"You don't make peace with friends. You make it with very unsavory enemies." -Yitzhak Rabin
President Bush's remarks before the Knesset on Israel's 60th anniversary are now infamous. By this point, everyone knows that this attempt to link the idea of talking with enemies to the idea of appeasement, a process which involved giving away half of Czechoslavakia, is both silly and dishonest, a cheap ploy on the part of the Republican machine to equate diplomacy as such with the biggest mistakes of the Chamberlain Government. What hasn't been mentioned so much is what Bush's comments seem to say about the Middle East Peace Process, to which he claims to remain committed. The peace process, which has been stalled or moving backwards for almost the whole of Bush's term in office, was largely built on Prime Minister Rabin's difficult decision to deal directly with Yasir Arafat. At the time, Arafat was viewed much as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Ismail Haniyeh are viewed today.
Leah Rabin, in her book, Our Life, His Legacy, remembers how difficult that historic handshake was:
Did Yitzhak intend to shake Yasir Arafat's hand? Surely, he had mixed feelings -- after all, this was the leader of an organization that had, over the years, taken the lives of countless Israeli civilians and soldiers. But peace is something you make with your enemies, not with your friends. And making peace means moving past bloodshed, beyond anguished memories. The look of discomfort on Yitzhak's face was unmistakable; he looked as if he'd swallowed something large and painful. He was shaking the hand of a man he said he would never dignify with direct contact. He was breaking a vow. How could he forget the victims of terror, even at this historic moment? Had it not been before the eyes of the world, he might not have felt so deeply conflicted. I imagine he was thinking, The whole world has heard me say never and now I am....
That historic handshake, that willingness to deal not with moderates or friends but with enemies, with the actual forces he confronted, was the foundation of the peace process. President Bush recently stated in Egypt that he was "absolutely committed" to an independent Palestinian state living in peace with Israel which he described as "an opportunity to end the suffering that takes place in the Palestinian territories." Bush also met with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, a moderate willing to work with the United States and Israel to try and restrain Hamas's terrorist agenda. Abbas, a member of the Fatah Party which Yasir Arafat once led, is only now a diplomatic partner for peace because Rabin was willing to meet not just friends but enemies in the process of making peace. Likewise, the groundwork for a two-state solution was laid almost entirely by Rabin's bold diplomacy, diplomacy not undertaken out of fear or out of any desire for "appeasement" but instead undertaken bravely, against vicious domestic opposition which mirrors in some ways the current reactionary attacks on Senator Obama's willingness to talk to both friends and enemies. Mrs. Rabin notes:
On the fifth of October, the Knesset debated and ultimately approved the second Oslo agreement. The way seemed clear to tackle the next item on the peace agenda -- peace with Syria. That evening, the Likud and other right-wing parties mustered a crowd of 20,000 to 30,000 to Zion Square to protest the latest Oslo accords, chanting, 'Rabin is a traitor' and, 'Rabin, go home before you give it away.' During the rally, demonstrators burned posters of Yitzhak in an SS uniform or a kaffiyeh, as Benjamin Netanyahu stood on a balcony overlooking the crowd.
The right-wing is, of course, the same everywhere. Ultimately, Rabin made a great deal of progress for peace, advanced Israel's position in the world and increased Israel's security. At least for a time, he vastly improved the lives and security of Israelis and Palestinians alike and his legacy was to create the framework in which a more lasting peace remains possible. For this, he was murdered by Yigal Amir, a young man who believed, as George Bush believes, that making peace with enemies, regardless of the context or the details, amounts to nothing more than appeasement.
There is no comparison, morally or intellectually, between the Labor Prime Minister who gave his life for peace and the Republican President who pretended to give up golf for war. The moral gulf which separates George Bush from Yitzhak Rabin is as wide as the one which separates Jack Abramoff from Mohatma Gandhi. Nonetheless, it is amazing that President Bush could have been so ignorant or so indifferent to the Arab-Israeli peace process that, in order to get in an ugly and dishonest attack on Senator Obama, he would so fundamentally condemn Rabin's legacy and the whole of the peace process as to say that talking to enemies was, in and of itself, tantamount to appeasement and that he would say it before the Knesset, where Rabin himself once stood to argue for peace. That his comments were followed shortly by Mike Huckabee's tasteless joke about assassinating Senator Obama is a particularly ugly coincidence.