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On February 25, 1994, on the Jewish festival of Purim, a New York–born doctor and resident of the Kiryat Arab settlement entered the Ibrahimi mosque in the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron. He wore his IDF reserve officer’s uniform and carried an assault rifle. Baruch Goldstein had been a follower of the racist Rabbi Meir Kahane in the United States and a member of Kahane’s ultranationalist Kach party after emigrating to Israel.
The Tomb of the Patriarchs had been a shared place of worship for Jews and Muslims since 1967, though clashes were frequent. Entering the Muslim area, Goldstein opened fire on worshipers, killing twenty-nine and wounding over a hundred before being overpowered and beaten to death. Goldstein’s specific motives were unclear. He had acted on his own and left no message. Since the Oslo process had begun, he had taken to wearing a yellow Star of David, like the ones the Jews had been forced to wear in Germany during the Holocaust, in an act of protest. He probably hoped to set off a cycle of violence that would disrupt the peace process. Condemnations of the massacre came from all parts of the Israeli political spectrum, including Netanyahu and the other right-wing leaders and settlers. Goldstein’s far-right supporters claimed he had acted to prevent a terrorist attack.
As rioting broke out in the West Bank, Rabin sent reinforcements to quell the violence while trying to keep the Oslo process on track. Kach, which had been barred since 1988 from contending in the elections on account of its racist platform, was outlawed, but Rabin decided not to antagonize the settlers and rejected recommendations to evict the small and fanatical Jewish settlement from Hebron. Neither did the security forces prevent Goldstein’s supporters from holding his funeral on the outskirts of Hebron. One of those supporters was a twenty-three-year-old law student, Yigal Amir, who vowed to continue Goldstein’s quest to end the peace process.
On April 6, after the forty days of mourning for the twenty-nine Muslims who had been murdered in Hebron, Hamas launched its first revenge suicide attack against Israeli civilians. The Palestinian Islamist movement was opposed to Oslo, but it had mainly remained on the sidelines until the Hebron massacre. A Hamas operative detonated himself next to a bus collecting schoolchildren in Afula in northern Israel, killing eight and wounding fifty-five. A week later, another Hamas bomber blew himself up inside a bus in the coastal city of Hadera, killing five. The explosive devices had been built by “The Engineer,” Yahya Ayyash, a master planner of suicide bombing attacks. Arafat refused to publicly condemn the attack.
The next two years would be interspersed with suicide attacks, fueling protests against the government and putting Rabin and Peres in the impossible position of directing the security forces against Hamas while continuing to negotiate the next agreements with the PLO. As the public began turning against the Oslo process, Netanyahu rose in the polls. Peres’s refrain was that pulling out of the talks would be “a prize to terror.” Exasperated as they were with Arafat, in May 1994 Israel and the PLO signed the Cairo Agreement, which set out a timetable and procedures for implementing the principles of the Oslo Accords.
On July 1, Arafat arrived in Gaza City. The IDF pulled back from most of the Gaza Strip, retaining control of borders with Israel and Egypt, the Israeli settlements, and the roads leading to them. The following night, the right wing held a mass rally in Jerusalem’s Zion Square. Some Likud leaders were dismayed upon arriving when they discovered giant “Death to Arafat” banners and Rehavam Ze’evi, the leader of far-right Moledet (Homeland) party, which called for “transfer”—that is, mass expulsion of Arabs—due to make a speech.
The demonstration had been organized by the settlers, who coordinated with Netanyahu loyalist Tzachi Hanegbi. Nearly all of the fifty thousand people who gathered in the square were religious settlers or their supporters. They planned to illegally march from the square toward the Palestinian neighborhoods and “paralyze” the city.1 The Likud leadership was split. The “princes” Ehud Olmert, Dan Meridor, and Benny Begin were in favor of pulling out. Tzachi Hanegbi and Ariel Sharon demanded they stay. Netanyahu was on the fence. He supported the princes’ demands, but he stayed. It would set a precedent for the next fourteen months.
Netanyahu’s speeches during the period were measured. He fiercely criticized the government’s policies, but he mainly avoided ad hominem attacks. Certainly his words were more moderate than what was being said by Sharon and other right-wing leaders. But he had coordinated with them and took part in some of the wildest protests against Rabin. Netanyahu tried to have it both ways, presenting himself as pragmatic and prime ministerial while riding the far-right tiger.
On October 19, the worst suicide attack up to that point took place in Tel Aviv. A Hamas bomber blew himself up in a crowded bus near Dizengoff Square, killing twenty-two. Netanyahu, who was nearby in Metzudat Ze’ev, joined the angry crowds jeering the government around the smoldering bus. The next day his political opponents and media pundits accused him of “dancing on the blood”; but most Israelis remembered the graphic footage of torn bodies, the driver lying dead at the wheel, and realized that even at the heart of cosmopolitan Israel, they were no longer safe. Polls in the aftermath of the “No. 5 bus bombing” had Netanyahu leading Rabin.
That week, Sara gave birth to their second son and Bibi’s third child, Avner. The new mother didn’t spend long at home with her baby. Sara was busy trying to complete her master’s degree in psychology and accompanying her husband to public events and fundraising trips abroad. Her parents were drafted to take care of the two small boys, alongside a never-ending succession of nannies, none of whom met Sara’s exacting standards. Avner’s brit milah (circumcision ceremony), held at a large banqueting hall in Jerusalem, was Likud’s social event of the year, as the party leadership, including rivals such as Sharon, put in an appearance. Boosted by the polls, Netanyahu already had the aura of a prime-minister-in-waiting. Only David Levy stayed away. He had rebuffed Netanyahu’s half-hearted attempts to reconcile with him following the hot-tape scandal, saying, “He will be judged by his actions.” An irrevocable split seemed unavoidable.
Rabin continued to dismiss Netanyahu, refusing to contemplate the inexperienced politician, twenty-seven years his junior, as a worthy rival. He rarely agreed to meet and update the leader of the opposition, and in Knesset debates he openly mocked him, much in the way Ben-Gurion had treated Begin in the 1950s. Their relationship would deteriorate as Rabin accused Netanyahu of leading the incitement against him.
One leader who was taking Netanyahu seriously was King Hussein of Jordan. Hussein, a keen follower of Israeli politics, was reading the polls. As Israel and Jordan negotiated a peace agreement, he wanted to ensure that Likud would be on board. Historically, the Revisionist movement regarded the foundation of the Hashemite kingdom, on land they claimed had originally been intended for the Jewish homeland, a travesty. “Two banks to the Jordan, this is ours and this ours as well,” sang the Betar youth movement. Begin had relinquished this claim in 1965, but it had been replaced by the “Jordan is Palestine” plan, by which the Palestinians would build their state on the ruins of the Hashemite kingdom, rather than in the West Bank.
In May 1994, as talks gathered momentum, Netanyahu met secretly with Hussein’s younger brother in London. Crown Prince Hassan sounded him out on Likud’s positions on the agreement taking shape. Netanyahu assured him that Likud would not be an obstacle. On July 25, the agreement was formally announced in Washington and approved by the Knesset, 91–3, with Likud in favor (some members abstained). Unlike with Egypt, Israel did not relinquish territory to Jordan. For once there was consensus over an agreement with an Arab neighbor. The signing ceremony, on October 26 in the Jordan Valley, was a shining moment for Rabin and proof that the process with the Palestinians was yielding significant achievements. Although Netanyahu was not on stage, the signing provided an easy way for him to show pragmatism and statesmanship. A few days earlier, Hussein had called to personally congratulate him on Avner’s birth. The next month, he was the guest of the Jordanian royal family at a memorial service at Karameh, where both he and Hassan had fought twenty-six years earlier as young soldiers.
Rabin was also pursuing a deal with Syria. He hoped an agreement with President Hafez al-Assad could also lead to a deal with Lebanon, over which the Assad regime exercised control, allowing Israel to pull its troops out of the “Security Zone” in southern Lebanon, where they were engaged in bloody skirmishes with Hezbollah. Conducted through American intermediaries, negotiations with Assad bogged down in intricate details about the final location of the border and security arrangements on the Golan. Neither side trusted the other sufficiently to disclose its true positions.
Rabin publicly accused Netanyahu of sabotage. In a television interview, he said, “The Likud chairman Netanyahu sent messages to Syria, saying they should wait until after the elections…. Don’t close a deal now with Rabin.”2 Whatever messages Netanyahu had sent through third parties to Assad, it was disingenuous of Rabin to blame him for the failure of the talks. In the last decade of his life, Assad had negotiated with five different Israeli prime ministers and rejected every peace plan presented to him. He died in 2000, and it’s highly unlikely he ever truly intended to reconcile with the Jewish state. Assad’s rejection of Israel was a cornerstone of his hardline Ba’athist ideology.
Netanyahu and the Israeli right wing were also fighting Rabin’s policy in Washington. Republican lawmakers worked to frustrate the Clinton administration and derail the Oslo Accords. In 1995, two Republicans from New York, Senator Al D’Amato and Representative Benjamin Gilman, chair of the House Committee on International Relations, put through legislation banning direct US assistance to the Palestinians. The funding was intended to provide support for Arafat’s newly founded Palestinian Authority.
It was the first time the Israeli government had been outflanked from the right by Israel’s ostensible supporters on Capitol Hill. The legislation was a breach of the unwritten rules that internal Israeli politics should not be fought in Washington. Netanyahu and the settlers had no compunction in splitting the Jewish and pro-Israel consensus. The majority of American Jews were fully in support of Rabin’s policies, but the right-wing minority in control of AIPAC and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations were not keen on Oslo, and in the Republicans controlling Congress they had willing allies.
The angry and violent atmosphere on Israel’s streets spilled over in New York as two Israelis—Shulamit Aloni, now minister of communications, and Colette Avital, consul general, one of Bibi’s early mentors during his student advocacy days in Boston—were both heckled and shoved by right-wingers at public events.
ON THE MORNING of January 22, 1995, a Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) suicide bomber detonated himself at the Beit Lid Junction, a busy intersection between Tel Aviv and Haifa, among a group of soldiers on their way to their base. Three minutes later, a second bomber blew himself up near the first responders who had rushed to the scene. Twenty-two Israelis died.
Public support for Oslo plumbed the depths. Polls in the aftermath of the Beit Lid attack had only a third of Israelis still supporting the process with the Palestinians. According to a poll conducted by the newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, if elections were held in early February, Netanyahu would beat Rabin 52–38. Arafat refused to arrest the Hamas and PIJ leaders on a list presented to him by Israel. The Oslo talks were suspended for a few weeks as Israel imposed a closure on the West Bank and Gaza. But more suicide attacks took place in April, July, and August.
The ultra-Orthodox Shas had pulled out of the Labor coalition, and Rabin’s government was based on a minority coalition. The Arab parties, who weren’t members of the government, and Shas saved the government by not voting against it in no-confidence votes. Elections were to be held at the very latest by late 1996, and suddenly the prospect of Netanyahu becoming prime minister seemed very real. Most of his many rivals and critics within Likud piped down and got in line. They didn’t want to miss out on promotion once the party got back in power. All but Levy.
Attempts to bridge the rift between them failed, and Netanyahu pushed for more constitutional changes within the party, aimed at shrinking Levy’s influence. He failed to heed warnings about forcing Levy out. In June 1995, the Likud Central Committee met to decide how new members would be appointed. Levy demanded a quota system ensuring representation of his supporters. Netanyahu refused, instead proposing that the party branches, which were controlled by his people, elect most of the members of the party’s institutions. Without mentioning Levy, in his speech Netanyahu compared those opposing his leadership to Arab dictators pressuring Israel. Benny Begin proposed an opposing motion, which was steamrolled—the Central Committee voted 1,074–330 for Netanyahu’s motion. Levy boycotted the meeting, announcing he was leaving Likud.
On June 18, Levy formed a new party, Gesher (Bridge), and accused Likud under Netanyahu of having abandoned the party’s traditional Mizrahi voters in working-class neighborhoods and the development towns—founded in the 1950s for the immigrants arriving in the new state, mainly from Arab countries. Netanyahu wasn’t perturbed. Only one other Likud MK left with Levy. Bibi was confident that he would win the next election without them.
IN DECEMBER 1994, Rabin and Peres were back in Oslo, receiving the Nobel Peace Prize together with Arafat. The world feted them as peacemakers, but many Israelis were left cold. Initial public enthusiasm had long ago evaporated. Arafat was once again seen as the terror chieftain, only now he was standing beside Israel’s leaders. As suicide bombings continued, security crackdowns on the Palestinians became much more popular among the voters than peace talks or shiny diplomatic ceremonies abroad.
Surveys showed that most Israelis still respected Rabin as a strong and trustworthy leader, much more than Netanyahu. But frustrated by terrorist attacks, they were increasingly inclined to give Bibi a chance. In an attempt to broaden his appeal, Netanyahu admitted that if he was elected, despite his deep misgivings, he would not renege on agreements already signed by the government. “Reciprocity” became his watchword. He would keep to the deal, but since Arafat was a congenital liar and unreformed terrorist, he claimed the process would founder on the Palestinians’ intransigence. Put on the spot by an interviewer asking whether, if elected prime minister, he would meet Arafat, Bibi answered, “I’ll send my foreign minister.”
He had been Likud leader for only two years but already believed that the prime minister’s office was his by right. Bibi wouldn’t be another Begin, waiting patiently for three decades for the pendulum to swing. He was anxious for elections. The settlers were more desperate to stop pullbacks.
ON SEPTEMBER 28, 1995, after over a year of wrangling with Arafat, Israel and the PLO signed the “Interim Agreement on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip,” more commonly known as the Oslo II Accord. Israeli forces were to pull out of all the Palestinian cities, as they had from Gaza and Jericho, and from 450 villages. The territory would be split into three areas. Urban Area A would be under full Palestinian security control. Rural Area B would be under civilian Palestinian control with Israeli security. Area C, including all Jewish settlements, the roads leading to them, and borders with Israel and Jordan, would remain under full Israeli control.
Essentially, it was not that different from Netanyahu’s shelved “cantons plan.” Presenting Oslo II in the Knesset a week later, Rabin said it would lead to “less than a state” for the Palestinians. He promised that the settlements would not be moved, Jerusalem would remain united under Israeli sovereignty, and Israel would “not return to the 4 June 1967 lines.”
Rabin’s assurances were not enough. Oslo II barely scraped through in a 61–59 vote. Two hawkish Labor MKs broke with the party in protest over giving the PLO control of wide swaths of the West Bank. The government was saved by two other MKs, former members of the right-wing Tzomet (Crossroads) party, who had defected to the coalition and received ministerial posts. The right wing blasted Rabin for passing the agreement “on the votes of Arabs and for the price of a Mitsubishi [the new deputy minister’s government car].” In and outside the Knesset, the Oslo II debate was the stormiest period of Rabin’s premiership.
On the evening of the debate, another mass demonstration was held in Zion Square, and once again, Netanyahu spoke. He criticized the government for passing the agreement with “a non-Zionist majority,” adding, “It relies on five Arab representatives who are aligned with the PLO.”
The crowd was at fever pitch. When he heard people shouting “with blood and fire we will banish Rabin,” Netanyahu answered them, “That’s not the way. No blood and fire, just the ballot box.” But his pleas fell on deaf ears, and many in the crowd chanted, “Death to Rabin.” Out of his sight from the balcony overlooking the square, a few demonstrators were burning Rabin’s picture. Others handed out photomontages of Rabin wearing an SS officer’s cap. He couldn’t see them, but television reports from the demonstration were edited to make it seem like Netanyahu had encouraged the “Death to Rabin” calls and the burning of his photograph.3 When he was told of the goings-on in the square, he immediately denounced them, but it was too late.
Netanyahu was driven back to the Knesset for the debate. “This is the most estranged government ever from the [Jewish] heritage of Israel,” Netanyahu said from the podium. “The government’s alienation from the heritage is the real reason for its policies and why Hebron is to them an Arab city, Judea and Samaria the ‘west bank,’ the Golan, Arab land.” Rabin angrily shouted from the government seats, “You want to go back into Gaza.” Netanyahu answered, “No, Mr. Rabin, I don’t want to go back to Gaza, but you have brought Gaza back into Tel Aviv, and you have brought Gaza into every part of the land of Israel.”4
Rabin retorted, “You just shut up. When Menachem Begin made the decision to withdraw from the Sinai Peninsula, you weren’t even here. You have never in your life filled any kind of position involving responsibility for security.”5
Outside the parliament, rioters spotted the prime minister’s car. Rabin was not there, but members of the outlawed Kach movement surrounded it, banging on its sides. Later one of them proudly presented the Cadillac symbol he had prised off the vehicle. “Just like we got to the symbol, we can get to Rabin himself,” he boasted.6 Another member of the government, Housing Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, was surrounded as he tried to reach the Knesset. When he finally made it in, shaken, the debate in the plenum was suspended for a few minutes as news of the rioting filtered in.
Netanyahu asked to make a special statement. “The first condemnation I made immediately after I heard of that calumny, during the protest,” he claimed. Rabin refused to listen, leaving the plenum. Netanyahu blamed “a group of thugs, I know which illegal movement they belong to. You must not accuse an entire community because of a group of thugs.” He compared the cries of “Rabin the murderer” to similar cries in the past by left-wing demonstrators against Sharon and Begin. “This was always wrong…. And we emphatically denounce it.”7
But he had been there when the cries were heard and Rabin’s portrait was burnt in the square. Other Likud leaders, including Meridor, Milo, and Begin, had stayed away. When Reuven Rivlin had arrived, sensing the atmosphere, he had left the balcony. Netanyahu stayed.
The next day Netanyahu told Likud’s representatives to end their coordination with the far right. They ended their coordination, but it didn’t change the violent tone on the streets. They weren’t his people on the streets anyway.
OVER THE DECADES Israeli society has seen major waves of public unrest. National anger rose after the Yom Kippur and Lebanon wars, and there were protests against the peace agreement with Egypt and the disengagement from Gaza. There were rallies against corruption in politics in 1990, and there would be more in 2017. There would be “social justice” protests against the squeezing of the middle class in 2011. But there has been nothing as prolonged, as intense, and as toxic as the anti-Oslo protests of 1993 to 1995.
They were led by religious settlers who saw the process with the Palestinians as an existential threat to all they had built since 1967. They were the ideological and organizational backbone of the movement, which spanned the more moderate right and the various religious groups and at the extreme edge included the outlawed Kahanists. Together they held large rallies, blocked highways, and built dozens of illegal settlement outposts. A few of them attacked Palestinian targets in an attempt to disrupt the talks. Not all in the movement supported violence, and their shocked condemnation of Goldstein’s bloodbath in Hebron was near-complete. But no one made a serious attempt to detach the violent group from the wider camp.
As the Oslo process ground on, defying terrorist attacks and political strife, the protests focused more and more on Rabin himself. Demonstrators tried to disrupt the prime minister’s every public appearance, shouting him down and jostling his entourage. On Fridays, when Rabin returned for the weekend from the official residence in Jerusalem to his apartment in north Tel Aviv, they were waiting outside, shouting insults and threats. Once they called out to Leah Rabin, “You will be strung up like Mussolini and his mistress.”
Rabin was at first ambivalent. When he was warned that he was personally at risk, he responded, “I was in much more dangerous situations in my army service.”8 Outwardly he remained dismissive, but as intelligence accumulated of attacks planned against both government and Palestinian targets, he privately urged the attorney general, Michael Ben-Yair, and the Supreme Court president, Aharon Barak, to agree to radical legal steps, including possibly administrative detentions against far-right activists. Neither, however, were eager to suspend the civil freedoms of the government’s critics. Ben-Yair had also refused the security service’s demand to be allowed to torture Palestinian terrorism suspects in the frantic attempt to prevent further suicide attacks.
Still, Rabin didn’t fear for his own security. Shin Bet failed to beef up his bodyguard detail, and when they gingerly recommended Rabin wear a bullet-proof vest in public, he shot them down immediately.
The Shin Bet was aware of dark mutterings among extreme settlers and rabbis on the necessity of removing Rabin and whether it was even a holy Jewish duty. But they had no indication of an active assassination plot. In early August, Rabin finally relented to Shin Bet chief Karmi Gillon’s request to be allowed to brief leaders of the anti-Oslo camp and warn them that the tone of their protests could lead to political violence, perhaps even an attempt on the prime minister’s life. Gillon met with right-wing politicians, settler leaders, and rabbis. One of them was Netanyahu, who appeared to be surprised by what Gillon had to say, and skeptical that the situation could lead to serious violence. He didn’t see what influence he could have on a potential attacker.
Gillon also gave a rare briefing to a small group of senior journalists. In the briefing he spoke mainly of other security matters, reaching the concern over Jewish terrorist attacks only toward the end. He said he was most worried about possible attacks against Palestinians and the mosques on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. He added that he was worried about “UFOs,” minor figures not on the Shin Bet’s radar who “all day hear that Rabin is a murderer.” For people like this, he said, “I have no intelligence solution. The only solution is security.” He told the journalists that he had met with and warned right-wing leaders and rabbis. He didn’t single out Netanyahu.9
The headlines the next day were of Shin Bet’s warning of an attack on Rabin or Peres. Sharon attacked the government, saying that the warnings were actually incitement against the right wing, fabricated by Rabin, whom he compared to Stalin. A few weeks later in a television interview, Rabin accused his right-wing opponents—who blamed him for the terrorist attacks—of being “collaborators with Hamas.”
“They are trying to dance on the blood…. They are not condemning the [Hamas] murderers, but attacking me for political gain…. I’ll say it again, they are helping Hamas…. Hamas is relying on them.”10
NETANYAHU’S CONDUCT IN those toxic months has remained the most indelible stain on his record. The charge that he led the incitement has become accepted truth. But at no point did Netanyahu use the vocabulary of the far right against Rabin and his ministers. He didn’t join in the chorus calling for the “Oslo criminals” to be put on trial for treason. He confronted those who were chanting “Rabin the traitor,” admonishing them. “He’s not a traitor, [but] he’s making a big mistake,” he said forcefully at a rally in April. “We are dealing with political rivals, not enemies. We are one nation.”11
But Netanyahu has been pronounced guilty of incitement by association. He did not get up and leave when the chanting began. He continued arriving at demonstrations where calls for Rabin’s murder were made. Often he was not on the stage, but on the fringes of the crowd. Some Likud leaders refused to take part in these events. Others joined in. Sharon enthusiastically joined his settler allies. In a newspaper column, Sharon wrote, “What is the difference between the Jewish committees in the Ghettos and the government? There they were forced to collaborate and here the government is doing it from its free will.” Sharon was never damned for likening the Rabin government to collaborators with the Nazis. Netanyahu, who didn’t use that imagery against Rabin, was presented as the head inciter because he was the prime minister’s rival.
What could Netanyahu have done differently? It was his duty as leader of the opposition that was fighting the government on a policy that would have historically changed Israel’s foundation, disastrously in his opinion, to lead the protests. Most of the thousands who flocked to the rallies were not members of his party. The protesters burning Rabin’s picture had never been Likudniks. Netanyahu had no control over them. Did he have the option of splitting the anti-Oslo camp? He could have denied them cooperation, but the right wing had lost power in 1992 as a result of its fragmentation. Likud’s membership lacked the fervor and dedication of the settler movement. A more moderate Likud rally against the government would have attracted much smaller numbers.
Refusing to work with the far right would have meant Netanyahu and Likud giving up the streets. That would have limited them to speech-making in the Knesset and being sidelined by a largely pro-Oslo media. Israeli politics was still being played out on the streets in the early 1990s, not the Internet, and the extremists made up the necessary numbers. Keeping out of the fray would have diminished Likud’s voice and would have probably done nothing to minimize the incitement and violence. Netanyahu had no power to prevent what would happen on November 4.
ON OCTOBER 26, a forty-four-year-old man, using a Libyan passport with an assumed name, landed in Malta, on the ferry from Tripoli. A few hours later, while walking through Sliema, a resort town on Malta’s east coast, two men riding a motorcycle shot him in the head before speeding away. Israel had taken revenge against one of the masterminds of the suicide bombing campaign. The assassination of Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s founder and secretary-general, Fathi Shaqaqi, was one of the last operations that Yitzhak Rabin signed off on.
Nine days later, Rabin took part in a rally in central Tel Aviv under the slogan “Yes to Peace. No to Violence.” He had initially been skeptical about the rally. He wasn’t sure whether he wanted to draw more attention to the campaign being waged against him and feared that too few supporters would come. The fears were baseless. Many members of the Israeli left wing, or, as they called themselves, “the peace camp,” were fed up with the streets being dominated by the right, and turned out in strength. The square opposite city hall was packed.
“I always believed the majority of the nation wants peace, is prepared to take risks for peace,” Rabin said in his last speech. “The nation really wants peace and opposes violence. Violence eats away at the foundation of Israeli democracy. It must be denounced, condemned, isolated. It is not the way of the state of Israel. There is democracy. There can be disagreements. But they are settled in democratic elections.”12