own national mythology, his own demonization of the Palestinian enemy Rabin is an unlikely peacemaker.

A cautious and suspicious man, a soldier, in effect, over nearly all his adult life, whether in or out of uniform, he never really wanted to talk to the Tunis-based PLO. He tried to bolster the more moderate Palestinian leader- ship in the occupied territories so that he wouldn't have to.

It was only about five months ago that he finally realized that that just wasn't going to work.

By then, Rabin's arch rival in Israeli politics, For- eign Minister Shimon Peres, was well ahead of the While Rabin and the local Palestinians dith- ered over details, Peres and his deputy, Yossi Beilin (the man Rabin called "Peres' poodle'), engineered accommodation with Arafat's PLO.

It took the Nor wegian back channel and Peres remarkable fair and imagination to pull it off. Rabin could not have done it. But then Peres could never have sold the deal to the Israeli people. That needed a man with Rabin's impeccable military credentials.

With his deep voice and his slow, deliberate deliv- ery, Rabin is the national reassurer, the trusted fa- ther figure, the Israeli de Gaulle. Polls show that over 30 percent of Likud voters support the Labor govern- Continued on Page 36 33 CURRENTS

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"Rabin, Arafat: Joined by Their Fear of Zealots," Newsday, 19 September 1993. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1993-023. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1993-023