Oslo, Judicial reform: Crises that shook Israel and feature Netanyahu - opinion

Very few Israelis will admit something that is obvious: The current crisis surrounding judicial reform, and the mass protests flowing out of Tel Aviv across the country, are an echo, and in some ways a mirror, of the crisis triggered by the Oslo Accords three decades ago.

In both cases, you have a prime minister (Yitzhak Rabin then, Benjamin Netanyahu now) traditionally seen as moderate but suddenly leading a coalition bent on revolution.

Both prime ministers moved quickly after taking office to bring broad change – in their view, a long-needed solution to a profound problem. For Rabin, it was peace after decades of bloody conflict; for Netanyahu, it was to wrest control of national life from an unfettered, disconnected, and self-perpetuating judicial-legal establishment. In both cases, the political pressure for a quick and dramatic solution had been building for decades.

Both were right in principle and wrong in practice. They both addressed a true problem with a false solution. 

Both were fundamentally altering the nature and contours of the country – on the strength of a slim and controversial Knesset majority. 

In both cases, a vast opposition camp coalesced rapidly around the belief that something essential and precious to their view of the nation – for one, the biblical homeland, for the other, democracy – was under dire threat from a government far exceeding its mandate.

And, of course, both stories involve Benjamin Netanyahu and the revulsion he manages to inspire among opponents (and some allies as well). 

But here the echo becomes a mirror: Netanyahu led the opposition to Oslo. Now he’s the one being protested against. These two crises are bookends to his long and storied career.

Oslo and judicial reform: Bookends to Netanyahu's career

I MADE aliyah in January 1994 – less than four months after Oslo was signed. My family and I took a van from the airport directly to the settlement of Eli, halfway between Ramallah and Nablus, right next to Shiloh, where the biblical Tabernacle stood for centuries. 

On the first jetlagged morning, I awoke at dawn and took a stroll outside on the dewy mountaintop. I looked out over a broad vista of biblical highlands, taking in the crisp, oregano-rosemary air. It was a breathtaking Zionist dreamscape, a return after millennia. This would be my home for the next seven years.

I was active in opposing Oslo. I attended the infamous Zion Square rally in 1995 in which posters I never saw apparently depicted Rabin in an SS uniform. This became a big scandal after the fact, one that didn’t diminish when the posters were retroactively downgraded to leaflets. 

Nor was the rally a platform of incitement, the way it has been depicted in the official history. Did anyone call Rabin a “traitor”? Yes; a small group of hyperventilating youths shouted it out – and were then immediately told off by the speakers on the balcony, including Netanyahu. But if one should judge a protest by the stupidest words of its fringe, today’s movement is no better.

It was in the Oslo years that I learned that someone who attacks you for your “tone” has usually run out of arguments on substance. My tone was fine. So was that of the camp’s leaders, including Netanyahu. What our opponents didn’t like was the substance – the claim that Arafat and the PLO were not peacemakers but terrorists taking Israel’s government for a ride. That Oslo would lead not to peace but instead to vastly increased terror. That the other camp’s most precious dreams were, in fact, delusions.

All of which proved remarkably accurate.

It was in the Oslo years that I learned that Israel’s Left and Right are not so much camps around policy as they are about personality and culture. We on the Right wanted someone who was in tune with our lives, our suffering, our fears and dreams. Someone who believed that the Jews’ return to the Land of Israel was intrinsic to Zionism and non-negotiable; and that those who took personal risks to settle the land were heroic, as in the movement’s early days. 

Not someone like Rabin, who said that Golan Heights residents could “spin like propellers” for all he cared; or that terror victims, including my friends and neighbors, were “sacrifices for peace”; or that he was responsible for the security of “97% of Israelis” – the implication being he felt no responsibility for the lives of settlers, citizens of Israel, the remaining 3%, many of whose homes had been built with his approval as defense minister in the 1980s.

The rhetoric of the moment was, in other words, heated. Politics were nasty. But not much beyond the norms of Israeli discourse.

And then Rabin was murdered.

In a moment, the rules of Israeli politics were forever broken. The dreams of half the population were shattered in the most violent way. But I was among the other half. For us, the experience was awful as well, but different: Rabin was my prime minister too. His murder was sickening. And now I was somehow made complicit. 

I did not feel complicit. I felt violated. Something had been taken from me.

In a moment, what was a peaceful, earnest movement that stood for a noble Zionist ideal and engaged the political battle in a thoroughly democratic manner was suddenly tarred in toto as barbaric, monstrous, regicidal. 

The rage of the pro-Oslo camp turned against us in its fullest fury – and understandably so. The subject was decisively changed, from a dispute about whether Oslo was a form of self-delusion to whether being on the Right made one inherently evil. An accessory.

The media as a whole, having dismissed as illegitimate the entirety of our protest movement, naturally blamed us for the assassination. They dubbed the months of protest that preceded the murder the “period of incitement.” To this day, political leaders like Benny Gantz blame Netanyahu for Rabin’s death.

But there was no incitement in the movement’s mainstream. I was there. At no point in the protests did I feel like things were getting overheated or out of control. From Zion Square, we marched peacefully to the Knesset and continued our protest – loud but not violent – as the Knesset voted on the Oslo II agreement. It passed by a single vote. 

Nobody wanted to storm the building. This was no January 6. 

The anti-Oslo movement was built on a refusal to drink the Kool-Aid, a clear understanding of the horrors Oslo would bring, and a need to shout the warning at the top of our lungs. A warning is not incitement, no matter how harshly phrased. The prediction of an inevitable descent into terrorism – which actually ended up happening – is not incitement. It’s protest. And calling it incitement is unacceptable in a healthy democracy.

If today’s protest movement turns tragic – if extremist elements take extreme actions in the movement’s name – I will never blame the movement as a whole. Protest is never under the full control of its leaders, and to blame it for tragic outcomes is to tar all democratic protests everywhere. You can’t say “democracy is defined by the right to protest” and then hold protest inherently responsible for what evil people do with it.

How many of those taking to the streets today still hold anti-Oslo protesters – meaning me – responsible for the assassination? Do they know what responsibility they are implicitly taking on themselves if something horrible happens now?

I’ve learned my lesson. I find myself on the side of the protesters today, for reasons of policy rather than culture or hatred, and I say so publicly. But you won’t see me at the rallies. I don’t want that kind of responsibility.

IN DECEMBER 1997, Ari Shavit, an up-and-coming journalist, burst onto the Israeli scene with a kind of mea culpa entitled “Enemy of half the state,” published in Haaretz’s weekend supplement. On the cover of the magazine was the headline “The year of hating Netanyahu.”

Netanyahu had pulled a stunning victory, defeating prime minister Shimon Peres in the 1996 elections in the wake of the first wave of post-Oslo terrorism. On Peres’s watch, coffee shops and buses had been blown up by suicide bombers, producing far more carnage than the rocks and Molotov cocktails of the First Intifada. 

Now Netanyahu, the presumptive architect of Rabin’s murder and destroyer of peace, had become prime minister, and the post-assassination Left was blind with rage. Shavit was one of the few Oslo supporters who publicly cast a critical eye on the Left’s mindset:

“Hatred of Netanyahu enables us to conveniently forget that [with Oslo] we acted like fools. We embraced illusions. We fell into a collective state of messianic drunkenness,” he wrote. 

“Hatred of Netanyahu allows us to forget that it was not the rise of Netanyahu that brought on the paralysis of Oslo but the paralysis of Oslo that brought on the rise of Netanyahu. It allows us to believe again that everything could be so simple, that if we just withdraw, if we just recognize Palestinian statehood... we can again taste the intoxicating flavor of the end of history, the end of wars, the end of conflict.”

The messianic fervor around Oslo came to an end with the Second Intifada, but the hatred of Netanyahu did not. Indeed, one of the most unfortunate aspects of the last generation of Israeli politics has been the extent to which it has turned entirely around the personality of a single man, a demon-or-savior named Netanyahu. 

This dynamic is not entirely his fault – all blaming him does is absolve others of responsibility – but it has certainly made Israeli political discourse unbearably anti-policy, ill-tempered, and dull.

LIKE SHAVIT, I too have moved around politically, or perhaps the map has moved around me. I left Eli in 2001, at the height of the Second Intifada. My second-grader’s school bus had been shot up by Palestinians armed through the Oslo Accords. The bus had been bullet-proofed, nobody was hurt, and my son was delighted at the adventure, but his mother and I were not. So we moved to Jerusalem. 

I opposed Ariel Sharon’s withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, mainly for strategic security rather than religious-historical reasons. But I also felt a bit of a shock when I went to the settlement of Kfar Darom to observe and protest, and was confronted with an enormous camp of quasi-messianic religious settlers on the same side as me on policy but whom I can define today only as wackadoodle. These were no longer my people; I’m not sure they ever were.

I strongly opposed Aharon Barak’s judicial revolution back then as well, and have long believed in the need for change. I believe in a Jewish state, one that is an authentic home for the Jewish people. This automatically will mean a certain emphasis in terms of symbolism, holidays, and public education: teaching Jewish history, the Bible, the Oral tradition, alongside Israeli and Zionist history. I supported the 2018 Nation-State law.

But I also believe in democracy, equality before the law, and protection of minority rights. I think the extent to which Jewish symbols and content should reign should not extend, for example, to disproportionate public funding for infrastructure, schooling, or any other government service. There is no justification for Arab citizens to suffer structural neglect. Nor is it wise in the long term. 

Democracy requires the protection of rights and equality for all citizens. The proposed reforms will eviscerate them, and I’m furious at Netanyahu for betraying Israeli democracy by even proposing them.

And so we find ourselves living a déjà-vu. Once again, a narrow government is trying to unilaterally change the rules of the game in a way that is guaranteed to bring consequences far worse than the problem they are solving. Once again, massive protests have filled the streets. Rhetoric is hot. 

It is both trite and grotesque to point to the Rabin assassination as a personal warning to Netanyahu today. But one cannot escape the sense that terrible things may yet happen. 

There will be a huge temptation to make political hay out of those terrible things. But just as I won’t blame either Netanyahu or Rabin (as some extremists did) for the assassination, I won’t blame either Netanyahu or today’s opposition leaders for whatever may yet come. Evil should be blamed on those who perpetrate it. 

But that doesn’t mean such a tragedy is inevitable, either. 

It is commonplace in Israel that “only the Left can make war, only the Right can make peace.” Fundamental change requires broad consensus or, failing that, overwhelming force. In the absence of both, you will necessarily have rupture. Those who insist on rupture are gambling with our national future.

It’s time to put an end to this gamble. 

The author is a writer, translator, and editor of Jewish Priorities: Sixty-Five Proposals for the Future of Our People (Wicked Son, 2023). He resides in Jerusalem.