For a soldier trained in an agricultural school, a man ill at ease with words and symbolism, Yitzhak Rabin had no trouble with the language. For Zionism, this was one of those great moments of reckoning, of self-definition, and Rabin rose to the occasion. He found the right words for the right historic moment and reclaimed the Zionist inheritance for its vast secular mainstream when he spoke of Baruch Goldstein and his fellow extremists among the settlers on the West Bank and Gaza: "To him and others like him we say: You are not part of the community of Israel. You are not partners in the Zionist enterprise. You are a foreign implant. You are an errant weed. ... You placed yourself outside the wall of Jewish law."
This is the closing of a circle. From its very beginning, a century ago, Zionism was in the main a secular enterprise. Its standard-bearers were children of the secular enlightenment, of life beyond the walls of religion and kin. They were children of Europe's bourgeois age, rejected assimilates who had knocked at the gates of the wider world only to be turned away. Theodor Herzl, the Viennese journalist and dreamer who spun Zionism's first threads, wove them from the bewildering mix of emancipation and antisemitism that the Jews confronted in late 19th-century Europe. Zionism emerged as a powerful new fact, he said, when "we tried to mingle with the others and we were rebuffed." The waves of early pioneers and settlers who carried Herzl's vision to Palestine were faithful bearers of this secular impulse.
Occupiers, not liberators. The messianic, religious alternative that sustains men and women such as Baruch Goldstein, people on the fringe, came Israel's way in the aftermath of the Six-Day War of 1967. The conquest of the West Bank, a biblical land loaded with religious meaning, placed Israel in the way of a great temptation. "For a month, for a year, or for a whole generation we will have to sit as occupiers in places that touch our hearts with their history," wrote the Israeli novelist and writer Amos Oz. "We have not liberated Hebron and Ramallah, nor have we redeemed their inhabitants. We have conquered them and we are going to rule over them only until our peace is secured."
It was not easy for a zealous fringe to resist this great temptation, to draw its own limits. No Arab interlocutors showed up for a great historic compromise. The lands acquired as a collateral for a peace settlement cast their spell. "Facts" sprouted on the ground.
A young admirer of Goldstein's said that by his murderous deed in the Hebron mosque, in the Cave of the Patriarchs, Goldstein had tried to "stop the peace talks." No such luck. Goldstein is not the first nor will he be the last extremist who hacks away at history, who tries to "force its end" only to be swept aside or to give added impetus to the very forces he tried to stop.
Grant Goldstein an insight. Days before his terrible deed, he told an interviewer that Israel had grown "tired of fighting the Arabs down a blind alley." Goldstein and his companions had read the political wind accurately. A bourgeois society had made a great choice in 1993, for modernity and normalcy, for peace negotiations with the Palestinians and an end to the siege.
A "saving remnant" of true believers like Goldstein saw the choice as betrayal and illusion. They spun apocalyptic lore out of sacred scripture, out of "signs" of trouble and imminent redemption. They reinterpreted and vulgarized the past. Their trail is familiar to all movements that mix religion and terror. "A single line of blood and terror runs from the Islamic Holy War member who shot Jewish worshipers who stood in prayer in Istanbul, Paris, Amsterdam and Rome to the Jewish Hamas member who shot Ramadan worshipers," declared Rabin.
A political man who knows he has put his society through a whirlwind of changes, Rabin has put off the issue of the permanent status of the settlements for three more years. By then, he can only hope, political life will have rendered its own verdict on which settlements will endure and which will be swept aside, and on the kind of coexistence Israelis and Palestinians will be able to fashion.
Deep down, Rabin's Palestinian interlocutors also understand the logic of things taken up or deferred. The prevailing wisdom has it that the peace Yassir Arafat delivered to his people will fall of its own weight. But the prevailing wisdom errs. The peace seems vulnerable now because its promise has been delayed, but it will make its own case when the Palestinians taste for the first time a measure of political autonomy. The first time a Palestinian crosses the Allenby Bridge to Jordan through a checkpoint manned by a Palestinian, the peace that Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization are trying to fashion will be seen for the break with the past it really is.
