On November 4, 1995 a fanatic right wing gunman assassinated the Prime Minister of Israel, Yitzhak Rabin. In retrospect that was an example of an historical contingency comparable to the assassination on June 28,1914 of Archduke Ferdinand, of Justice Quartus de Wet on June 12, 1964 not sentencing Nelson Mandela to death after being found guilty of sabotage and conspiracy against the apartheid government and the gunman shooting Robert F. Kennedy on June 5, 1968. While all these catastrophic derailments are examples of how the future was reordered. Jay H. Ell will focus on Rabin and the role that Netanyahu played.
Yes Netanyahu is still around claiming that Mayor Mamdani has become the real threat to all Jews while a documentary NAZA is allegedly "proves" genocide. And hijacking... is once in the news.
,
RABIN AND ARAFAT - OSLO ACCORDS
In the early 1990's there was an optimistic mood in Israel. They had survived the War of Independence, Six Day and Yom Kippur wars and for practical purposes the First Intifada had been squashed. The surrounding Arab nations no longer provided an existential threat. Although in1979 the Ayatollah had pledged Israel's destruction, he had not as yet conjured up, trained and armed proxies that would later become the spearhead of the attempt to eliminate it. The principal danger then was Yasser Arafat, head of the Palestine Liberation Organization, (PLO), He had introduced terrorism mainly in the form of hijacking to the world stage on a scale never witnessed before. However he was weakened and was tending to what was left of a six year long Intifada, (The First).
On July 22, 1992, Israel elected the first Israeli born Prime Minister, Yizhak Rabin, in fact for the second time, to negotiate a peace for a country that had known none. Momentous peace talks with Yasser Arafat followed and the Oslo Accords, were agreed to. This barely more than a year after Rabin assumed office. The latter were then announced signed and sealed at White House at two meetings in September 1993. with President Clinton presiding. A year later the two leaders in addition to Foreign Minister Peres received the Nobel Prize for Peace. In that same year further talks took place in Cairo extending what was to be a gradual process of peace between the two peoples.
The Oslo Accords achieved fundamental agreements that were never to be followed through. These included recognition of Israel as a State and self rule in Gaza and the West Bank with the legitimatization of the PLO. At this stage Benjamin Netanyahu entered the scene. Like his father he was dead against Palestinians permanently occupying Gaza and the West Bank.
NETANYAHU - RABID OPPOSITION TO RABIN
In 1994 Bibi Netanyahu was part of a demonstration against Rabin where a coffin was paraded with a noose while offensive signs dominated the environment. On the coffin the message screamed, “Rabin is killing Zionism”. Netanyahu's opposition hardened and became uglier as the leader of the opposition he stood on a balcony while crowds below yelled curses at Rabin. They waved posters of him in a Nazi uniform with an Arab kafiya on his head. His widow Leah Rabin, singled Netanyahu for creating the environment that led to the death of her husband and never forgave him, snubbing him publicly at his attempts to show sympathy.
It is again one of those vagaries of history why Netanyahu succeeded Rabin and not Peres in the 1996 election. However in the next Ehud Barak won one of the rare clearcut victories in Israeli politics sending Netanyahu to the political wilderness for a decade.
Barak followed up with another attempt at a two state solution in 2000.This time Clinton outright blamed Arafat for rejecting the deal. The United States President subsequently remonstrated with the PLO leader that he had marred his Presidency. While there was a counter narrative put out by Arafat as to why he reneged on the second Clinton attempt there was none on the first. That initiative was halted as a result of the Rabin death Arafat argued and Leah Rabin corroborated his version of events.
LEAH RABIN AND ARAFAT AND THE PEACE PROCESS
While Leah Rabin rejected Netanyahu’s denials of culpability she had every reason to support Arafat’s contention that he was committed to the peace plan. The PLO leader made a secret visit to her within days of the assassination in her apartment in the North District of Tel Aviv. He had wanted to attend the funeral but security concerns overrode that objective, So he flew in under tight security from Gaza by helicopter for a 90 minute condolence visit. He shared with the widow that her husband was “a hero of peace and a personal friend”. She responded that “ my husband regarded you as a partner in peace”.
The evidence that this was not performative was argued by Arafat in an interview with Time at his headquarters in Gaza, where he claimed, “They were more than friends”, that they spoke regularly by phone and they had another special channel, a person who connected them. The sit down meeting came a week after Rabin’s assassination and it seemed. “…as it was a year….The man paid with his life for the peace of the brave”. Arafat hinted at coordination between the fanatics on “..both sides”.
Arafat stated that he was now worried about the peace process. In the discussion it was noted that neither Netanyahu nor Hamas signed the agreement. However he believed Peres who was part of the agreement would deliver but Netanyahu intervened. In 2000 the PLO leader rejected Barak's effort. There were two other major initiatives made one by PM Sharon in unilaterally ceding Gaza to the Palestinians but Hamas won the election so there could be no unification. The other by Olmert in 2008 which Mahmoud Abbas declined.
AND THEN THERE WAS ONE - BIBI NETANYAHU AND NAZA
So now it is back to this decade who was the only one left of the original dramatis personae, Benjamin Netanyahu, who was clinging onto power. Sadly the world has turned against Israel rather than its Government. Also the Jews in the diaspora are being blamed as well. Antisemitism is at another peak in history. The scapegoat narrative today is that the Jews generally are the oppressors and the Palestinians are the oppressed. To add to the drama now is the emergence of a documentary purporting to “prove” Ethnic Cleansing entitled NAZA.
NAZA details that an AI application was used to inflict civilian deaths, “collateral damage” in attacks on Hamas. The production won a “Special Prize” in a film festival in Venice. At the conclusion of the viewing there was a standing ovation for 25 minutes. There were several reasons why such a revelatory documentary would be immediately accepted at face value. The enormous destruction of Gaza, Israel’s ongoing presence nearly three years into the war and the reporting of the Gaza Ministry of Health of over 70,000 deaths, the overwhelming number being non combatants.
The authoritarian overreaction of Netanyahu to the two directors of the Gaza story became the story itself. He claimed that they were “….contributing to fuel global antisemitic sentiment…… The defamation prompted him to propose doubling the fines of those defaming the military and stripping individuals of their citizenship”. The two involved were born in Israel and very soon it became obvious that Netanyahu was giving the documentary world wide attention. This would have just become a boutique production in one of the plethora of these events, notwithstanding that it was backed by the UK newspaper The Guardian. Now everyone wants to see it!
The problem with the reception of the audience and subsequent condemnation from no less than the Prime Minister of Israel is that there is counter narrative from one of the founders of the NAZA system which has been ignored. The lead story in The Times of Israel, (September 17, 2026), by former Lieutenant Colonel Sarit Zahavi was headlined “The filmmakers mistook the IDF’S system for limiting civilian casualties as something far darker. They should have asked me ; I helped build it.”
She continued, “A little less than 20 years ago, (Ehud Olmert was Prime Minister) I was one of the founders of the unit within the IDF that deals with warning populations on the other side of enemy lines and preserving civilian lives… I would have explained that the chart shown at the beginning of the film’s promotional material is not a ‘killing chart’, but rather a planning chart for a target identified as being used by Hamas……it’s purpose is whether to strike at all, who in the command echelon is authorized to approve the strike….In stark contrast (to what the film purported to represent),….’NAZA 500 - collateral damage’….. means that action must be taken to reduce the collateral damage…both Hamas and Hezbollah deliberately place their rockets and headquarters in the heart of civilian areas…it is precisely the IDF’S efforts to preserve lives….namely evacuation warnings and tracking evacuation status that have been interpreted as ‘ethnic cleansing’…ignoring the scope of terror infrastructure exposed inside and beneath villages in both Lebanon and Gaza in almost every house….”.
There is little doubt that there needs to be an investigation into the conduct of the war, but this explanation exposes the gross negligence of all involved in the NAZA documentary, The story in “The Times of Israel” raises the issue as to why Netanyahu didn’t tell the world that the production had got it all wrong.. At least he could have argued a point made by the the Lieutenant Colonel as to why no-one in the Israeli Defense Force was asked to comment aa to what NAZA was. Bibi chose rather to politically grandstand and not contradict the premise of the movie and it was left to the IDF to explain. Perhaps he would rather not focus on the fact that it was initiated by Ehud Olmert and he was not going to investigate the conduct of the war Rather he was off to New York to attack Mamdani.
BIBI GOES TO MAMDANI’S NEW YORK
Netanyahu was off to New York where he immediately began a running battle with New York Mayor Yohran Mamdani who had originally maintained that he would arrest the Israeli Prime Minister when he arrived in the Big Apple. (Mamdani had not suggested the arrest of the President of Iran who was the country’s representative to the UNO Assembly or Russia’s Lavrov. All the while he was having tea with another alleged war criminal, the President of the United States).
Instead of ignoring the Mayor, who in the grand scheme of the world stage is a nonentity, Bibi decided to run against him in the October 27 Israeli election using the General Assembly as his stomping ground. Mamdani isn’t on the Israeli ballot or an international leader. The PM said that Israel wasn’t committing genocide because he said so. The delegates in The Assembly walked out in droves before he started. Bibi has a way about him that endears him to no- one. He lives by his wits with unbelievable political and survival skills. So he sneered at those that left, “No moral courage” and invited those that had the moral courage to remain, to leave.
Meanwhile outside in the streets of New York the demonstrations mumbled. One was “demanding” that the UNO “do something” about antisemitism. (Be careful what you wish for). About a 1000 attended that one which had representatives from every conceivable Jewish Organization. There were about a 1000 at the anti Netanyahu rally with 24 at a pro Bibi support group. The largest, a march was led by the Palestinian Youth Movement where there were “thousands”.
All in all Bibi was not going out with much of a bang in New York. The figure that had created a stir wherever he pitched up was no longer calling the shots. As Bill Clinton once said,“Who the hell does the guy think he is? Who is the world power around here?” It was a far cry from the last visit where he took over the Situation Room and persuaded Donald Trump that they could change the Iranian regime quicker than Putin thought he could overrun Ukraine. His foil now was the Mayor of New York. He screamed from the podium of the world that the Jews of New York fear Mamdani. Jay H. Ell believes they fear Netanyahu far more. (Blog: Israel and Jewish Angst).
AT THE END OF THE DAY
There was one moment in history on 1995 when the stars were aligned in that torn tiny piece of holy real estate in the Middle East. Bibi was central to them imploding before they joined. The climate in Israel was strong enough to carry peace attempts through till 2010 Since then Bibi has stridently gone in the other direction. He has to exit now and a new painful beginning of peace hopefully will start. If it does the world might pick up on the fact that it needs two states to create a two state solution.
What would have Netanyahu done without Mamdani and Mamdani without Netanyahu ?
Just because many of the countries that are attacking Israel have said and done not much against antisemitism through the ages doesn’t exculpate the Netanyahu cabal for anti -humanitarian behavior.
Fly El Al!
