San Francisco Chronicle · San Francisco, California · 23 November 1995

CP-1995-002

Israeli Opposition Goes Back to Attacking Peace Process

Netanyahu ends post-assassination political truce

Dina Shiloh, Chronicle foreign service, Tel Aviv

Scan 1063 × 1700 pixels

Transcribed from the clipping

“Tel Aviv — Barely two weeks after Yitzhak Rabin was buried, opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu already is firing the first shots of Israel’s 1996 election campaign. ‘We will win the next election,’ he told several hundred top members of his Likud Party at a meeting Sunday night. ‘We will win because we are right.’

Yesterday, after declining to block parliamentary approval of the replacement government of Shimon Peres, Netanyahu sharply attacked Peres in the Knesset, saying that there are clear signals that without Rabin serving as a restraining force, Israel’s new prime minister ‘is running to make concessions’ to the Arabs.

Netanyahu’s rhetoric and public statements were restrained after the assassination. During Rabin’s funeral, when the fruits of peace — the presence of Jordan’s King Hussein, Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak and other Arab leaders — were clear to all Israelis, Netanyahu looked uncomfortable.

Yigal Amir, Rabin’s confessed killer, was the product of right-wing extremist ideology, and Netanyahu was held responsible by many on the left — including Rabin’s widow, Leah — for having done little to discourage the violence on the far right… As the Likud drew closer to the National Religious Party… and even Moledet — an extremist party that advocates ‘transferring’ Arabs out of Israel and the West Bank — anti-government rallies became the scene of some of the worst excesses of anti-Rabin incitement.

Netanyahu was often the chief speaker, though he claims not to have been aware of some of the most inflammatory placards held up and not to have seen a coffin with ‘Rabin, killer of Zionism’ written on it at a demonstration last year near Tel Aviv.”

Context added by this archive

Seven months before Netanyahu first became prime minister. The word for what Moledet wanted is the paper’s own, in its own quotation marks: “transferring.”

Cite this clipping

This clipping is read closely in the section below

• One man, and the position he never changed

More from San Francisco Chronicle

• Palestine Is Celebrating Its Ten Years of ProgressSan Francisco Chronicle · 20 November 1927
• Palestinian ProblemSan Francisco Chronicle · 13 October 1944
• Arabs Call Partition Decision Russ VictorySan Francisco Chronicle · 5 December 1947
• Arab Leader Predicts Renewed Violence in PalestineSan Francisco Chronicle · 19 December 1947
• A Zionist Answer to Mr. LevisonSan Francisco Chronicle · 4 February 1948
• Jaffa——‘Ghost City’San Francisco Chronicle · 9 May 1948
• 22 more from this paper in the full text →

More from the 1990s

• Arabs Split on Cultural Ties to IsraelThe New York Times · 7 March 1995
• Gaza Arabs Dispute Origin Of Sunday's Mystery BlastThe New York Times · 7 April 1995
• Doctor Says Snapping of Head Killed Palestinian Held in IsraelThe New York Times · 1 May 1995
• Israel Widely Mistreats the DetaineesThe New York Times · 6 May 1995
• Israel Votes To Seize Arab LandOmaha World-Herald · 15 May 1995
• Settler violence in Israel is criminalThe Rock Island Argus · 16 September 1995
• All 374 clippings from the 1990s →

In these collections