What happened to 1993? / Book Review: "Killing a King" by Dan Ephron

You know that Israel is nothing but stolen Palestinian land. But some times you really crave a chicken schnitzel in a Pita. What are ya gonna do?

My friend in DSA likes to joke that we should have dress down days once a week where we allow ourselves to have mainstream, milquetoast liberal attitudes towards things. And then Monday will come and we will go back to being anti-imperialist Marxists who have hardline opinions and do not for a moment entertain such naive and misguided outlooks.

I've really been feeling that lately. Especially as I have been reading through "Killing a King, The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the remaking of Israel," by Dan Ephron. I understand that Israel was founded through the Nakba, and that Rabin was a violent colonial ruler and upholder of apartheid. But as horrifically violent as Israel's creation was, one cannot help but look back at certain key moments that may have offered a chance of an off ramp and a path towards justice and reconciliation, even if imperfectly. No outcome in the region could be worse than that which has played out in the more than two years that have passed since October 7, 2023.

So, not to sound like a liberal Zoinist, but: Jesus Christ, you really wonder what could have been, and can we please stop killing civilians??

Since October 7th, I have been very annoyed by leftists and humanitarians who condemned the attacks of October 7th. I usually compare October 7th to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, and think that it's the high point of absurdity when people in my highly privileged social circles condemn the actions of individuals who have lived under starvation, oppression and siege their entire lives.

All of that is still true, but this book also thrusts into my vision the longer history of Hamas attack on civilians in the decades prior to 2023. While some of Hamas' attacks may have been strategic attacks on IDF soldiers and legitimate attempts at armed self defense, there is a clear pattern of tit for tat attacks on Israeli civilians, in bus bombings and commercial areas. I make zero defense of the Zionist atrocities which often preceded these attacks -- a major plotline in this book is Baruch Goldstein's massacre of Palestinian worshipers at the Tomb of the Patriarchs -- but the Hamas tactic of responding to massacres such as that one with attacks on Israeli civilians is very clearly a failed strategy.

There are two pieces of conventional wisdom about Oslo and its failures that are true. 1) It was a neocolonial process that forced Palestinians to make major concessions and did not adequately account for the injustices of the Nakba. 2) Hard-line factions within Israeli and Palestinian society conspired against it. Far right settlers as well as Islamist militants saw the agreements as unacceptable concessions, and stoked sectarian tensions to derail the process.

The latter point is more on my mind as I read through this book. It's impossible to notice how the hard line factions in Palestinian and Israeli society conspired simultaneously to derail the Oslo process, and what a tragedy it has been that their efforts were mostly successful.

What would have happened if Rabin had been wearing a bullet proof vest the night of his assassination? His aides warned him that many people wanted him dead and encouraged him to wear a vest, but Rabin could not be bothered to heed the warnings.

What would have happened if Shimon Peres had called for elections in the weeks following the assassination. Support for Rabin and the peace process shot through the roof in the weeks following the assassination, and Peres, Rabin's successor, could have cemented that popularity by calling for elections and earning himself six years in which to iron out the details of the peace plan.

Instead, Peres decided to wait for elections one year from the assassination, by which time Bibi Netanyahu -- with the assistance of numerous suicide bus and cafe bombings orchestrated by Hamas -- regained the upper hand on the national political scene. One year following Rabin's assassination, Bibi defeated Peres in national elections, and set to work dismantling the Oslo peace process and resumed expanding settlements.

What would have happened if Israel's security services had refrained from assassinating Hamas bomb maker Yahya Ayash? 

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After I finished reading the book, I told my friend what I'd been reading and that I was feeling sad Oslo had turned out to be such a failure. He laughed and told me I was "definitely a Zionist normalizer," a reference to a joke we had been making earlier. And then he mentioned a friend of his who was doing a doctorate, studying the ways the Oslo was destined to screw over the Palestinians even if Rabin had not been assassinated. She is probably reading better sources and books than what I'm reading. Oh well.