Even now, two years after her death and seven years after he was assassinated, the apartment of Yitzhak and Leah Rabin still exists, preserved, kept up, furnished and appointed as though nothing had happened. Dalia Rabin Pelossof, their daughter, visits once a week.

A cleaning woman comes to keep things in order. Yitzhak’s clothes hang ready in the closet. The same goes for Leah’s wardrobe. The dishes in the kitchen are washed, the carpets vacuumed, the curtains aired. It is a beautiful apartment, well appointed, so full of life, so empty of life. It is stuck in a distant, other reality, that froze somewhere out there. If a stranger were to go in for a moment, he would think to himself that the person who lives there is going to come home from work, make something to drink, light a cigarette, and turn on the television to watch the news or a soccer game. His wife will show up in a moment, give him a kiss and mince off to the bedroom, filling the house with her laughter and the scent of her light perfume.

But they won’t be coming home anymore. Outside there is a different country from the one they knew. A new reality reigns. Evil winds blow. Leah and Yitzhak Rabin are gone. The apartment stands empty, mute, silent.

Not long ago, Dalia Rabin went into her deceased parents’ bedroom. For the first time since her father’s assassination, she opened the drawer of the night-table near his bed and peeked inside. As far as anyone knew, the only one who had opened those drawers after the assassination was Leah Rabin herself. Now that she was gone, it was her daughter’s turn.

Testimony of a Drama

Pieces of the prime minister’s life, which was cut off overnight, lay inside: two cigarette lighters, reading glasses, and a watch that had stopped. There was also a small notebook, a Kohinoor writing pad, the kind that fits in a rear trouser pocket or a front jacket pocket. A nice little notebook that Rabin scribbled in with a Pilot pen, no different than the kind he used to sign the Oslo Accords.

Dalia Rabin leafed through it, her hand trembling a little. Her father had written brief lists in his orderly, legible handwriting. He did not know that it was his last notebook. There were telephone numbers, a few comments, and three consecutive pages that aroused curiosity under the heading “Meeting with the Secretary of State.”

Dalia Rabin realized almost immediately that she was looking at a historical document: a detailed witness in the prime minister’s handwriting, from inside the room, of the drama that was going on behind the scenes in the contacts that Yitzhak Rabin held with Hafez Assad via the American administration. Contacts that were halfway hidden until today. Promises were made, messages passed on, versions heard. No one, until today, could point to the real story. Now here it was, completely told, in lists that Rabin wrote for himself before his last meeting with the mediator, the American Secretary of State.

A reminder: the American Secretary of State was then Warren Christopher. A dry lawyer, taciturn, punctilious and boring. He carried on a Sisyphean, endless campaign of dialogue between Damascus and Jerusalem in an effort to bridge the gap between Israel and Syria and come to a comprehensive, full agreement between the two countries. After Rabin’s death, there were claims of a “deposit” that the prime minister supposedly left with the American Secretary of State, about a promise of a full Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights that was not kept. Shimon Peres, who took Rabin’s place as prime minister, opened the safe and discovered an explicit promise by Rabin to withdraw from the entire Golan. Peres jumped at the bargain: he would keep the promise, and (the late) Rabin would bear the responsibility. The problem was that none of these promises were set down in writing. Everything was buried in the memories of those involved, a good many of them no longer among us today.

The Syrians continue to claim, till today, that they received an explicit promise from Rabin of total withdrawal from the Golan. Rabin’s confidantes deny it. The Americans are keeping quiet. They don’t confirm or deny. Three pages of a tiny Kohinoor notepad tell the entire story. Rabin is preparing himself for a meeting with Christopher. Rabin is furious with Christopher because he found out that the Syrians expect a complete, quick and unconditional Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights. Rabin discovers that the Syrians heard it from the Americans and he understands that they’ve tricked him. They misquoted his statements. They did not present them accurately. It is told that in that meeting with Christopher, which Rabin writes about in his notepad, the prime minister’s voice was so loud it could be heard outside the room.

Here is what is written there:

The heading, as stated, is: “Meeting with the Secretary of State.” First of all, manners: “Expressing thanks,” and straight to the matter at hand: “The Syrian subject.” Here, as we noted, the trouble begins. Rabin begins with the good: “I appreciated the Syrian President’s attitude.” And then, he gets down to the nitty-gritty:

“What was agreed between us:

  1. Willingness for full withdrawal in exchange for full peace with all its components.
  2. Duration of the withdrawal and its stages.
  3. The combination of carrying out full peace before completing the entire pullout with a preliminary pullout.
  4. Security arrangements.”

Commentary: This is conclusive proof, in Rabin’s own hand, that he told the Syrians he was willing to agree to full withdrawal from the Golan Heights in exchange for full peace. Still, he had conditions, which are detailed under No. 4. Rabin demanded of the Syrians withdrawal in stages, with most of the demand being to carry out what he called “full peace” even at the beginning of the process, after “a preliminary withdrawal.” Only after that, said Rabin, would Israel carry out the rest of the withdrawal from the Golan Heights. In other words, we are ready to come down from the Golan Heights on condition that we get a full peace that is sealed and carried out in the first stages of the pullout, along with appropriate security arrangements.

Back to the notepad: “What will actually happen,” Rabin writes on the second page, and continues: “The Syrians have the promise of a more complete withdrawal than any other Arab country dared to request. In exchange there is no agreement to a single one of the components that is a condition-as a package deal or table with four legs. A process of negotiations when the Syrians expect that the Americans will sell Israel out in writing. They’re stopping negotiations and making their resumption conditional on practical Israeli concessions.”

Here is all the drama on one small notepad page: in other words, how they tricked Yitzhak Rabin. The Syrians got the promise of a withdrawal that was “more complete than any other Arab country dared to request.” The fiasco here belongs, evidently, to the Americans. The Syrians did not agree to give in exchange what Rabin asked for, did not understand that it was a package deal, and ignored what Rabin called, in those days, “the four legs of the table,” without which there would be no agreement. At this stage, when it became clear to the Syrians that Israel had demands of its own, they stopped negotiations and made their resumption a bargaining chip to pressure Israel into making more concessions, and they tried to get an Israeli deposit in writing from the United States. The Syrians, it turns out, insisted on an American document that would include the Israeli deposit, a deposit that the Americans gave them with stark negligence: without emphasizing all the circumstances, the stages and Israel’s conditions. That is how the Syrians took the map by force and tried to convince the Americans to sell Israel out. Yitzhak Rabin, a straightforward and upright man, did not like being sold out. He boiled with anger. Netanyahu Activates, Barak Erred

Here is the third page:

“What happens now?” Rabin asks in his notepad, and answers: “Emphasize to the Syrians that the territorial subject is not in their pocket as something that stands by itself. It is conditional on their response to the other Israeli demands. Continue, after this clarification, on the subject of security arrangements. We will not give up on a change in the security arrangements in the territorial differences in light of the geographic situation and precedent of the separation-of-forces agreement.”

Everything is almost clear here. Rabin is asking the Americans to fix what they broke. To make the situation clear to the Syrians. To tell them that the Golan Heights are not in their pocket from the beginning, nor for free. In the end, to insist on security arrangements, too: Israel asked for Syrian demilitarization not only on the Golan Heights, but also in broad sections of territory deep within Syria, but refused to demilitarize parallel territory one to one because of what Rabin called “the geographic situation and the precedent of a separation-of-forces agreement.” In other words: Israeli depth is far smaller than Syrian strategic depth, and therefore Israel would have to make do with a smaller demilitarization, symbolic, along its new border.

All the rest is written in the history books. Rabin’s meeting with Christopher took place in Tel Aviv in June 1995, less than five months before he was assassinated. Dennis Ross came to Israel a few more times, tried to fix something, but didn’t manage it. After that came Shimon Peres, who took over the controversial deposit and did not manage to translate it into an agreement. A wave of terror attacks began in Israel, and Peres called early elections and was defeated by Binyamin Netanyahu. He, for his part, got Ronald Lauder going, who shuttled between Damascus and Jerusalem and passed on his own deposits. These are certainly described in other notepads. After Netanyahu came Barak, who learned the material from Lauder, and tried to understand from the Americans where we stopped and where we went wrong, which didn’t prevent him from making more mistakes. No agreement with the Syrians came from all of this. Rabin was assassinated, Assad died, and we were left with the notepad.

Recently, Dalia Rabin spoke with Professor Ya’akov Ne’eman, who is a lawyer. “I want to tell you something,” Ne’eman told her, “something about the dollar account your mother had in America.” His story was fantastic. Ne’eman told her that the story could have ended differently. Rabin says he told her that many years ago he discovered a yellowing, forgotten internal regulation in the Finance Ministry’s archives. This regulation stipulated that a member of the Foreign Ministry who completed his term abroad was permitted to hold a dollar account for three more years. Ne’eman said that following the discovery, he contacted Professor Aharon Barak, who was the state attorney at the time, and decided to press criminal charges against Leah Rabin after Dan Margalit exposed the dollar account story in Ha’aretz. “Did you know about it?” Ne’eman asked him. “No one brought it to my attention,” Barak said. Today he is the president of the Supreme Court. So much for the Rabin Pelossof version of the Ne’eman story.

It should be noted: the Rabins’ dollar accounts in the United States were exposed by Dan Margalit in Ha’aretz in 1977, a little more than three years after Rabin completed his term as ambassador in Washington. That means that the administrative regulation did not apply to the incident (since the dispensation to have the account lasted for only three years).

On the other hand, the existence of this regulation changes the situation significantly. If the state attorney or the court had known of this regulation, the whole way it was dealt with might have been completely different.

In an instance like this, Professor Barak could have concluded that there was no felony here, but rather a procedural deviation of a few months. The probability that Barak would have pressed criminal charges in such a case is low. The entire process would have become a disciplinary, procedural, technical one and would have ended with a fine or a warning. It could be that the reason for pressing criminal charges, which ended in a conviction, after which Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin had to resign, might never have existed (Professor Aharon Barak refused to comment on this story).

Would there be peace today if Rabin had not been assassinated? Would there have been a war? No one can answer that question. When the suicide attacks began, during his term, Rabin considered (on the IDF’s advice) stopping the process and making it clear to Arafat that he had to destroy Hamas if he wanted to continue on the peace path. Rabin considered, hesitated and decided to keep going. His character as a pursuer of security, suspicious, insistent on detail, would have caused him almost certainly to stop much before it was actually stopped. The confrontation might have broken out a long time ago. Maybe not. Maybe Binyamin Netanyahu would not have defeated Rabin in the elections (Bibi enjoyed a slight advantage in the polls before Rabin was assassinated). No one can know where the turbulent political reality would have led us in this mad place. So it is impossible to determine anything regarding peace or war. What we can certainly determine is that if Rabin had not been assassinated, he would be among us now. And for anyone who knew him, that is enough.

This article appreared on October 11, 2002 in Maariv

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