Earlier this week, Forward, a nonprofit Jewish news publication, published an article suggesting that New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is viewed more favorably in the United States than Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu.
My takeaway from the piece was one of hope. Hope that, when Israelis go to the polls this fall, they choose a different path.
I still remember the night Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated in 1995. It was a Saturday, and I was getting ready to start babysitting when CNN interrupted its programming with the breaking news.
I didn’t have cable at home, so if I hadn’t been babysitting that evening, I probably wouldn’t have learned about it until the next day, or at least much later that night.
I remember the overwhelming sense of sadness I felt at the loss of such a remarkable leader. Among the images CNN replayed throughout the evening and in the days that followed was the now-iconic handshake between Rabin and Yasser Arafat on the White House lawn with President Clinton.
Rabin never fully trusted Arafat, and the feeling was mutual. Yet he understood a fundamental truth about leadership: peace is rarely made with friends. It is made with adversaries willing to take extraordinary political risks in pursuit of something greater than themselves.
His assassination was more than the loss of Israel’s prime minister. It was a devastating blow to the peace process and marked a turning point from which the region has never fully recovered. Nearly three decades later, I still can’t help but wonder how different the Middle East might look today had Yitzhak Rabin lived.
In my view, Netanyahu has never demonstrated a genuine commitment to achieving a lasting peace. His record reflects a consistent reliance on military solutions over diplomatic ones, leaving the region trapped in an exhausting cycle of conflict.
When a leader can make Ariel Sharon, a longtime hardline general who, as Prime Minister, ultimately embraced the difficult realities of diplomacy and took consequential steps such as the Gaza disengagement, appear to be the more pragmatic voice for peace, it speaks to just how dramatically Israel’s political landscape has shifted.
The people of Israel deserve leaders who can safeguard their nation’s security while also pursuing a future in which peace is more than a distant aspiration. Security and peace are not competing goals; in the long run, each depends on the other.
Whatever one’s politics, there comes a point when the pursuit of military victory alone is no longer enough. Lasting peace requires the courage to seek a political solution as relentlessly as one seeks a military one.
Leave a Reply