To the Editor:

Hillel Halkin’s comments [“Israel & the Assassination: A Reckoning,” January] elegantly skirt key points involving Yitzhak Rabin’s image, the peace process, and Israel’s political climate.

Chiding Rabin’s mourners for elevating him over other murder victims and fallen soldiers ignores the unique effects of political assassination on any society. In this case, few Israelis have matched Rabin’s lifelong contributions. Mr. Halkin properly derides those who credit Rabin with expansive idealism, but applying this view to all of Rabin’s backers is grasping at straws. Apart from some dreamyeyed leftists, the “sentimentalization” derives precisely from Rabin’s pragmatism. And what Mr. Halkin calls the “instant mythologization” of Rabin was evident even before his death—certainly one could see it at the triumphant Saturday rally at which he was killed. . . .

Mr. Halkin maintains that Rabin should not have acted without a clearer national consensus. But support for the status quo was no greater than support for the peace process, and pursuing the Oslo agreements in the volatile Middle East of 1993 was no more of a decision than standing still. . . .

Mr. Halkin paints past and present political turmoil with broad brushstrokes. He makes a convenient comparison between the opposition to Rabin and the anti-Begin protests of 1982 during the Lebanon war, . . . but charging Menachem Begin with the murder of Palestinians in Lebanon was worlds removed from accusing Rabin of murdering his own civilians. . . .

The Peres government’s invoking of public-order statutes seems draconian until, as Mr. Halkin notes, one looks at other democracies. Judging from the example of America, which prosecutes those charged with sedition or with threatening the President, Israel’s post-assassination arrests and restrictions were too little and too late. . . .

Shai Franklin
Geneva, Switzerland

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To the Editor:

As someone who well remembers Hillel Halkin’s January 1975 article in COMMENTARY, “Driving Toward Jerusalem,” to which he refers in his most recent article, I find it difficult to believe that the two articles were written by the same man. In the earlier article—though cast in the form of a musing between conflicting views he held—Mr. Halkin put forward the inspiring ideal of “two peoples in two states . . . [in] one land” in Israel. This remains an ideal toward which individuals concerned for the future of the state of Israel should strive.

The fundamental flaw in Mr. Halkin’s latest article is that he fails to pursue the implications of his statement that “an undemocratic Israel cannot prosper, no matter how much or how little land it commands.” Yes. It is for this reason that opposition to the eventual establishment of a Palestinian state is ill-founded. The people in the part of the land of Israel that would eventually become a state of Palestine have conclusively demonstrated, and now voted, that a state is what they desire.

The intellectual vacuity of opponents of the peace process which Israel embarked on as a result of Yitzhak Rabin’s efforts is quite surprising. Do they truly believe that the state of Israel may forever reign over the West Bank without allowing the people there the ability to determine their own governance? It has been almost 30 years since Israel acquired this land; most residents of the West Bank were born during this time. The position of peace-process opponents that Arabs of the West Bank should remain disenfranchised is not tenable.

Opponents of the Rabin-Peres peace process—though motivated by the sincerest intentions—are not acting in Israel’s best interests.

Alan Ebenstein
Santa Barbara, California

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To the Editor:

. . . I fully agree with Hillel Halkin that the Labor government erred in not being more forthcoming about the need for peace with the Palestinians. Government leaders did a terrible job of convincing their opponents—indeed, they hardly even tried. At the same time, I am puzzled by several of Mr. Halkin’s points. How reasonable is it to suppose that the Right could have been convinced? What could Labor have done or said to have moved the Right away from its refusal to make peace with the PLO?

I am also astonished by Mr. Halkin’s attack on Labor for violating some of the positions of its electoral platform. . . . Why does he show so much anger at this? Labor did not alter its policy because it is sneaky, as he implies, but because reality ended its self-delusions. . . . The power balance between Israel and the local Palestinians favored Israel so much that the local Arabs could not reasonably suppose they could get anything of value in a negotiation without the support of the PLO. Labor was less than forthcoming because, like the rest of us, it did not believe the PLO was ready for peace and it fooled itself into believing that Israel could negotiate with the Palestinians without dealing with the PLO. I blame a strange combination of reasonableness and obtuseness, not chicanery, for this problem. . . .

The symbolic importance of the assassination raises the meaning of the act beyond that of a normal or even an extreme political squabble. Does the political Right, especially the national-religious camp, mean to deny the legitimacy of the Israeli state? Yigal Amir’s action flowed easily out of a world view whose banners labeled Rabin a “Nazi,” a “traitor,” and a “rodef” (pursuer). . . . That is why the right-wing rabbis who discussed the question of whether or not Rabin was a rodef share responsibility for Amir’s action. They challenged the legitimacy of Rabin’s rule not only by disagreeing with his policy or calling for people to vote against him, but by positing their right to judge and convict him, even if only in principle. . . . The assassination was not politics by other means.

Alan S. Zuckerman
Brown University
Providence, Rhode bland

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To the Editor:

Hillel Halkin is the most eloquent, elegant, and brilliant essayist and journalist in Israel. In “Israel & the Assassination: A Reckoning” he presents persuasive arguments against the so-called “peace process” and its supporters. He debunks the hagiography that followed Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination, and exposes the Labor party’s role in creating a rift in Israel. It is, therefore, utterly astonishing that he still advocates the establishment of another Arab state along Israel’s 1967 borders—effectively refuting his own best arguments.

Mr. Halkin reminds me of all those unregenerate Marxists who, when confronted with the reality that economic chaos and brutal repression have been the hallmarks of every single Communist nation, maintain that though the leaders might be bad, Communism itself is still a noble goal. When Mr. Halkin hears the murderous, anti-Israel ranting of the Arabs of Gaza and Judea and Samaria, can he possibly think that territorial compromise is still viable?

Ruth S. King
New York City

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To the Editor:

. . . I will not attempt to respond to Hillel Halkin’s insistence that he still believes in the blessings of Palestinian statehood, an idea that is completely dissonant with all his other insights. . . . After all, Israel is a democracy where people can believe whatever they wish. . . . I simply wonder whether an intifada launched in Israel’s Galilee and Negev would convince him that those areas need to become Arab states as well.

Steven Plaut
University of Haifa
Haifa, Israel

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To the Editor:

Hillel Halkin, who classifies himself as on the Left, is typical of the species in that he has long believed—for twenty years, he says—in the existence of a Palestinian people whose land is “occupied” by Israel. . . .

In actual fact, Israel is not, nor has it ever been, an “occupier.” It held lands to which it had a valid claim. When Israel first entered these lands in 1967, in defending itself and fighting for its existence, it crossed no international border. . . . But then, leftists are not easily daunted by facts. . . .

On the other hand, Mr. Halkin is also an atypical leftist. As was said about Antony in Antony and Cleopatra, “What willingly he did confound, he wail’d.”; Accordingly, Mr. Halkin . . . wails that Israel is now in grave danger from its Arab neighbors and that it will be difficult to bring together a people that he has helped to sunder. . . .

The road ahead will be difficult. But what will make it quadruply more difficult is that I do not think that to this day the Halkins realize the tragic enormity of their error.

David Basch
West Hartford, Connecticut

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To the Editor:

Hillel Halkin . . . erroneously states that a putative Palestinian state in all of the West Bank and Gaza “would comprise . . . 23 percent of the area of British Mandate Palestine.” In fact, Transjordan, the area east of the Jordan River, which constituted 77 percent of British Mandatory Palestine, remained subject to the Mandate until it gained its independence in 1946 as the state of Jordan. The areas referred to as the West Bank and Gaza total only about 5 percent of the area of the British Mandate. . . .

Roger A. Gerber
New York City

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To the Editor:

We are indebted to Hillel Halkin for his vital insights into the catastrophe of present Israeli government policy. . . . Mr. Hal-kin says that what made the assassination of Rabin “exceptionally atrocious was not its being a murder but its being a cataclysmic political blunder.” But the use of the word “blunder” here implies that the assassin was acting as a chosen agent of the opposition in Israel (Likud, the settlers of Judea and Samaria, etc.), and the assassination had been decided on by opposition elements to further their “political” objectives. This is obviously an implication Mr. Halkin does not wish to make. . . . I believe it is conceded even by the Rabin-Peres faction that the assassination was not carried out as a political measure by the opposition but was the desperate act of one distraught, unbalanced individual, driven to it by events rather than rhetoric. . . .

I am more concerned, however, about Mr. Hal-kin’s readily acknowledged advocacy, going back some twenty years, of “a Palestinian state along Israel’s 1967 borders”—a conviction of which he now writes, “I still hold to it today.” It seems to me that if one capitulates to the assiduously fostered propaganda myth of a “Palestinian people” to mean only Arabs in the western part of the former British Mandate (excluding the Jews who live there and the Arabs of Jordan), and if one then goes on to advocate the establishment of a Palestinian state based on that propaganda myth, then one’s analysis of Israel’s present “cruel dilemma” and “torment,” to use Mr. Halkin’s words, becomes blunted. . . .

What is needed now is the courage to reject the myth of the Palestinian people, and to put the grotesquely misnamed “peace process” on hold for an agonizing reappraisal of the unfolding catastrophe. . . .

David L. Hurwitz
New York City

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To the Editor:

. . . Hillel Halkin is mistaken in crediting Yeshayahu Leibowitz with the invention of the term “Judeo-Nazi.” It was common currency among anti-Semites in British official circles in the Middle East as early as 1941. In 1944, for example, Edward Grigg, British Minister in Cairo, advised Anthony Eden that partition would “bring into existence a Jewish Nazi-state.”

Other locutions and practices beloved by large segments of the Israeli Left, ranging from references to Jewish settlers as bloodsuckers and parasites, to the cutting of the payot (earlocks) of Orthodox boys and assaulting Jews wearing kippot (skullcaps), are also highly derivative of past European traditions. But what is now frowned upon or even illegal in Europe, where the Holocaust gave anti-Semitism a bad name, can be said and done with impunity in Israel and is no bar to membership in the Knesset or the cabinet. Was it for this, as they say, that we needed a Jewish state?

Edward Alexander
Seattle, Washington

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To the Editor:

I was very impressed by the anger Hillel Halkin felt and the accuracy with which he described the aftermath of the Rabin assassination. Never before have I witnessed the type of cynical, “in-your-face” reaction to a national tragedy as occurred in Israel after the assassination.

It took less than twelve hours for the cynicism to begin, starting with a famous poet’s statement on television that he did not want national unity but wanted instead to keep Likud out of power for a long time, going on to charges that the party leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, was the man behind the murder, and then to a rounding-up of rabbis that was reminiscent of other times and places. . . .

At the end of his article, Hillel Halkin says: “Only a wise politics can help to join again what a foolish politics has helped to sunder,” and then asks, “Can one, in today’s circumstances, imagine a politics wise enough?” To answer his question: a politics wise enough to help us will occur only if Israeli politicians of all stripes start thinking in terms of “my country first” instead of “my party right or wrong.”

Ira Slomowitz
Kfar Saba, Israel

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To the Editor:

I write to congratulate COMMENTARY on Hillel Halkin’s “Israel & the Assassination: A Reckoning”—nowhere have I read an article so clear-thinking and courageous.

Dorothea Straus
New York City

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Hillel Halkin writes:

I wish to thank all those who have written and to apologize for not replying in what follows to each of their individual criticisms. In some cases, a more careful reading of what I wrote would have prevented me from being accused of things I never said (among them that I am a “leftist”—what on earth, besides my admission to having voted for the Labor party in 1992, could have led to such a curious conclusion?). In one instance, concerning the apprehensions I expressed over what Shai Franklin calls “the Peres government’s invoking of public-order statutes” in the wake of the assassination, I am happy to concede that my fears were exaggerated. For the rest, I prefer not to rehash points already made by me; readers of COMMENTARY can compare these with the arguments brought against them and decide for themselves.

Rather, I would like to use this space to deal with a matter that I referred to in my article only in passing, but that a number of readers chose to comment on at greater length—namely, my position on the question of a Palestinian state.

Alan Ebenstein is of course wrong, and Ruth S. King, Steven Plaut, and David L. Hurwitz are right. “Subject to certain conditions,” as I wrote in these pages in January, I am in favor of statehood for the Palestinians. Why am I, and what are the conditions?

Contrary to what Mrs. King writes, I am not for a Palestinian state because it is a “noble goal”; the goal of a Jewish state in an undivided land of Israel, were it realizable, seems to me nobler. And contrary to what Mr. Plaut writes, I do not believe that a Palestinian state will necessarily be a blessing; as I made clear in my article, I am well aware that it could be a curse. And contrary to what Mr. Hurwitz writes, although I do happen to think that the Palestinians by now have a national identity that makes them a people, I do not believe that this automatically entitles them to statehood; many peoples with more ancient national identities, such as the Welsh and the Catalans, are doing very nicely without states. I believe that the Palestinians should have a state for one overriding reason only: because it is the least bad of a number of bad alternatives.

What are the other, worse ones? At the risk of repeating what most people know, there are—and have been since 1967—three of them. The first is for the nearly two million Palestinians in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza to continue living under Jewish rule. This could be done either by politically en-franchising them—in which case, along with the million Arabs who are today Israeli citizens, Palestinians would comprise nearly two-fifths of the voting population of Israel, and even more in the future because of a birth rate far higher than the Jewish one; or by not enfranchising them, so that, with the passing of the old South Africa, Israel would permanently become the world’s only country that functioned as a democracy toward one part of its population and a dictatorship toward another.

The second alternative is forcibly to expel the Palestinians living in the territories, whether by trucking them to the Jordanian or Lebanese borders, or by stampeding them through a systematic campaign of terror. Is this feasible behavior for a small democracy that is heavily dependent economically and politically on larger democracies like the United States? Even on the nationalistic Right, no one in Israel short of the lunatic fringe seems to think so.

The third and last alternative, once known as “the Jordanian option,” is to return most or all of the West Bank to the Hashemite rule that it was under between 1948 and 1967. But apart from the fact that few Palestinians support this solution and that the Jordanian government lost interest in it years ago, Palestinians are a majority of Jordan’s population and would be an even larger one with the addition of the West Bank. The Hashemite dynasty will not last forever; if it should fall and be replaced by a Palestinian-con trolled regime, why, in terms of the threat to Israel, would a large and potentially powerful Palestinian state stretching to the Iraqi, Syrian, and Saudi borders be preferable to a small, weak one surrounded by Israel on all sides?

Nor do I think that the Palestinian demand for a state is without justice. The Palestinians have suffered greatly and not always through their own fault; they have been dispossessed by Israel—and as a Jew, I am glad of this—from parts of their traditional territory; and if their deep sense of grievance and humiliation, and their understandable wish to conduct their own affairs, can be even partly assuaged by granting them a state that will not greatly endanger Israel and Jewish interests, this seems to me the best option.

Is such a state imaginable? Without minimizing the risks, especially when dealing with political thugs like Yasir Arafat and his PLO henchmen, to whom the Rabin government foolishly and prematurely opened the gates of Gaza and the West Bank, I think it is—provided that certain conditions are met and that Israel has the long-term resolve to insist on serious compliance with them. These are:

1. An all-out fight by the Palestinian Authority against terror. Until such a war is waged, and decisively won, the Palestinians do not deserve a state and should not get one.
2. Total and permanent demilitarization. The Palestinians would have to agree in return for statehood never to expand their police force beyond its already bloated numbers, never to acquire heavy weapons, and never to enter into military agreements with other Arab nations.
3. A permanent Israeli military presence in the Jordan Valley, along the border between the Palestinian state and Jordan. Only such a presence could enforce demilitarization, prevent a possible Jordanian-Palestinian Anschluss, and allow Israel to control the economic and geographical choke-points needed to guarantee that a Palestinian state would honor its commitments.
4. Open borders between Israel and the Palestinian state that would allow for the free and uninhibited movement of people, goods, and workers in both directions. I know that at the moment, after years of PLO-condoned Hamas terror, this is not a popular idea in Israel; most Israelis would like to see a solid wall, the thicker and higher the better, between Israel and a Palestinian entity. But in the long run, I do not think that a bunkerized Israel living next to a ghettoized Palestine could bring material prosperity or emotional and cultural well-being to either people, and Jews should anyway refuse to accept a situation in which they would need permits or visas to live in or visit parts of the Land of Israel.
5. The retention in situ of all Jewish settlements in the Palestinian territories. A strong Jewish civilian presence in Judea and Samaria is necessary, in my opinion, to ensure that the Jewish historic connection with these areas remains unbroken; that the borders between Israel and a Palestinian state stay open; and that the Palestinian government passes the daily litmus test of protecting the Jews living under its jurisdiction and treating them fairly, which is also the best guarantee that it would act similarly with its own Arab citizens.
6. The establishment in the Palestinian Authority, as a prerequisite for the granting of statehood, of a genuine, Western-style democracy with a functioning parliament and the same civil freedoms that exist in Israel, Europe, and America. I have no illusions about the ease with which this could be done in an Arab and Muslim culture; but in my contacts with Palestinians in recent years, I have been surprised and impressed both by their fear and distrust of their own leadership and by the strength of their desire for the democratic rights enjoyed by Israelis—from whom, it turns out, they have learned a great deal more than Israel ever tried to teach them. Only a democratic Palestine could be counted on to live peacefully beside Israel; and two such democracies existing side by side in a region otherwise controlled by authoritarian regimes might develop joint interests that could act as a cohesive force between them.

Are these conditions utopian? Many people may think so, and should they be proved right, I for one would be quite willing to postpone Palestinian statehood for utopian times and seek other ways of muddling through the interim. Would such a state guarantee us against the danger of Palestinian irredentism that Steven Plaut fears? No, it would not; the danger would be real and would have to be combated—in part, by making Israeli Arabs more equal partners in their country than they are now.

If Mr. Plaut, Mr. Hurwitz, and Mrs. King have better ideas, I would be glad to hear them. On the whole, I think that too much time has been expended on arguing the pros and cons of Palestinian statehood in the abstract, and too little time on debating the particulars of just what kind of Palestinian state might be desirable for Israel, just what kind might not be, and just what Israel can and should do to help bring into being the first kind. It would be wise to begin thinking seriously about these things while our thoughts might still do some good.