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Photo at right, of Yitzhak Rabin's funeral, from Noa Ben Artzi-Pelossof's book (left)

The curse of the peacemakers

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God.

Matthew 5:9

In his sermon on the mount, Jesus Christ offered his blessing to peacemakers. Unfortunately, most of humanity – including most nominal Christians – have never got the memo. Advocating for peace in a world dominated by territorial, tribally oriented, heavily armed and trigger-happy people is a thankless, dangerous task. As far as modern nation-states and those who run them are concerned, external enemies come and go, but peacemakers are always high on the hit-list – often literally.

For the most part, “peace” is in the same category as “God”: revered in theory, provided it doesn’t interfere with truly sacred goals like confiscating land and wealth from other people. It is permissible to talk about peace when a cycle of conflict is nearing its end and the warriors have gained their goals, lost comprehensively or are too weary to continue. At other times, when the war-mongers are intent on blooding their swords, peace is reviled and scorned and those who advocate for it risk being pilloried, imprisoned or assassinated. Truly, activists for peace are permanent enemies of the status quo in states and systems that were built and are maintained by war and its threat.

Meanwhile, the rulers of the world hand out “peace prizes” to people who have no discernible commitment to peace. Take former US president Barack Obama, for example, under whose presidency the USA was involved in constant warfare. His Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, just nine months into his presidency, was apparently meant to strengthen his resolve to be a peaceful president. If that was the aim it failed. Obama became particularly noted for his wholehearted embrace of a policy and practice of extra-judicial murder, using drones to kill alleged enemies of the USA in numerous countries around the world in flagrant violation of international law. Obama’s drones killed hundreds of people, most of them totally innocent, in countries with which the US was not at war and with no oversight or approval by US Congress. It is fair to say that Obama’s normalization of this form of murder – justified on the basis of alleged preventative value to the USA – set the scene for its routine employment by Israel in Gaza and elsewhere in the Middle East.

Few genuine advocates for peace, meanwhile, receive any plaudits – certainly not while they are alive. Secret services hold files on peace activists, regarding them as dangerous and tracking their movements. If anybody advocates for honest dialogue with external enemies they are attacked as “appeasers”, “traitors” and “collaborators”. At best they may be labelled as naive “useful idiots”, playing into the hands of hostile foreign powers. Pacifists may be criticized as undermining “our troops” and as generally lacking in patriotism. Somehow, thanks to the efforts of the state and/or corporate apparatus, (always including most of the media), anti-war protesters are portrayed as loopy and untrustworthy while those who promote or provoke war on false or flimsy pretexts manage to escape with no more than mild censure. Every past war might have been a mistake, we are told, but the one now being promoted is different. The next war is always for “a just cause”, is always “the right thing to do” and is often “the only alternative”.

During times of war, warring states are not interested in hearing debates about the merits of their actions. During times of war censorship is ramped up and penalties for speaking against war are increased. Nor are warring states receptive to the arguments of those who, for conscientious reasons, don’t want to participate in warfare. Conscientious objectors – “conshies” in Australian parlance – are demonised and made subject to penalties too,

In Frank Harris’s controversial autobiography, My Life and Loves, the American journalist describes his disgust at the US Government’s treatment of conscientious objectors who resolved not to fight in World War 1. Hundreds of men were sentenced to as much as 10 or 20 years in jail for refusing to fight, and many suffered severe torture and brutal maltreatment in prison. Only intense campaigning led to the release of many of these prisoners. Some died as a result of their maltreatment and many others were permanently scarred.

The risks of promoting peace

When it comes to warfare, the state demands total obedience and compliance and will stamp out criticism of its actions if it can. How convenient for warmongers that, in this day and age, our leaders insist that we are effectively engaged in a perpetual war, justifying rafts of repressive laws that can be deployed against citizens who ask difficult questions or draw too much attention to the wrongdoings of their regimes. Witness award-winning Australian journalist Julian Assange as exhibit A: persecuted, imprisoned and tortured for exposing the war crimes of his nation’s great and powerful ally.

If it’s dangerous for ordinary people to campaign for peace or to protest against war, it can be even more risky for leaders, especially when other powerful interests oppose peace for reasons of their own. While nobody can say with certainty why US President John F. Kennedy was murdered nor who arranged his killing, one common theory is that pro-war interests within the US, unhappy about the possibility that he might have withdrawn US military personnel from Vietnam, may have played some role in his demise.

A far more clear-cut case of a national leader being murdered by anti-peace forces was the assassination of Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, shot dead in 1995 by a far-right Jewish religious zealot who opposed Rabin’s policy of making peace with the Palestinians. Rabin was by no means a typical peacenik. On the contrary, he had been a fierce military leader with a reputation for strong resolve in conflict. He came, however, to believe that Israel’s best interests lay in making peace with its Arab neighbours and, more particularly, with the Palestinians. For pragmatic reasons he was willing, in the pursuit of lasting peace, to make meaningful territorial concessions and this, perhaps more than anything else, infuriated the anti-peace extremists in his own country.

I recently found a copy of a book In the Name of Sorrow and Hope, by Rabin’s grand-daughter, Noa Ben Artzi-Pelossof (now known as Noa Rothman) which gives a deeply personal view of the killing and its consequences. The book describes Rabin standing up at a rally in front of 200,000 pro-peace Israelis and warning them:

Violence is undermining the foundations of Israel’s democracy. It must be condemned. Peace is not just a prayer. It is first of all a prayer but it is also a realistic aspiration of the Jewish people. But peace has enemies who are trying to stand in our way . . . This rally must broadcast to the people of Israel and the Jewish people around the world and to many in the West and elsewhere, that the people of Israel want peace and support peace. I always believed that most of the people want peace and are ready to take a risk for it.

Rabin with his grand-daughter (photo from her book)

At the end of the rally he stood with others and sang The Song of Peace. People in the crowd waved pro-peace banners and wore stickers and badges that read: “Yes to Peace, No to violence”. After the rally he was shot, and later that night he died. Rabin’s murder was captured on amateur video. Ben Artzi-Pelossof describes watching it for the first time on Israeli television in 1995.

Strangely, during the minutes before the assassination, the cameraman had focused on the assassin, a lone figure wearing jeans and a light-coloured T-shirt, his arms hanging loosely by his sides. At one moment policemen seemed to be chatting with him. The tape kept running. It was as if the amateur cameraman suspected the killer’s intentions, as if he somehow suspected that what was to happen was a possibility. But the police did not . . . We later learned that if the parking area had been sealed off, as it should have been, the assassin could not have come close to Grandpa.

Far-right zealots still boast that Rabin’s murder was “the most successful political assassination in modern history”. They base their boast on the fact that the crime extinguished the movement to peace. Indeed, it ushered in a new era of far-right zealotry and violence in Israel that has led directly to the Gaza genocide of 2024.

It didn’t have to be this way. Back when Rabin stood in Washington and – with some misgivings – shook the hand of Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat, he said:

We who have fought against you, the Palestinians, we say to you today in a loud and clear voice: Enough of blood and tears. Enough. We harbour no hatred towards you. We have no desire for revenge. We, like you, are people who want to build a home, plant a tree, love, live side by side with you – in dignity, in empathy, as human beings, as free men. We are today giving peace a chance and saying to you: Enough.

But as Noa Ben Artzi-Pelossof explains in her book, extremists on both sides wanted to make peace impossible. As she told people at the time:

There are maniacs on both sides who will do anything to stop the peace process. The Palestinian extremists want to create a Muslim, Jewish-free state in Palestine, while Israeli extremists feel they have a Biblical right to the very land on which the Palestinians lay their claim. Both factions fight to destroy a peace process which is all about recognizing the respective states and the rights of their citizens. The price of peace is reconciliation and compromise. If we believe in it, we cannot allow the extremists to succeed.

Even then, the baleful influence of Benjamin Netanyahu was strong among Israel’s extremists. In 1995 members of Netanyahu’s Likud party were at the forefront of anti-peace rallies where “demonstrators chanting inflammatory slogans held up banners saying ‘Rabin is a traitor’ and posters showing him dressed in the uniform of an SS officer”. Netanyahu, who had watched the rally from a balcony in Zion Square, had the opportunity to address the Knesset (the Israeli parliament) to justify his party’s policies. Rabin walked out, rather than listen to Netanyahu speak.
When he returned he took the microphone and spoke directly to Netanyahu: “Enough of lies! Let’s play the game openly, with our cards on the table. Let’s stop tearing the country apart in the name of some artificial unity. Enough of that. Enough of hypocrites!”

The religious zealots, the calculating extremists who coveted more Palestinian land and those who had simply been brainwashed into hatred from their early youth were being weaponised by cynical politicians who saw them as a pathway to power. Ben Artzi-Pelossof wrote:

I was shocked to see hate in the eyes of the extremists, to hear them chanting, ‘Rabin is a murderer, Rabin is a traitor’. I saw boys and girls my age, brainwashed by the extremists, parade before the cameras holding posters that showed Grandpa surrounded by skulls and crossbones. I saw men with hoods over their heads burning effigies of Grandpa; sometimes he was portrayed wearing a Palestinian scarf; at other times he was shown wearing the Iron Cross of a Nazi officer. One television image in particular horrified me. A young man, a Bible in one hand, a revolver in the other, was screaming hatred and the threat of death at Grandpa.

As for the actual assassin, Ben Artzi-Pelossof described him as “just a gun, a robot . . . who had been indoctrinated by a well-oiled system of hate, a system that was deeply ingrained in our society.”

Weaponising extreme ideologies

He attended a religious school and from an early age was drawn into a world ruled by extremist rabbis and other fanatical opinion-makers. Their constant incitement to violence reminded me of the methods used by the Nazis and Fascists in their rise to power. They were united by hate. They all carried the gun that killed Saba. Yigal Amir, the assassin, was simply the one who pulled the trigger.

It made my blood boil to see the murderer in court, looking relaxed, chewing gum, even laughing, evidently still convinced that he had done the right thing. And I could not stomach it when a television station showed the triumphal return home of a young right-wing woman suspected of being an accomplice to the killer. I now understood why Saba called the extremists ‘ayatollahs’. His death proved him right.

Tragically for Israel, Palestine and the world, the extremists won. They and their puppeteers showed they were willing to sink to any level, go to any length to prevent peace. As Ben Artzi-Pelossof reflected in her book:

As I see it, Israel is like a divided body, healthy on one side, stricken with cancer on the other. And that cancer is the extreme right. It was the cancer that killed Grandpa. It is the cancer that is still trying to kill Israel. How can we rid ourselves of this cancer?

Of course, this question isn’t relevant only to Israel, but to much of the world.

Ten years after her grandfather was murdered by the right-wing zealots Ben Artzi-Pelossof (now Rothman) was interviewed by Israel’s i24 news. She accused the killers and their supporters of taking Israel back 20 years to when the country was “led by the ethos of the ‘persecuted Jew'”, and of “blaming everything on the Palestinians”. “All leaders compete with each other over who is a greater Arab-hater. In the end, we’re back to square one.” Asked if Netanyahu had ever apologized to her or her family she said: “Never. He has a real problem assuming responsibility.”

Asked if another political assassination was possible in Israel she replied:

Judging by the political climate and the dangerous penetration of religion into the democratic process, absolutely. But the current violent political climate lacks another component – a peace plan, a crucial ingredient in political assassinations in Israel. If any political peace plan emerges then certainly, it’s very possible.

Tragically, her observations are, again, applicable to many other nations than Israel. The few who stand to gain from fomenting and maintaining violence have so much to gain that they won’t tolerate any realistic prospect of peace.

Blessed are the peacemakers?


This Post Has One Comment

  1. Janet Grevillea

    Greg I did not know the story as told by Noa Rothman, grand-daughter of Rabin. Thank you for introducing it to us.

    Well we know the one who said, ‘Blessed are the peacemakers’ was killed, not by a sole assassin but by the state and religious authorities of his time. Are we to believe that peacemakers are only ever individuals and small groups? Could an entire nation be a peacemaker?

    There is a group in Australia called Australians for War Powers Reform (https://warpowersreform.org.au/), whose aim is to ensure that any decision that Australia goes to war should be made by parliament, not by the prime minister. They write and speak well, but theirs is an uphill battle. In the meantime, our politicians retire and go to work for arms manufacturers.

    And our language is strewn with words of violence – smashed avacado, the fight against cancer, the real estate sign that says ‘renovate or detonate’. I wonder what would happen if all of us refused to talk like that. What if we spoke peace.

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