New York — The Israeli Foreign Ministry website has produced a memorial page in memory of assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, but has conspicuously omitted providing a link to the text of his last speech to the Knesset, one month prior to his assassination, in which he repudiated creating a fully sovereign Palestinian state and making other dangerous territorial concessions. The memorial page provides links to key speeches he delivered, but omits this crucial one, whose policy guidelines have been simply discarded by the current government of Ehud Olmert.
In his last speech to the Knesset, delivered on October 5, 1995, Rabin outlined in detail his peace vision and the limits of concessions he was prepared to make:
Rabin ruled out a fully sovereign Palestinian state: “We view the permanent solution in the framework of State of Israel which will include most of the area of the Land of Israel as it was under the rule of the British Mandate, and alongside it a Palestinian entity which will be a home to most of the Palestinian residents living in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. We would like this to be an entity which is less than a state, and which will independently run the lives of the Palestinians under its authority.”
- Rabin ruled out a total withdrawal from Judea and Samaria and thus a return to the pre-June 1967 borders: “The borders of the State of Israel, during the permanent solution, will be beyond the lines which existed before the Six Day War. We will not return to the 4 June 1967 lines.”
- Rabin ruled out withdrawing form the Jordan Valley: “The security border of the State of Israel will be located in the Jordan Valley, in the broadest meaning of that term.”
- Rabin ruled out uprooting settlement blocs, like the Gush Katif bloc in Gaza (which was subsequently uprooted by former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon): “The establishment of blocs of settlements in Judea and Samaria, like the one in Gush Katif.
- Rabin ruled out removing any settlement before coming to a full peace agreement with the Palestinians: “I want to remind you: we committed ourselves, that is, we came to an agreement, and committed ourselves before the Knesset, not to uproot a single settlement in the framework of the interim agreement, and not to hinder building for natural growth.”
- Rabin insisted on Israel retaining full security control of the borders with Egypt and Jordan, contrary to Israel’s relinquishment of the Philadelphia Corridor on the border with Egypt: “The responsibility for external security along the borders with Egypt and Jordan, as well as control over the airspace above all of the territories and Gaza Strip maritime zone, remains in our hands.”
ZOA National President Morton A. Klein said, “It is deeply troubling that the memorial page for Yitzhak Rabin would omit his last major address to the Knesset. It is perfectly obvious why this has been done — the policy of the Olmert government has discarded each and every one of Rabin’s red lines in dealing with the Palestinian Authority (PA) that he outlined in that major speech and, rather than allowing people to decide the merits of this radical departure from Rabin’s policy, the speech is simply airbrushed so people will not be reminded of it. Rabin’s speech is actually elsewhere on the website, but the public is not provided on the memorial page with a link to refer to it easily and anyone searching for it would have to take time and effort to find it.
“Surely, logic and decency would have dictated that a link be provided to the speech, which would remind people that Israel is proposing major concessions under great pressure and well beyond what Yitzhak Rabin envisioned. Instead, in order to shield from scrutiny the radical concessions and path pursued by the Olmert government, Rabin’s own last Knesset speech is simply left out of the picture, an inconvenient fact which must not interfere with the rush to dangerous concessions to a terror-sponsoring PA, which the late Yitzhak Rabin would have clearly opposed.”
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