When a Jewish extremist murdered Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin at the end of a peace rally 20 years ago Wednesday, many U.S. reporters based in Israel thought of the event as the country's Kennedy assassination.
I shared that feeling as a young reporter in Israel at the time. I covered the rally where Rabin was assassinated and attended every session of the trial of his killer, Yigal Amir. But in the past two years, while writing a book about the murder and trying to understand what it meant for Israeli society, I came to think of it as the analogue of a different event in American history: the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.
The correlation felt so compelling that I ran it by pre-eminent Lincoln scholar Harold Holzer. Let's just say he didn't laugh me out of the room (a beautiful room at the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College, which Holzer runs).
So here goes. The United States in the 1860s and Israel in the 1990s: Both countries are in formative periods, when big questions about identity and the kind of society people hope to create are still in play.
Both countries are divided, almost evenly, over one core, vexing issue. In the United States, it's the extending of slavery. In Israel, it's the future of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, where millions of Palestinians live under military rule with few of the rights that Israeli citizens have.
In Washington, a supporter of the Confederacy in his mid-20s shoots the president in hopes of upending the results of the war, which is a decisive victory for the Union. In Tel Aviv, a Jewish extremist in his mid-20s shoots the prime minister with the aim of reversing the first steps toward peace — a series of deals Rabin had struck with the Palestinians known as the Oslo Accords.
And that's where the stories diverge. Lincoln dies, but his legacy — preserving the Union and doing away with slavery — remains intact. The assassination goes down as a failure.
Rabin dies as well. But his murder sets off a chain reaction that shifts power in Israel from the pragmatists to the ideologues and ultimately guts his peace process. As assassinations go, it stands as one of the most successful in history.
Holzer indulged my analogy long enough to speculate about what would have happened if Lincoln had died before the Union victory — say, a year earlier.
“I think without Lincoln, the national will doesn't have an advocate. And the will of the people to keep the system that they had created so uniquely and so successfully evaporates. He's that good at making the case in his orations,” he said.
Rabin's leadership was unique as well, and Amir knew it. In his confession, he said that he killed Rabin because his record in war made him a singularly effective advocate for peace. Amir's brother, Hagai, who helped plot the murder, predicted Israel would be a different country without Rabin.
“According to Judaism, killing a king is profoundly significant. It affects the entire nation and alters its destiny,” Hagai Amir wrote days after the murder.
He knew what he was talking about.
Dan Ephron is the author of “Killing a King: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabinand the Remaking of Israel.”
