According to “Israel today“, By Ryan Jones The daughter of slain Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who started Israel’s land-for-peace process with Yasser Arafat’s PLO, says her father likely would have responded to ongoing Palestinian intransigence by reversing the concessions he had made.
“Many people who were close to father told me that on the eve of the murder he considered stopping the Oslo process because of the terror that was running rampant in the streets and that Arafat wasn’t delivering the goods,” Dalia Rabin told Yediot Ahronot. “Father after all wasn’t a blind man running forward without thought.”
Knowing her father’s mind, Dalia believed that her father also “considered doing a reverse on our side. After all, he was someone for whom the security of the state was sacrosanct.”
Rabin is often held up as an icon by left-wing Israeli politicians and political movements that advocate surrendering to all Arab land demands, including the division of Jerusalem.
But as he entered the peace process in 1993, Rabin famously stated that an independent Palestinian state could “only rise on the ruins of the State of Israel.”
In an address to the Knesset in 1995 after signing the Interim Agreement with Arafat, Rabin reiterated that what his government was working toward was nothing more than a Palestinian autonomous area:
“We view the permanent solution in the framework of State of Israel which will include most of the area of the Land of Israel as it was under the rule of the British Mandate, and alongside it a Palestinian entity which will be a home to most of the Palestinian residents living in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.We would like this to be an entity which is less than a state, and which will independently run the lives of the Palestinians under its authority.”
It is also interesting to note that, by contrast to what is taking place today, Rabin strongly stated in that same Knesset address that Israel had never agreed to and would never agree to freeze Jewish building in existing Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria:
“I want to remind you: We committed ourselves, that is, we came to an agreement, and committed ourselves before the Knesset, not to uproot a single settlement in the framework of the interim agreement, and not to hinder building for natural growth.”
That this land-for-peace process began because a large number of Israelis finally admitted that the land belongs to the Arabs and that Jews settling there was wrong is a myth perpetuated by those who want to see Israel surrender to all Arab land demands, which the Arabs often admit is only a stepping stone to the destruction of the Jewish state.
