Yitzhak Rabin (b. 1922) was Prime Minister of Israel from 1974 to 1977, and again from 1992 until his assassination in 1995 at the hands of a Jewish Israeli right-wing extremist who opposed the Oslo Accords.
Right: A bloodstained paper found in Rabin’s shirt pocket after his assassination, with the text of a song or poem called Shir Hashalom (A Song of Peace).
I was old enough at that time to have some understanding and appreciation of what had been developing – the peace agreements, the progress towards (maybe, just maybe?) a real, lasting, peace – and to have some appreciation of what his assassination seemed to represent. A hope cut short. I would not claim to know today, and most certainly did not have any knowledge back then, just what sort of man Rabin was: the fine details of his life and career; the nuanced, complex, ins and outs of the various cliques or movements within Israeli or Palestinian politics at the time; where exactly Rabin stood on each of various different political issues or what exactly he had or had not said, done, voted for in the past. I could not say then, and I cannot say now, the extent to which Rabin alone, or Rabin in particular, had just the right qualities to make these important steps towards peace come about, or whether the situation was moving in that direction anyway, and he just happened to be the one who happened to be Prime Minister at that time. But, the former does seem to be the standard narrative, the popular perspective: namely, that there was something special, something unique, about Rabin, that if he had lived he really might have been able to bring about peace, and that the hope of that happening died with him.
I was entirely unaware of the Yitzhak Rabin Center, a sort of combination museum / library / research center just a short walk from Tel Aviv University, until my father or brother mentioned it as a place to maybe think about visiting. And I would not blame anyone for assuming it to be skippable; I had little interest when my father and brother were first discussing it. But I am so glad that we ended up going, and frankly, I would strongly recommend it not only to anyone interested in gaining a more nuanced, complex, understanding of the history of Israeli politics, democracy, and society, from pre-1948 to today (or, until the late 1990s at least), but also to anyone interested in Museum Studies, museum design.
The Center turns out to be a pretty incredible museum. For its content: providing a more nuanced, complex, accounting of Israeli history than I’d ever been exposed to before, and in particular going deep beyond the typical black & white dichotomy of Israel and Palestine, or Jews and Arabs, to get into the Israeli left and right, the shifts in power between left and right over the decades; policies that were and were not popular; protests and demonstrations in civil society; debates and complex issues within Israeli society over religion, immigration, education, security, and a variety of other issues. Admitting and exploring wrongs committed by the Israeli government, and the shifts and changes, impacts and ramifications, and so forth connected with these. But it’s also an incredible museum for its technology – audio guide headsets that activate based on your location within the galleries, playing not just a few tens of sound recordings of curatorial narration, but rather, nearly 200 audio tracks – including diagetic music, audio for over a hundred historical video clips, and so forth, that set a mood, create an atmosphere of each time and place within the history, and explore a variety of themes, from the battlefield to cosmopolitan streets, from political speeches in the Reichstag, the Knesset, and the United Nations to television news reports, that just bring such a richness to the entire experience. And, as a museum serving visitors from a wide array of linguistic backgrounds, I thought it actually a pretty brilliant innovation, rather than having the videos play in any one language, they are silent without the audio guides – and with them, play in whichever language you select.
I wrote an earlier draft of this post that went through my notes on the exhibits, my notes on what I learned of Israeli history, year by year across the 20th century. It got rather lengthy, and my writing and thinking got into some quagmires about how to write about, how to represent, these events and these exhibits, amidst Israel’s history, and its very existence, being as fraught and controversial as it is. And all the more so amidst the current political situation, as a far-right government works to carry out reforms which many say are authoritarian, dangerous to the foundations and future of Israeli democracy, damaging to the rights of women and gender/sexual minorities, in order to enable the easier pursuit of theocratic and right-wing agendas.
But while I cannot help but to let slip my politics, my chief intention in this post is not to assert a political argument, but rather, simply from the perspective of a museum visitor, a tourist / traveler, a historian, and someone interested in Museum Studies, I primarily just wanted to share about this museum experience I had. Politics aside, I believe The Yitzhak Rabin Center exhibit galleries are a great model for how other museums could organize themselves, with their proximity-sensor-linked audio guides, and telling a narrative of national history that is nuanced and complex, open about problems and troubles in the country’s history.
Where other museums, books, videos, might represent the story of the modern State of Israel in wholly laudatory or villainizing terms, in the Rabin Center museum, we learn a far more complex story, of ups and downs, victories and defeats; of the ways in which Israelis built a state that is a beacon of freedom and democracy in the region, and the ways in which they fell short. We learn of struggles and tensions between religious and secular, of progress and setbacks in gender equality and LGBTQ+ rights, and of discrimination and inequalities between Jews of different ethnic or racial backgrounds, as well as of course between Jews and non-Jews. We learn of protests and demonstrations, media critiques, and social movements. We learn of political scandals, how Rabin resigned from leadership in the Labor Party and from candidacy for the position of Prime Minister in 1977, and about how popular sentiment regarding how the government and the military handled the 1973 Yom Kippur War led to dramatic shifts in Israeli politics: how Israel has never been always one thing – socialist, liberal, progressive, conservative, traditionalist – but rather, that in the late 1970s, “for the first time in history, Israel had a center-right government” with new agendas. As in any other free and democratic country, politics shifted left and right over time.
We learn about the many moves and efforts for peace, about the complexities and difficulties involved, the disagreements and debates. We learn about times when the Israeli government forced Jewish settlers to withdraw from, to abandon, settlements in areas such as the Sinai, as part of efforts to make peace with neighboring states such as Egypt, and the divides this created, revealed, or exacerbated within Israeli society, and we learn about times when such withdrawals led not to peace but only to continued or increased violence. We learn about dreadful acts committed, at times, by the Israeli government or IDF, or elements therein, and we learn about massive protests, within Israeli civil society, against them. And we learn about a diversity of views on what Israel means or represents, how the state should be and how it should behave; a diversity of views on the settlements or the “Occupation,” and on how Israel should address the challenges it faces. Beyond simply left or right, we are presented with a glimpse into the complexity of many of the issues Israel (and in many case, any country) faces.
We learn, too, about the various victories and setbacks in the pursuit of peace, about the hope for peace that the 1993 Oslo Accords represented, and about how extremists on both sides prevented peace from being achieved, not only at that time, but in preceding decades and down to today as well.
Contrary to popular narratives that all too often frame things in very black-and-white terms – for or against “Israel,” as if “Israel” is all one thing – we learn in the Yitzhak Rabin Center a lot about civil society, about protests and political tensions within Israel, and about political shifts over time. The current situation shows very clearly, I would think, that “Israel” is not just a single actor, with a single set of political aims or positions, but that this has changed over time – e.g. with the current government being decidedly more right-wing than its predecessors, with different aims, intentions, attitudes, positions – and that there are millions of Israelis who disagree strongly, powerfully, with those attitudes, positions, and agendas.
Like every other country on the planet, Israel has its problems, internal and external; the black marks on its record, the spots where it should have done, should have been, better, and the areas where it fails to live up to its ideals. The Rabin Center museum does not shy away from showing this, with vulnerability and honesty. If there is one thing I learned from this museum, perhaps above and beyond everything else, it is that Israel is a normal country. Israel exists beyond the controversies, beyond the headlines, beyond “The Conflict.” It is a country where millions of people, like people anywhere else in the world, worry about taxes and education, about jobs and unemployment, about climate change and women’s rights. It is a country where politics takes place like anywhere else, left and right, domestic and foreign, arts and culture, society and economics. It is a country that struggles to live up to its ideals, that strives to do better for its people, and that works to negotiate agreements with its neighbors.
Israelis are fighting right now to keep their democracy, to rescue their country from a dangerous rightward swing, and to set it back onto a path of trying to do better, to be better, to become better. I hope that, for the sake of all the people living there, the world can learn to see them with compassion and humanity, rather than with ire, and to recognize that they too, like everyone else in the world, deserve prosperity and happiness, self-determination, and freedom and safety from those who would see them displaced, persecuted, eradicated.
[…] Abbas, the Palestinian Authority, the PLO, are probably not the greatest partners in peace. But, Rabin came close, and Olmert came close, or so I thought; who knows to what extent Arafat or Abbas […]