ARLOSOROFF’S ASSASSINATION

The assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin at the hands of a rightist fanatic on November 4 was by far the most horrendous political event since the declaration of the state. But the rising tides of hatred in Israel since the killing suggest that the lesson of the 1933 catastrophe has not been learned, opening the possibility that Rabin’s death will become not an isolated event, but the beginning of much worse.

Haim Arlosoroff gained prornmence as one of the fastest-rising stars in Labor Zionism in the 1920s, a time of steadily increasing fear and confusion for the Jewish national movement. Hitler’s strength was growing rapidly in Germany; the eastern European regimes were awash with a virulent and menacing anti-Semitism; Palestine was being wracked by repeated rounds of anti-Jewish pograms; Britain, formally committed to establishing a Jewish national home in Palestine, was increasingly inclined to appease both German and Arab fanaticism.

Encircled by an ever-tightening ring of hostility, the dream of a renewed Jewish state, first articulated by Theodor Herzl in Der Judenstaat only three decades before, seemed to be slipping ihrough the Zionists’ fingers at precisely the hour of greatest need.

Within the official Zionist Organization, two trends emerged to cope with the crisis. The one, exemplified by Arlosoroff, called for conciliating the Arabs and soothing British anxiety over Arab sentiments, at a time when Arab demands were an end to Jewish immigration and the renunciation of the Jewish national home in Palestine. The other, led by Jabotinsky, called for an overt struggle to bring British policy to support immediate absorption of hundreds of thousands of Jews into Palestine, creating a Jewish majority and a Jewish state over Arab opposition.

In 1929, another series of Arab pogroms tore the length and breadth of Palestine, leaving 133 Jews dead. The ancient Jewish community in Hebron was destroyed. Britain’s answer was the Passfield White Paper, calling for the suspension of Jewish immigration. Arlosoroff, then the head of the Jewish Agency’s political department, championed retreat. In 1931, he announced his determination to seek “a rapprochement between Jews and Arabs in Palestine, starting from the basic principle that . . . neither of the two peoples shall dominate or be dominated by the other, regardless of what the numerical strength of each may be” — euphemistic for a policy of accepting Arab demands that the Jews renounce massive immigration and the goal of a Jewish state. As his position became more influential in the Zionist Organization, it was met with convulsions of fear, rage, and a sense of betrayal among eastern European Jews, who saw both their escape route and their most precious dream disappearing before their eyes.

Further fuel was added to the pyre with Hitler’s accession to power less than two years later. Jabotinsky and his supporters poured their strength into organizing an international boycott of the Nazi regime. Arlosoroff went to Berlin to cut a deal whereby the Jewish Agency would purchase German goods in exchange for the transfer of some of Germany’s Jews to Palestine. Both positions might have been considered reasonable under the circumstances, but Arlosoroff’s policy sounded the death-knell or the boycott — the one weapon with which ordinary “Jews, the world over, could fight Hitler. Both sides called each other “traitors” in the aftermath, but it was Arlosoroff who gave up his life. On June 16, 1933, he was shot dead on a Tel Aviv beach as his wife looked on.

Avraham Stavsky, a member of Jabotmsky’s party, was arrested, convicted, acquitted on appeal, and then, after the war, exonerated after a recond investigation; to this day, the identity of the actual killer remains a mystery. But Stavsky’s acquittal came too late to keep the unity of the Jewish national movement from being blasted apart. At the 18th Zionist Congress, held two months after Arlosoroff’s murder, the Zionist left blamed the murder not only on Stavsky himself, but on the incitement of Jabotinsky and his entire party, and refused to be seated with them. The result was a walk-out by the Revisionists, who within months had left the Zionist Organization completely, setting up a competing organization. Jabotinsky’s followers soon established rival groups in every conceivable field of activity, from sporting clubs to health funds to operations smuggling Jews into Palestine — and to the Irgun, Palestine’s “alternative” Jewish military organization, which broke away from Labor’s Hagana.

The independent operations of the Zionist right became an intolerable provocauon for Labor, stoking a hatred of murderous proportions-including the decision to take party affiliation into account in distributing scarce immigration permits into Palestine, even during the Holocaust. In November 1944, the Hagana moved against the Irgun on behalf of the British, abducting and torturing the dissidents, and handing over to the British some 300 members of the resistance, many of whom were exiled to prison camps in Eritrea. As many as half the Irgun commanders favored resistance — a step that would have meant civil war. But the head of the Irgun Menachem Begin, refused to allow it: “Do not raise a hand and do not use arms against Hebrew youths,” read his written order. “They are not responsible. They are our brothers. They are being misdirected and incited. . . . This is the only way to save the Jewish settlement from a civil war, to save the country from destruction.”

In June 1948, even after the Jewish fighting organizations had become uneasy allies in the struggle against British and Arab invaders, the threat of civil war careened into sight again, when an Irgun ship, the Altalena, carrying weapons and volunteers for the war, entered Israeli waters. So great was the distrust that Ben-Gurion feared a putsch; Begin feared a trap. Both were wrong, but fighting ensued nonetheless. The rounds of bloody skirmishing ended with the firing of what Ben-Gurion called “the holy cannon.” It sank the ship. One of the 14 Irgun men killed by that gun was Avraham Stavsky. The man who fired it? Yitzhak Rabin.

It was a radio broadcast from Begin that night that again averted civil war: “Irgun soldiers will not be a party to fratricidal warfare,” he announced, and the threat passed.

As it transpired, the bloodletting on the Altalena marked the end of the worst. The hatred remained even after the War of Independence, but the common work of building the Jewish state gradually eased the bitterness that had begun with Arlosoroff’s murder. Even then, it took two more decades for the wound to heal suffxciently for any representative of the Zionist right to sit as a minister in an Israeli government.

The tear at the heart of the Zionist movement began with the sense of betrayal — on both sides — that led up to, and spewed forth from, the Arlosoroff assassination. The Jews in the east, seeing the Zionist Organization giving up on the idea of Jewish statehood, correctly understood that their most cherished dreams were being compromised by men who would lightly discard them; the Zionist Executive correctly felt that its legitimacy was being brutally challenged by an opposition that would not abide the results of a democratic system. In these basic claims, each side was righ.

But in a sinking lifeboat, it no longer matters who is right. In 1933, neither the right nor the left possessed a leadership with the resourcefulness and presence of mind to close the breach and avert catastrophe. Had it not been for the anguished decision of Menachem Begin 11 years later to swallow his pride and refuse civil war, the bullet that felled Arlosoroff might have been the bullet that buried the Jewish state.

But today it seems that the peace that developed after the acceptance of the founding of the state was illusory. Yitzhak Rabin demonstrated that, even now, an Israeli government can be run perilously close to the rhetoric of Arlosoroff’s ambiguous non-nationalism: “a rapprochement between Jews and Arabs in Palestine, starting from the basic principle that . . . neither of the two peoples shall dominate or be dominated by the other.” These words are much the same as the slogans, “We do not want to dominate another people” and “Separation of the two peoples,” which in the last two years have been used to justify giving up Hebron and Bethlehem and moving towards the de facto partitioning of Jerusalem. And the increasingly ugly public debate is the same debate as during the 1930s: Traditional and nationalistic Jews correctly understand that their most cherished dreams are being compromised by men who would lightly discard them (not least because of statements by members of the government referring to rabbis as “ayatollahs,” settlers as “crybabies,” and the mainstream political opposition as “collaborators of Hamas”); the government correctly feels that its legitimacy is being undermined, for example by accusations that decisions have been made without a “Zionist majority” in the Knesset. Again, each side is right. For whatever that’s worth.

The question now is whether Israel can pull back from the brink, or whether Rabin’s murder, like Arlosoroff’s, will be the precursor to additional rounds of villainy, or even dissolution.

So far, the signs point to a repeat performance of the Arlosoroff catastrophe. The signal for a national witch hunt was given minutes after Rabin’s death, with the official pronouncement by Health Minister Efraim Sneh that “the prime minister passed away at 11:10 p.m., as a result of a murderous act of violence and as a result of incitement.” The lone gunman, therefore, was not alone; Ihe political and intellectual left lost no time identifying the other criminals behind the killing.

Israeli television immediately broadcast a live interview in which Environment Minister Yossi Sarid declared that there was “one murderer but many inciters,” as the crowd behind him chanted, “Bibi’s a murderer! Bibi’s a murderer!” beneath a banner reading, “Bibi: Rabin’s blood is on your hands.” ” Bibi” is Benjamin Netanyahu, leader of the opposition Likud. Deputy Education Minister Micha Goldman quickly announced that “today’s act of depravity . . . is the product of members of the Knesset from the Likud, who will not succeed in dumping blame for the murder on the extreme right.” Said Ran Cohen, head of the leftist Meretz parliamentary faction: “Full responsibility rests like the mark of Cain with the leadership of the political right.” Labor member Avi Yehezkel dismissed right-of-center condemnations of the murder as ” crocodile tears.” Later in the week, Speaker of the Knesset Sheyah Weiss blamed the murder on the “Nazicization” of Judaism in Israel. According to Asa Kasher, a prominent lawyer close to the government: “Now we’ll see the leaders of the political right expressing pain and shock. . . . Now I say to them: Your hands have spilled this blood. Yours, Benjamin Netanyahu.”

The popular novelist Meir Shalev provided the politicians with intellectual cover: “We know that we are once again not talking about left and right, but about a very simple fact: Murderers come from only one side of the Israeli political map.” Best-selling author David Grossman pronounced Netanyahu ” unfit” to lead the opposition and called on him to resign from public life as a result of his “indirect responsibility” for the assassination. Yizhar, one of Israel’s best-known writers, observed: “The political right believes that soil is more important than people. Soil is more important than Arabs, of course, and today more important than Jews as well.” Poet Yair Garboz: “We point an accusing finger . . . at the entire political right, without any exceptions, all of them.” Comedian Tuvia Tzafir: “We are one people, perhaps. But two camps. Those who sing the peace-movement anthem and those who reject it; those who regard pieces of land as holy and those who consecrate the living man; those who “wait for Rabin” [a Labor campaign jingle] and those who eliminate him.”

And then there was Leah Rabin, the wife of the slain prime minister, who fingered the “verbal violence” of Netanyahu and other Likud members of the Knesset, as well as the worldview of religious Jews, as having “created the atmosphere” that resulted in the murder.

Where is all this going? Leave aside the question of whether the accusations of opposition “incitement” are correct or absurd. What is crucial is that the pot is already boiling, the heat is being turned up again and again. No Labor leaders have yet emerged who are willing to criticize or even distance themselves from the vendetta against the entire pdlitical opposition, much less admit any responsibility the government may share in bringing the situation to a crisis. A thunderous silence pounds through the isolation of Acting Prime Minister Shimon Peres, the architect of the Oslo accords and perhaps the one man with the standing to call off the dogs.

In the face of all this, the conservative opposition has thankfully, if uncharacteristicaUy, followed Begin’s example in refusing to return fire. Netanyahu himself published a book two years ago endorsing the Talmudic verdict that ancient Israel was destroyed by Jewish fratricide, while the Romans were at the gates, and that the lesson must be the complete extirpation of political violence from Jewish society. Last week, Netanyahu put his money where his mouth is by announcing that his party would support Shimon Peres’s bid to succeed Rabin as prime minister, thereby guaranteeing continuation of the Labor government he has fought bitterly for three years. ” The murderer wanted to end the Labor government with bullets,” said Netanyahu, “and we will have no hand in that.”

Netanyahu’s gesture was pointedly ignored. Additional concrete steps to encourage national reconciliation have been proposed, but they are not easy to pull off. The massive memorial rally marking the first week after Rabin’s death could have been an occasion for real mending, but the organizers rejected the efforts of organizations associated with the right to participate, thus transforming what should have been a national closing of ranks into yet another example of partisanship and division-mongering, humiliation and score-settling.

The terrible tragedy that Israel has suffered continues to unleash more tragedy. Yet the Jewish state goes about the business of cleaning up after the funeral as though the worst is over — when in fact it may have only just begun.

Yoram Hazony is the director of the Shalem Center- national Policy Instiutte in Jerusalem.