In this January 10, 2025 blog post, Rabbi Brant Rosen connects the week’s Torah portion, Parshat Vayechi, to the legacy of Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli Prime Minister assassinated following the Oslo Peace Accords, and the entirety of the Zionist enterprise.
Although many promote the mythology of Rabin as a former military man who later became a man of peace, the truth is much more problematic. In fact, Rabin never supported Palestinian statehood throughout the Oslo “peace process.” It is more accurate to say he used the veneer of this process to enable an Israeli settlement regime that has since become permanently entrenched in the West Bank. Rabin’s role in Oslo can be directly linked in a straight line to the systemic violence against Palestinians that is now raging with impunity throughout the Occupied Territories.
In other words, while Liberal Zionist mythology attributes the curse of Shimon and Levi to “bad apple” Zionists, this kind of systemic, unrestrained violence has been central to the Zionist project from its very beginning. Indeed, Israel’s still ongoing genocide in Gaza is not the result of “errant weeds” in the Israeli government like Netanyahu, Smotrich and Ben-Givir. It is the logical end game of Zionism itself: an ideology and movement that has from its very origins dehumanized and dispossessed Palestinians to make way for Jewish settlement.
