Rabin’s Anti-Nixonian Peace
A man famously attributed with threatening to break the bones of Israel’s enemies, Yitzchak Rabin had lived a lifetime of confrontation. Like Richard Nixon, he’d lost a lot of friends, and had alienated many in his own party.
But, like Nixon visiting China, Rabin was the one man with an appropriately-aggressive reputation to pursue peace with the Palestinians.
And when one takes a cursory look, there are many comparisons to be made between these two statesmen. The political careers of Rabin and Nixon share notable similarities in their trajectory, until one final point: whereas Nixon’s self-destructive and paranoid politics characterized the end of his political career, it was specifically Rabin’s hopes for reconciliation – and a distinct lack of wariness – that defined his later political path, and ultimately brought the end of his life.
Rabin’s first tenure as head of state was cut short by a scandal involving his wife, resulting in political purgatory, followed by an eventual return as Prime Minister. Similarly, Nixon spent a long tenure as Vice-President, suffered a bitter election defeat to John F. Kennedy, and wandered the political wilderness before returning to the White House as President.
Despite seeing daily televised images of protests to their policies, both Rabin and Nixon continued to stubbornly believe in a nebulous “silent majority” of the larger population, which was always on their side. In fact, in an interview the night of his assassination included in the film Rabin, the then-prime minister invoked this exact term to define the unnoticed group of citizens amidst the many loud protests against his peace negotiations.
And while only an infamous Communist-baiter like Nixon could “acceptably”establish American political ties with Red China during the Cold War, only someone with the seasoned military stature of Rabin could make anything close to an “acceptable” peace with Israel’s most bitter enemy, Yasser Arafat and the PLO, in the wake of the First Intifada.
Of course, there’s also their respective partnerships with the leading rock-stars of their time: Nixon with Elvis Presley and Rabin with Aviv Geffen.
But it’s in their final political chapters where light-hearted comparisons among the famously anti-Semitic president and the “warrior for peace” Israeli prime minister really fall apart.
While Nixon’s return to power was marked by legendary paranoia and a hubristic vow to continue the war in Vietnam until he achieved what he termed “peace with honor,”Rabin’s second go-around at the helm found him taking the fateful course of reconciliation with his most heated political rival, Shimon Peres, and pursuing a “battle for peace.” Having previously disparaged Peres in his memoirs, Rabin entered into a doctrinal alliance with Peres that would see them reach the symbolic peak of their partnership with the sharing of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994.
Rabin recounts the events that led to the subject’s transformation from a reactionary politician — who fought the most against those with whom he should probably have agreed – into a symbol of partnership amidst great turmoil. Peres and Rabin were beacons of Israel’s Left wing for decades, and their very public tussles belied the fact that they had so much in common.
The still-controversial peaceRabin signed with Yasser Arafat was inspired in part by the sight of Israelis fleeing the Iraqi bombingof Tel Aviv during the first Gulf War. As scud missiles fell all about the city, we are told that Rabin angrily looked out from his apartment window at the clogged highway to Haifa and realized his people only wanted peace. As he recounts in Rabin, “I fought so long as there was no chance for peace… the path of peace is better than the path of war.”
Ironically, it was this same trust in the good intentions of his own people that would eventually lead to his assassination in 1995. Rabin famously refused to wear a bullet-proof vest despite receiving many death threats around the time of the Oslo Accords, declaring that his surviving through wars with opposing forces meant he didn’t have much to fear from civilians in his own country.
So, Rabin was no Nixon – and that’s certainly a good thing. One wonders, though, with the collapse of the Oslo Accords after his death, what might have been achieved if Rabin had taken on just a bit of Nixon’s darker side.
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