As Rabin is mourned, do these ‘Me Too’ claims bury Peres’ legacy?

Following Rabin’s assassination, minutes after they stood side by side on the stage at the peace rally in Tel Aviv, and then Peres’s appointment as prime minister in his stead by general acclamation, there is a gilded image of their partnership for peace. Decades of enmity have been airbrushed out of the public memory.

This week Peres and Rabin were back in the news. Rabin’s resurrection was expected. The anniversary of his murder is an annual opportunity for political point-scoring and grand-standing, so much so that there are two shows, one on the Hebrew date of the murder, the 12th of Heshvan, when the state commemorates him in Jerusalem, and again on 4 November, when the political parties and movements of the left hold their rally in Tel Aviv.

Peres’s exhumation was much more surprising. Though in retrospect, perhaps, it shouldn’t be. A few days after the fifth anniversary of his death, Ha’aretz published an interview with Collette Avital, one of the most celebrated Israeli diplomats of the past generation and only the third woman in the diplomatic corps to attain the rank of ambassador.

The left isn’t left out

For many years, there’s been a rumour, accepted as truth, that Avital had an affair with Peres. She used the interview to deny that and went even further, claiming that Peres had on two occasions made unwanted sexual advances.

In one meeting between them in 1983, she said, “he suddenly pinned me to the door and tried to kiss me”. On another occasion, she was supposed to brief him but found herself being ushered to his hotel room where he waited in pajamas.

In the two weeks since the interview came out, the dynamic which has become so familiar now in the west of re-examining the record of a revered historic figure has played out, complete with reports of other women, so far all anonymous, who claim that Peres did the same to them.

This is particularly awkward for leaders of the Israeli left since Peres isn’t just a former Labour leader, who personified the ideological shift the party made when it embraced engagement and territorial compromise with the Palestinians. And it’s especially difficult for the current Labour leader, Merav Michaeli, who began her public career fighting on behalf of victims of sexual violence.

It took Michaeli four days to respond to the interview and then she tried to thread the needle, saying to the weekly meeting of Labour’s Knesset faction that, “As always, I believe those who were assaulted. I believe Colette Avital. It is always painful, difficult and frustrating to find out that men who we deeply valued hurt women. It is always very frustrating, but there is no alternative. The great and important things that someone did do not cancel out or justify behavior that hurts women. That behaviour must be eradicated.”

So the behaviour must be eradicated but not at the expense of Peres’s legacy. Or as Michal Rozin, a Meretz MK who also said that she believed Avital, put it, “We can’t forget what Peres did for the good of the nations andhis justified positions. I’m proud of Shimon Peres for the things he did and on the other hand I’m ashamed that he was part of a generation that sexually harassed and allowed itself to take advantage of power.”

The left is opening itself here to claims of double-standards, since many of its representatives have made a point over the last five years of boycotting the annual Knesset session in honour of Rechavam Zeevi, a far-right minister who was killed in 2001 by Palestinian assassins. In 2016, Uvda, Israel’s most widely-viewed investigative documentary series, broadcast a detailed investigation into Zeevi’s record, which included allegations of rape. Zeevi’s admirers on the right countered that the allegations and subsequent boycott were politically-motivated and were smearing a dead hero who could not respond. The luke-warm response from the left to the claims against Peres have strengthened them.

Battle for the past

Perhaps it’s impossible to detach politics from commemoration. The annual memorials for Rabin have always been political, whether from the left, who have used the assassination to push their two-state solution cause and blame the other camp for “the incitement that led to the murder,” — or from the right, especially Benjamin Netanyahu, then and now the leader of the opposition, who has tried to create a narrative whereby the real assassination was that of his character.

Netanyahu took it up a notch this week when he pointedly chose not to attend the memorial ceremony for Rabin on Mount Herzl on Monday, because, according to a source close to him, “at the ceremony on Mount Herzl he receives disrespectful buckets of abuse” and, “when Netanyahu attends, they attack him. When he doesn’t attend, they attack him.”

Of course, Netanyahu wasn’t abandoning the battle over the public memory. He spoke at the special Knesset session later that day and instead of speaking about Rabin, he lambasted the new government. “Year after year there are those who use Rabin’s murder to attack my camp and me,” he said. “Don’t lecture us about democracy and don’t lecture us about legitimacy.”

The events of the past few months have only strengthened his narrative. Now the man who replaced him, Naftali Bennett, is the leader of a small right-wing party, and prime minister only because the same left wing that “use Rabin’s murder” support him.

The anniversary of Rabin’s death is the perfect opportunity for him to delegitimise Bennett’s premiership. Some would say, in much the same way he delegitimised Rabin all those years ago.

Bennett’s speech was measured and “prime-ministerial” but his partner in power, Foreign Minister Yair Lapid, was prepared to take Netanyahu on. “Yigal Amir’s ideological heirs are today serving in Israel’s Knesset,” he said in his speech, referring to Itamar Ben Gvir, the Kahanist MK who as a young activist had vandalised Rabin’s Cadillac and said shortly before the murder, “Just as we got to Rabin’s car, we can get to Rabin”.

Ben Gvir is now an MK thanks to the machinations of Netanyahu, who orchestrated a merger of the far-right parties into the “Religious Zionism” list before the last election, ensuring that no right-wing votes would be lost under the electoral threshold of Israel’s system..

“Had we not performed the miracle of the ‘change government,’” Lapid continued, “they would be ministers in the government.”

Buried secrets

Israel commemorates its former presidents and prime ministers in national ceremonies. The first men to hold these posts, Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion have their own annual memorial events. So does Rabin, the only leader to have been assassinated.

The other 13 deceased presidents and prime ministers have a joint annual memorial ceremony and a personal one every 10 years on the decennial of their death with all the trappings of a state ceremony.

They also all have a right to be buried, along with their spouses, in the Great Leaders of the Nation Plot on Mount Herzl. The state also funds research and commemoration of their “legacy.”

In the past, none of these arrangements were controversial. Israel was a young democracy and the respect for its departed founding fathers, and one founding mother, transcended political divides. But the revelations regarding Peres’s record and the politicisation of Rabin’s memory are almost certainly the shape of things to come.

The last generation of Israel’s leaders will not enjoy the breathless eulogies their predecessors received. They include Moshe Katsav, the president who went to prison for rape and Ehud Olmert who served time for bribery and fraud.

Netanyahu is the first prime minister to go on trial while in office and Ehud Barak has been named in Michael Wolff’s new book on the sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein as having been “a frequent guest, almost a fixture” in his New York mansion. Barak strenuously denies these claims but they have become useful social-media fodder for the right.

Perhaps it would be best for Israel to leave the memorialising to political parties and abandon outdated notions of national consensus. If anything, commemoration of past leaders will become even more acrimonious in the future.