This piece is from Fathom’s eBook The Life and Legacy of Yitzhak Rabin, which can be downloaded here.

The eBook also features essays and interviews by Reuven Rivlin, Uri Dromi, Luciana Berger, Omer Bar-Lev, Michael Herzog, Sara Hirschhorn, Ronen Hoffman, Tzipi Livni, Einat Wilf and Sir Martin Gilbert.

When in 1995 Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin signed the Oslo Accords with the PLO and shook, however reluctantly, Yasser Arafat’s hand on the White House  lawn, a lot of commentators were surprised by what they viewed as his transformation from a hard-headed general, focused on security, to a peace-maker. The contrast, however, was at least in part artificial, and did less than justice to Rabin’s complex and nuanced views on the Arab-Israeli conflict.

In January 1976 I was appointed by the government as Director-General of Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs at the recommendation of the Foreign Minister Yigal Allon. Before assuming my position, I had a long talk with Rabin, who became Prime Minister in 1974 after the government of Golda Meir, which included such veterans of Israeli politics as Abba Eban and Moshe Dayan, had to resign in the wake of the Yom Kippur War.

At our meeting, Rabin enquired about my views regarding the possibility of talks with the PLO. Several times I had voiced the opinion that under certain conditions Israel should talk to the PLO, a position which Rabin opposed: I gave the Prime Minister my assurances that so long as I served in the government, I would follow government policies. If I would feel the gap between my personal views and official policy too deep, I would resign – I always had the option of going back to my university position.

I think I satisfied Rabin on this, so I asked if I may ask him a policy question. Assuming the Prime Ministry in the post-Yom Kippur feeling of crisis, Rabin had pointedly avoided making statements about his ultimate goals regarding relations with the Arab countries and the future of the occupied territories. He led a traumatised nation, a deeply wounded Labour Party and a weak and rickety coalition. I said to him that I understood his reluctance to go out on a limb and expose himself to criticism either from the Right or the Left: but since I wanted to be able to follow – and defend – government policy, I needed to hear from him, for my own enlightenment, his views on the future of our relations with the Arab countries and what should be the ultimate fate of the occupied territories.

After admitting his political difficulties, Rabin launched into a lengthy analytical exposé of his strategic and political thinking. The following is based on notes I took at that time.

Ultimately, Rabin said, Israel could not and should not hold on to most of the territories it captured in the Six Days War; specifically, it cannot hold on to the West Bank and Gaza, since ruling three million Palestinians against their will is unacceptable to Israel as a democratic state and will never be countenanced, even by Israel’s staunchest friends. Hence he opposed Jewish settlements in the territories, with the exception of the Jordan Valley and parts of the Golan Heights.

Eventually Israel should agree to withdraw from almost all the territories (except Jerusalem). But the major issue is timing: according to him, this cannot and should not be done when the country is still traumatised by its initial failure at the Yom Kippur War and the Arab countries are still intoxicated by their tremendous successes at the beginning of the war, specially the dramatic crossing of the Suez Canal. Any Israeli withdrawal at this stage would be viewed by the Arabs as proof of their military success and would be interpreted as the beginning of an overall roll-back movement, ultimately aimed at the elimination of Israel.

In order to make it possible for Israel to offer what would be ultimately extremely generous territorial concessions – almost a full withdrawal – a number of conditions would have to be fulfilled, so that Israel’s concession would not be interpreted as signs of weakness. For this to happen:

*The Israeli army, badly demoralised and still licking its wounds despite its ultimate successes in the Yom Kippur War, would have to be rehabilitated;

*The Israeli public would have to be convinced that the war has not sapped the national morale;

*Likewise, the Arab countries have to be convinced that they would not be able to use outside diplomatic pressure on Israel;

*The US strategic commitment to Israel has to be deepened and turned into long-term arrangements: US aid to Israel, which jumped to more than $2 billion after the Yom Kippur War, has to become the benchmark for US annual military aid to Israel. Only such a secure anchoring would signal to all – including the Soviet Union – that the ultimate arrangements in the area are not an outcome of Israeli weakness.

Only if these conditions would be fulfilled – and Rabin estimated a period of three-four years – could Israel seriously consider negotiations about the final status of the territories. In the meantime, a series of interim agreements should be undertaken, to show that there is momentum.

Regarding the Palestinians, Rabin said he would prefer an agreement with Jordan (which after all ruled the West Bank prior to 1967). Negotiating with the PLO, he argued, would mean creating a Soviet client-state at our door steps, and given Soviet attitudes to Israel, this ‘would be madness.’

I was impressed then – as I am today – by the sophistication and complexity of this analysis: I also understood why, given its layered nature, it could not be explicitly stated. Yet – to use common metaphors – it combined a strategic ‘dovish’ long-term strategy with a tactical ‘hawkish’ short-term public stance. By trying to reach further interim agreements with Egypt, and by maintaining close though clandestine contact with King Hussein, Rabin followed this strategy: his main concern, however, was to cement the strategic relationship with the USA, in which he succeeded both in terms of the funding as well as in terms of the new, modern equipment which enabled Israel to re-establish both the reality – and the perception – of its deterrent power and relative strength.

The Rabin Prime Ministry came to an unhappy end in 1977 due to reasons which had little to do with his policies. Yet when looking at his consent, during his second Prime Ministry in 1993, to go ahead with the Oslo agreements, the basic analysis he gave me in 1976 has been vindicated:

*Israel was able to re-establish its military standing and its deterrence;

*Strategic relations with the US were established on the basis – both financial and substantive – envisaged by Rabin;

*The disappearance of the Soviet Union (unforeseen by Rabin, as by everyone else) also meant that the Arab countries lost their strategic ally;

*With the demise of Soviet power, the PLO was no longer a Soviet client, and the emergence of a PLO-headed state in the West Bank and Gaza would now mean the emergence of a weak Arab state, not a Soviet foothold in the area;

*All these developments also had their impact on the PLO, which slowly (albeit reluctantly and not always honestly) moved from its military stance aimed at eliminating Israel to a less militant posture.

Many things changed between my long talk with Rabin in 1976 and the Oslo Accords in 1993. Rabin did not turn from a hawk into a dove: the circumstances he envisaged in 1976 fell into place, though it took longer than he imagined initially.

***

On a more theoretical level, Rabin expressed these views at a speech he delivered in October 1986 at a conference at Ben Gurion University in Beer Sheva on the 1956 Suez-Sinai War. At that time he was Minister of Defence in the Shamir-Peres National Unity Government. Given the nature of the government and his subservient position in it (he was No. 3) – he chose to keep a low profile on issues of ultimate solution to the conflict.

Yet the subject he chose for his lecture was significant: while many of the participants at the conference, who included British and French politicians, dwelt – some with visible nostalgia – on what they viewed as the lost opportunities of 1956, Rabin chose to speak on ‘The Limits of Power’ – in any case, not the usual subject matter for ministers of defence (1).

The crux of Rabin’s lecture was is his contention that Clausewitz’s dictum about war being merely the continuation of diplomacy by other means cannot be sustained under contemporary conditions – for a variety of general reasons, and specifically in the Arab-Israeli context.

According to Rabin, democracies – unless totally mobilised in a war against totalitarian dictatorships as in World War II – cannot follow the Clausewitzian dictum: in order to win a war in a democratic context, one has to be able to mobilise public opinion and manpower in ways which are different from the situation in Clausewitz’s own time. Without being a neo-Kantian or a Wilsonian (in any case, he would not feel at home addressing their thoughts), Rabin realised the limits of power imposed by democratic values and institutions. ‘Wars of Choice’ cannot be easily waged by democracies: this was the cause of the Franco-British debacle at Suez, but he obviously also had the US in Vietnam in mind, though he did not say so. He explicitly dwelt on the 1982 ‘War of Choice’ Israel waged in Lebanon and went into some detail explaining why Israel’s strategy (under Begin and Sharon, though he didn’t name names) was doomed to fail: forcing Lebanon to sign a peace treaty with Israel under conditions of occupation was a pipe dream: ‘Through military means … the attempt to bring about a war that will end all wars is a dangerous course of action and an illusion.’

Rabin went on to argue that what the Allies were able to impose on Germany, Japan and Italy after 1945 cannot be achieved by Israel vis-à-vis the Arab countries. While he insisted that Israel needed a projection of its military power to deter Arab attempts to attack or try to destroy it, he concluded:

‘As I reflect on the long-term implications of this perception of the limits to our military power in the face of continuing threat from war and acts of terrorism, I have come to the conclusion that force of arms alone cannot bring about the desired termination of the Arab-Israeli conflict.’ What Israel needs according to Rabin is ‘commitment, patience and endurance’, as there is no ‘Dekhikat ha-Ketz’ [‘Bringing about the end of days’] nor does there exist a short-cut through ‘zbeng ve-gamarnu’ [Hebrew slang for ‘one shot, and it’s over’].

I have chosen to dwell of these aspects of Rabin’s thinking because more than the usual encomiums, they seem to me to bring out the complexity of a man who always said he wanted to be a water engineer, but found itself involved in warfare – and peacemaking. Both were the twin sides of the same coin.

(1) The following is based on the text of Rabin’s lecture as published in The Suez-Sinai Crisis 1956: Retrospective and Reappraisal, edited by S.I. Troen and M. Shemesh, London, 1990, pp. 238-242.

This article first appeared in Striving for Peace: The Legacy of Yitzhak Rabin, 2005, Labour Friends of Israel.

This piece is from Fathom’s eBook The Life and Legacy of Yitzhak Rabin, which can be downloaded here.

The eBook also features essays and interviews by Reuven Rivlin, Uri Dromi, Luciana Berger, Omer Bar-Lev, Michael Herzog, Sara Hirschhorn, Ronen Hoffman, Tzipi Livni, Einat Wilf and Sir Martin Gilbert.