BENJAMIN NETANYAHU and his relationship with assassinated prime minister Yitzhak Rabin continue to arouse controversy in Israel. Martin Indyk, the former U.S. ambassador to Israel, recounted in January on an episode of PBS’s Frontline, “Netanyahu sat next to me when I was ambassador in Israel at the time of Rabin’s funeral. . . . I remember Netanyahu saying to me: ‘Look, look at this. He’s a hero now, but if he had not been assassinated, I would have beaten him in the elections, and then he would have gone into history as a failed politician.’” Netanyahu’s office denied that he said it.

Last November was the twentieth anniversary of the assassination of Rabin. It remains a contentious date in Israeli history. The occasion was accompanied by the publication of several works, most notably by former Newsweek Jerusalem bureau chief Dan Ephron’s Killing a King and a documentary by one of Israel’s leading filmmakers, Amos Gitai, Rabin, the Last Day. A major question raised by both was whether Middle Eastern history, including Israeli-Palestinian relations, would have developed in a radically different direction had Rabin lived. It boiled down to whether the assassination had aborted a peace process that would or could have culminated in a historic peace between the Israelis and Palestinians and, by extension, the Arab world as a whole.

Plenty of turning points can be detected in Israel’s turbulent past. In 2005, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon unilaterally pulled Israel’s troops and settlements out of the Gaza Strip. After his demise a year later—he descended into a decade-long coma, dying on January 11, 2014—no further Israeli withdrawals occurred after Gaza and the partial occupation of the West Bank continues down to the present day (“partial” because the West Bank’s main towns and their peripheries are under the control of the Palestinian Authority, though Israeli troops occasionally mount penetrating raids to arrest or kill suspected terrorists, and Israel fully controls the airspace above the whole of the territory). Sharon’s successor, Ehud Olmert, renewed negotiations with Mahmoud Abbas, the “president” of the Palestinian Authority, and offered him Palestinian statehood in virtually 97 percent of the West Bank and 100 percent of the Gaza Strip, with a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem. But Abbas rejected the offer, paving the way for the return of Benjamin Netanyahu to the premiership and leaving the status quo, with its burgeoning Israeli settlements, Palestinian terrorism and Israeli counterinsurgency, intact.

Did Sharon’s stroke alter the course of history? The jury is still out. It remains unclear whether he actually intended to withdraw unilaterally from the West Bank, perhaps to a line along the so-called “Security Barrier,” which would have left about 90 percent of the territory in Palestinian hands. It is likely that he was playing it by ear and had not yet made up his mind when felled by the stroke—though it was Sharon who, after the outbreak in 2000 of the Second Intifada against Israel, had sired the idea of the fence and had overseen the initial stages of its construction. While primarily designed to curb the infiltration of terrorists into Israel, many at the time suspected that Sharon had also conceived of the wall as “political,” demarcating the eventual border to which Israel would someday withdraw.

Be that as it may, for many the more tantalizing question mark hovers over the historical significance of Rabin’s demise, partly because of the grim nature of his death at the hands of a fellow Jew, partly because Rabin was a supremely likable, if reserved and shy, character (even a tearful PLO [Palestine Liberation Organization] chairman Yasser Arafat, Abbas’s predecessor, paid a condolence call on the widow, Leah, in the Rabins’ home in Tel Aviv), and partly because of the paradox presented by the apparent transformation of a laurelled general into a peacenik murdered by a right-wing activist bent on halting the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and the prospective withdrawal from Judaea and Samaria, the biblical designation of the territory constituting the West Bank. The killer, Yigal Amir, of Yemenite origin, was at some level also driven by resentment towards the Ashkenazi establishment that Rabin epitomized. As much as many in the Islamic world applaud martyrs, however brutal, in the cause of Islam, so the enlightened West adores its martyrs for peace—and none was more prominent than Rabin.

BUT DID THE two bullets that struck Rabin in the back in downtown Tel Aviv on November 4, 1995 reverse the course of history and definitively halt the Israeli-Palestinian peace process? Rabin assumed the premiership in July 1992, having run and won on a peace platform. Though cerebral, Rabin made an unlikely peacenik. He had made no substantive peace proposals to the Palestinians during his first premiership from 1974–1977, had spent most of his adult life in the army, and had personally signed the orders for the expulsion of the Arab inhabitants of the towns of Lydda and Ramle during the 1948 war. He also had orchestrated the Israel Defense Force’s Six-Day War victory over Egypt, Syria and Jordan and the occupation of the Gaza Strip and West Bank in June 1967; in 1988, in suppressing the First Intifada (or revolt) against the Israeli occupation, he had, as defense minister in the coalition government led by the Likud’s Yitzhak Shamir, ordered the troops to “break the bones” of Palestinian rioters.

But that intifada seems to have convinced Rabin that Israel could not indefinitely rule over the Palestinians and remain a democracy, and that the occupation must be brought to an end. Moreover, he believed that the 1990s offered Israel a strategic window in which to make peace with the Palestinians before the wave of Muslim fundamentalism washing over the region overwhelmed its moderates, before Iran and/or Iraq attained nuclear weapons, and while Arab regimes were bereft of a superpower patron (the Arab-supporting Soviet Union had just collapsed).

Rabin’s chance came in 1992, after two Israeli intellectuals, backed and in part steered by a young Labor Party Knesset member, Yossi Beilin, without Rabin’s knowledge or approval, initiated—at first contrary to Israeli law—clandestine talks with officials of the PLO, with help from the Norwegian government. Many of the meetings took place outside Oslo. By February 1993, the Oslo talks had matured and Beilin, by now deputy foreign minister, informed his boss, Foreign Minister (and long-time Rabin rival for the Labor leadership) Shimon Peres. Peres informed Rabin, who had from the 1960s to the 1980s firmly opposed talking to the PLO, which he dismissed as a terrorist organization whose constitution, the Palestine National Charter, called explicitly for Israel’s destruction.

The negotiations were dogged by Palestinian terrorist outrages in the occupied territories and in Israel proper and by repressive Israeli countermeasures, such as the temporary exile to Lebanon in December 1992 of 415 Hamas and Islamic Jihad operatives. Nonetheless, by May 1993 the main lines of a PLO-Israeli agreement had jelled. After further talks, Israel and the PLO in September exchanged letters of mutual recognition, Arafat stating that the PLO “recognize[s] the right of the State of Israel to exist in peace and security” and committing to renunciation of terrorism and “a peaceful resolution of the conflict.” He added that the clauses of the Charter denying Israel’s right to exist were “now inoperative.” Responding, Rabin stated that “the Government of Israel has decided to recognize the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people” and to negotiate peace. It appeared to be a historic breakthrough.

On September 13, 1993, on the White House lawn, with President Clinton, Rabin and Arafat looking on (Rabin appeared extremely ill at ease beside the Palestinian leader, but eventually shook his hand), Peres and Abbas signed a “Declaration of Principles”—the first Oslo agreement. Rabin called for an end to “blood and tears”; Arafat, for “an age of peace, coexistence and equal rights.” The Declaration of Principles outlined the path forward leading to a “comprehensive peace . . . and historic reconciliation” and posited the establishment of an autonomous “Palestinian Interim Self-Government Authority,” with the transfer of authority over education, health, social welfare and tourism to the Palestinians, who would set up a “strong police force” to guarantee order and security. During the following years, trust would be built between the two sides and negotiations for a final-status settlement would begin. Seven months later, on May 4, 1994, the two sides signed a follow-up agreement (the “Cairo Agreement”), positing Israeli withdrawal from the Jericho area of the West Bank and from much of the Gaza Strip, both to be ruled by the Palestinian Authority.

But a week later, Arafat, unaware that he was being recorded, told a Muslim audience in Johannesburg that the agreements the PLO had just signed were like the pact (“Hudnat Hudaybiyyah”) Mohammed had signed with a Jewish tribe in Hijaz in 628 AD, a tactical move the Muslims abrogated unilaterally a few years later. Arafat also called for “Jihad” to recover Jerusalem. He seemed to be saying that he would renege upon the agreements as soon as it suited his purposes. Nonetheless, Israel duly withdrew from the Gaza and Jericho areas during the following days and on July 1, Arafat arrived in Gaza, to a tumultuous welcome, treading on the soil of the Holy Land for the first time since 1967. Along with him came thousands of PLO fighters, now designated “police,” from their dispersed camps in the Arab world.

THE PARTIAL reduction of Israeli control of the territories was accompanied by a major surge in fundamentalist Palestinian terrorism, geared to torpedoing the peace process. Israeli countermeasures, which included mass arrests, curfews and area closures, bit into the Palestinians’ livelihoods and freedoms. The Palestinians charged that Israel was violating the agreements; Israel, that the PLO was failing to rein in the terrorists who were provoking the Israeli Right and limiting the government’s room for maneuver. The right claimed that the government was abandoning the settlers, facilitating Arab terrorism (Israel even helped arm the PLO “police” force) and rendering Israel itself vulnerable to Arab violence.

The peace process also occasioned a few incidents of Jewish violence against Arabs, the most telling episode being the massacre in February 1994 of twenty-nine Muslim worshippers in the Ibrahimi Mosque (for Jews, the Tomb of the Patriarchs) in Hebron by a lone, American-born settler medical doctor Baruch Goldstein. Goldstein, who became the adulated martyr of the Israeli Far Right, including Yigal Amir, sought to derail the peace process and frustrate further Israeli withdrawals from the West Bank. Dozens of protesting Arabs died in clashes with Israeli troops in the wake of the massacre.

Rabin failed to exploit the almost consensual Israeli revulsion to crack down on the extreme Right by the mass arrest of activists, who often broke the law by vandalizing Arab property and defying government orders, and of the rabbis who incited them to attack “Amalek,” a code word used among religious extremists for Arabs. (“Amalek” was the name of a biblical tribe or people who assailed the Hebrews led by Moses in their wanderings in the desert before they reached the Promised Land three thousand years ago.) The rabbis gave the activists ideological cover, legitimacy and motivation, and called on soldiers to disobey the government and their commanders if ordered to evict settlers. At the crucial cabinet meeting following the massacre, a number of ministers urged Rabin to take a dramatic step: To uproot the one hundred or so settlers who had more or less illegally settled in the heart of Hebron, or at least demolish the smaller compound in nearby Tel Rumeida. Fearing a clash with the settlers, which might lead to Jew-on-Jew violence, Rabin did neither.

Of course, Oslo triggered a far more widespread and deadly response by the Arab rejectionists. Over the following three years there were Arab fundamentalist bombings, kidnappings and ambushes in the Palestinian territories and in Israel proper. Each month saw multiple attacks, some resulting in massive casualties. Twenty-one Israelis were killed and dozens injured by a Hamas suicide bomber on October 19, 1994 in Dizengoff Square in the heart of Tel Aviv; twenty-two soldiers died the following January at the hands of two Islamic Jihad bombers in Beit Lid, just north of the city. The onslaught seemed to prove the Right’s contention that handing over territory reduced Israelis’ security—and Rabin was held responsible for the bloodbath. Rabin, they raged, was a “traitor,” an accomplice in the murder of Jews.

Nonetheless, having taken a strategic decision to reach out to the Palestinians and withdraw from the territories (though, carefully, he never explicitly endorsed eventual sovereign Palestinian statehood), Rabin soldiered on, despite his coalition government enjoying only a razor-thin majority in the Knesset, 61 seats of the chamber’s 120. On September 28, 1995, Israel and the Palestinians signed “Oslo II,” and in November–December Israel handed over control of most of the West Bank’s cities and towns (Nablus, Ramallah, Bethlehem, Jenin, Qalqilya, Tulkarm) and surrounding areas to the Palestinian Authority. But by then, Rabin—depicted in Nazi SS uniform or in an Arab keffiyah in posters brandished during massive right-wing demonstrations against the “Oslo process”—was dead.

RABIN’S SUCCESSOR Shimon Peres failed to leverage the national trauma and revulsion at the assassination into a campaign to suppress the extreme Right during his brief tenure as prime minister (November 1995-June 1996). He failed to clamp down on illegal activities and settlements—usually small satellite communities of large “legal” (in Israeli eyes) settlements; and refused to “administratively” detain the hundreds of activists or prosecute the rabbis who more or less endorsed the law breaking, including those who had specifically sanctioned the prime minister’s murder in line with the Talmudic prescriptions for “din moser” (one who hands over a Jew or, by extension, Jewish land to a Gentile authority) and “din rodef” (one who intervenes to stop a man hunting down a Jew). In both cases, the prescriptions sanctioned killing the anti-Jewish perpetrators.

Meanwhile, to stymie further progress toward peace (Peres, though a prosettlement, hardline defense minister in the past, was widely viewed as far more enthusiastic about peace-making than his predecessor), the Palestinian fundamentalists renewed their suicide bombing campaign in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem with added vigor. The spate of bombings during February and March of 1996 claimed more than fifty Israeli lives—and, surprising the pollsters, lost Peres the general election, with Netanyahu winning by a slim margin and putting together a right-wing coalition government. The bombings had come hard on the heels of the Israeli pullout from the West Bank’s towns, “proving” once again that concessions to the Palestinians resulted in the murder of Jews.

Netanyahu in effect halted the peace process—and strangely enough, or not so strangely as right-wingers would have it, the three years of his first premiership were marked by a dramatic drop in Arab terrorism. Nonetheless, Israelis were disaffected by the diplomatic immobility and foreign disapprobation, wanted peace, and disliked Netanyahu on a number of personal counts. In the 1999 general elections they replaced him with Ehud Barak, the new Labor leader, who came in on a peace ticket. Like Rabin, here was an ex-general who embodied security and could deliver it—while giving peace a chance.

And then came Barak’s rapid, almost meteoric, fall from grace. He failed to clinch a peace deal with Syria and controversially withdrew Israel’s troops from southern Lebanon to the international border, and he tried and failed to reach a lasting peace with the Palestinians. In July 2000 at Camp David, he offered Arafat a sovereign, albeit largely demilitarized, Palestinian state in 91 per cent of the West Bank and 100 percent of the Gaza Strip, with administrative control over parts of Jerusalem—and Arafat said “no.” In December President Clinton upped the ante, offering Arafat—in the so-called “Clinton Parameters”—94–96 per cent of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and sovereignty over the Arab-speaking neighborhoods of East Jerusalem, including the bulk of the Old City, and Palestinian sovereignty over the surface area of the Temple Mount, and Arafat again refused—and returned to Palestine to a hero’s welcome. Both in July and December Arafat had insisted on Israeli acceptance of the “Right of Return” of the Palestinian refugees while Barak and Clinton had provided for the resolution of the refugee problem mainly by resettlement in place or in the future Palestinian state, not in Israel.

Barak had gambled and failed to achieve peace. And the Palestinians had not only said “no” but proceeded to launch the Second Intifada, this one far more violent than the first (some 1,400 Israelis were blown up, knifed and shot to death, and many more were wounded, during the following three years). Barak lost by a landslide and was ousted from the premiership in the general elections of 2001. The Israeli public wanted a no-nonsense, hardline general and despaired of the Palestinians ever agreeing to a compromise, and installed Sharon as prime minister.

Sharon ultimately crushed the Second Intifada, but failed to persuade the Palestinians to renew negotiations, and in 2005 unilaterally uprooted all Israeli settlements in the Gaza Strip and withdrew Israel’s troops. The Palestinians responded by giving the Hamas a majority in their parliament in the 2006 general elections. The next year, Hamas staged an armed takeover of the Gaza Strip, from which it proceeded to periodically rocket southern Israel. Sharon’s successor, Ehud Olmert, offered Mahmoud Abbas, Arafat’s successor, a peace settlement along the lines of Clinton’s parameters. Abbas also said “no” (though technically, being much cagier than Arafat, he refrained from actually publicly saying the word “no”—and merely refrained from responding to Olmert’s concrete proposals).

Since 2009, Netanyahu has led successive Israeli governments and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been marked by treading water and stalemate, dotted by bouts of asymmetric warfare between Israel and the Hamas in Gaza and periodic bouts of terrorism and counterterrorism in the West Bank. Throughout the peace-process era, under Rabin, Peres, Netanyahu, Barak, Sharon, Olmert and again Netanyahu, Israel’s settlement enterprise in the West Bank has burgeoned, the number of settlers more or less doubling to about half a million in the twenty-year period (though Rabin and even Netanyahu had periodically agreed to limited settlement freezes to give negotiations a chance. Nothing, or nothing good, came of the negotiations, and the settlement enterprise was as repeatedly renewed).

WHICH BRINGS US back to the question: Did Rabin’s assassination change anything? Would history have been different had he lived? Back in 2004 the Clinton administration’s Middle East point man, Dennis Ross, published a memoir about his years as peace negotiator, The Missing Peace. In it he offered what amounted to two contradictory theses as to why the negotiations of 2000 had failed: One, that Arafat sincerely wanted peace but that the Israelis had never offered what he regarded as sufficient concessions and that he had, at each critical juncture, responded with a tactical “no” in the belief that he still had time to eke out further concessions, but that in the end he had misjudged the situation, time ran out, matters spun out of control and he lost the chance to get a two-state solution which included a sovereign Palestinian state.

Or perhaps it was two, that Arafat had throughout played a duplicitous game and had never reconciled himself to or sought a two-state solution, whatever the parameters, and had merely strung the Israelis and Americans along in order to appear conciliatory and gain points in Western public opinion but had in fact held out for a “solution” in which all of Mandatory Palestine, unpartitioned and unshared, would ultimately come under Palestinian Arab sovereignty.

By extension, the question is whether the Palestinian national movement, which down to the 1980s had forthrightly and publicly sought the destruction of Israel and the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state in all of Palestine, had from, say, the late 1980s resigned itself to a settlement based on a partitioned Palestine, with Jewish and Arab states, with the Palestinian state consisting of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem. Or not.

If one believes that the Palestinian national movement, consisting of both its fundamentalist and secular wings, represented by Hamas and Fatah respectively, has never reconciled itself to sharing Palestine with a Jewish state, whatever the exact territorial configuration, then the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin probably made very little difference. As they had rejected a two-state solution back in 1937 and 1947, when the Peel Commission and then the United Nations General Assembly had put such solutions on the table, so they would have rejected such solutions after 1995. In other words, had Yigal Amir not shot Rabin, there was nothing that Rabin could conceivably have done or offered that would have persuaded Arafat or his successors to acquiesce in a two-state solution and to sharing Palestine with a Jewish state. To be sure, they would have continued to play any number of diplomatic games to curry favor with Washington and Europe, but when it came down to the wire, they would ultimately not have signed off on a two-state settlement (as, indeed, they had failed to agree to such solutions when offered by Rabin’s successors in 2000 and 2007).

But rejecting this bleak, perhaps deterministic view of what has driven and drives the Palestinian national movement does not necessarily mean that had Rabin survived Yigal Amir’s assault, the ongoing peace process or a subsequent peace process would have ended in Israeli-Palestinian peace. Put another way, it is quite possible to believe that Arafat or his successors sincerely wanted (and still want) peace and would have sincerely agreed to the principle of a two-state solution and yet believe that no peace would have been achieved between Israel and the Palestinians had Rabin lived.

The basic geopolitical reality is that the Land of Israel/Palestine between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean—ten thousand square miles in all, the size of Vermont—is simply too small to divide between two peoples, each with robust demographic growth rates, into two viable states. (More than ten million people currently live between the River and the Sea, some fifteen times the population of Vermont.) Moreover, the multiple issues dividing the two peoples are of such depth, weight and consequence—most prominently, the Palestinian Arab refugee problem and the problem of Jerusalem and its Temple Mount—that no reasonable amount of good will by a Rabin or peace-minded Arafat could conceivably overcome them.

No Israeli prime minister could ever agree to a mass refugee return to the territory of pre-1967 Israel—as all Israeli prime ministers since 1948 have viewed such a return as the absorption of a giant fifth column, guaranteeing Israel’s destruction, demographically, politically and militarily. And no Palestinian leader could ever give up the “right” of Palestinian refugees living in the hovels around Tyre and Sidon, Tripoli, Damascus and Gaza, to return to their original homes and lands in pre-1948 Palestine. For Palestinian leaders, this would mean abandoning “justice” and their impoverished brothers in exile.

Similarly, no Israeli premier (though Barak came close to it in 2000) could ever agree, or at least sell to the Israeli public, the abandonment to Arab sovereignty of Jerusalem’s “Holy Basin” and Temple Mount—while no Palestinian leader could give up parts of East Jerusalem to Jewish sovereignty, especially part of the Haram al-Sharif (the Temple Mount). Among both peoples there are enough wholehearted rejectionists who would make sure that a Clinton parameter-like deal was never struck or brought to fruition (as Rabin’s assassination demonstrated from the Israeli side). Neither Arafat nor Abbas could conceivably sell such a deal to the Hamas and neither would (or did) try. They knew and know their people. And there is no logical reason to believe that Arafat or his successors would have been more amenable to a deal such as offered by Barak, Clinton and Olmert if their interlocutor had been Rabin. His blue eyes would have made no difference.

Then there is the proven inability of all Israeli prime ministers to confront and suppress opposition by the settlers and their supporters to uprooting the West Bank settlements. Even the deeply antisettler Rabin—he once described the settlements as “a cancer in the body of Israeli democracy”—found it impossible in 1994, after the Goldstein massacre, to uproot a mere handful of settlers from downtown Hebron or Tel Rumeida. Shimon Peres, Rabin’s heir, proved no more willing or able to confront the Israeli Far Right after the assassination, again, at a time when he would have enjoyed a wide public mandate to do so.

True, Sharon in 2005 managed to uproot the seven thousand Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip without real bloodshed. But it is also true that the Gaza Strip is not the West Bank in terms of demography, sanctity, history or strategic importance. The resistance to removing major West Bank settlements—Kiryat Arba, Ariel, Ma’ale Adumim, etc.—would probably be a hundred times greater. This doesn’t even take into account the overwhelming practical challenge posed by a prospective resettlement of more than one hundred thousand displaced settlers from the core areas of Judea and Samaria in Israel proper.

In short, Rabin, had he lived, almost certainly could or would not have offered more, and certainly not much more, to the Palestinians than Barak had offered them in Camp David in July 2000 or Clinton in his subsequent “parameters” of December 2000. And Arafat had responded to both offers with a firm “no”—as, in effect, had Abbas to Olmert’s offer in 2007. President Clinton, in an interview aired in November, was quoted as saying that, had Rabin lived, Israel and the Palestinians would have reached a peace settlement “within three years.” I doubt it.

Benny Morris is a professor of history in the Middle East Studies Department of Ben Gurion University of the Negev. He is the author of 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War (Yale University Press, 2008).

Image: Wikimedia Commons/Public domain