Eitan Haber, well-known Israeli journalist and author, describes himself as “a big admirer of peace.” That’s an apt description, since Haber served as head of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s office until Rabin’s assassination in 1995, and believes that Rabin “changed the face of history in Israel” in pursuit of peace.
Yet Haber was never a member of the Labor Party, he told me on Nov. 11, the day after he spoke here during the community memorial marking the seventh anniversary of Rabin’s death.
Born into a prominent right-wing family in pre-state Palestine, Haber said he was well educated in the Zionist revisionist movement of Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky. Haber’s father was a fighter in the Irgun Zvai Leumi, the movement’s paramilitary organization, and head of the right-wing predecessor of today’s Likud Party.
In fact, since the age of nine, Haber was a member of Betar, the right-wing youth movement; and the family’s Tel Aviv home was only a few hundred yards from the right camp’s national headquarters.
So how did this “son of the right wing,” the man who wrote perhaps the most read biography of Likud Prime Minister Menachem Begin, “cross the border” and come to work for one of Labor’s strongest proponents?
Haber’s transformation began, he said, during the 1970s while he was covering the peace process with Egypt as a military correspondent for Yediot Achronot, Israel’s largest daily newspaper. As one of the first group of journalists to visit Egypt, he met the bereaved family of his Egyptian bodyguard, whose brother had been killed in the Yom Kippur War.
“I met his mother, and I saw that the tears of a bereaved Egyptian mother are similar to the tears of a bereaved Jewish mother,” he said.
During that time, he said he also became close to Likud Defense Minister Ezer Weizman, and “took from him the confidence that the peace with Egypt will be a good peace. Just as Weizman changed his mind about peace during this time, so did I. I learned the importance of peace.”
In the intervening years, Haber said he “covered the peace process everywhere it occurred.” Even so, when Rabin first asked Haber to work for him in 1985 after becoming defense minister, Haber refused.
Haber had known Rabin for many years. He first met him in 1958 at age 18 while Rabin was serving as the army’s northern commander and Haber was assigned to cover him as a military correspondent for the army newspaper. Haber continued to cover Rabin as Yediot Achronot’s top military correspondent until Rabin’s tenure as chief of staff ended in 1968.
From all these years of contact, Haber said he knew “it was not a real paradise to work for Rabin, and I was also reluctant to lose my newspaper position. Yet Rabin squeezed me for an entire year, and I finally agreed to do it — but only for one year. One year then became ten.”
‘Peace solely for us’
Calling Rabin a “true statesman who devoted his entire younger life to war and his entire adult life to peace,” Haber said that “Rabin pursued peace [with] his neighbors solely for us.”
“Everyone who sits in the prime minister’s chair has the first and foremost duty to look at the whole picture,” said Haber during the memorial. “Rabin the statesman believed that Israel is just like David, not Goliath, in the Middle East, surrounded by 100 million Muslims here and one billion in the world.”
This, Haber explained, poses two existential threats to Israel that continue to drive the immediacy for peace: a demographic threat and a nuclear threat.
“In another few years, not many in historical terms, in the area between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River, the number of Israeli Palestinians and Arabs will be higher than the number of Jews,” Haber said.
“For the first time since its establishment, the State of Israel will have to decide between the democracy in which it lives today or an apartheid leadership…, which historical experience shows is not in our favor.”
“At that time,” Haber said, “Rabin believed Israel would lose its taste for life and existence as a Jewish and Zionist state.”
As for the nuclear threat, Haber told me, “The picture is not so promising. We face a nuclear threat from several nearby quarters — Iraq, Iran and Libya [and one or two others that he asked me not to mention by name]. The nuclear threat is the most important thing facing Israel. We cannot allow Arab and Muslim countries to have the nuclear bomb.”
“Rabin,” said Haber, “believed that without reconciliation with the Arab world around us, it would be difficult, even virtually impossible, to survive.”
“Many Jews in Israel and in the diaspora today think we can arrange another Entebbe operation” to solve Israel’s problems, Haber said. “They dream day and night about such a thing and want to see it on CNN and other news media. But we are not Goliath that we can do whatever we want.”
That doesn’t mean, said Haber, that Rabin pursued peace blindly, nor was he “willing to pay the price of security. Many people ask what Rabin would have done today, facing what Israel faces. I can allow myself to guess that he would have beaten those who threaten us without mercy, but at the same time still pursue peace.”
In addition to agreeing with Rabin that peace “is a condition for the continuance of Israel’s existence,” Haber reminded those at the memorial that “the years in which Rabin pursued peace were the best years for the State of Israel.” During that time, he said:
• Israel experienced 6 to 7 percent [economic] growth, in contrast to 0 percent today.
• 200 international companies with no prior ties with Israel came to establish themselves and invest in the country.
• Unemployment was reduced by 50 percent.
• The education budget was doubled.
• 25 countries recognized Israel’s existence.
• 80 kings and queens, presidents and prime ministers visited.
• Israeli representations were established in Qatar, Jordan, Morocco, Tunis, Mauritania and Oman.
Most of all, he said, “We began to live differently.”
Haber acknowledges that “the attempt for peace with the Palestinians has not yet succeeded. The State of Israel is perhaps the only country in the world today where there is a clear threat to her survival. We are at the height of the battle for our lives….
“But all the residents in the Middle East are aware that eventually terror will not stop the peace process. It will last one more year, maybe three or five, but the first step toward peace has been taken … and we can only hope that the Middle East will arrive at [its] final station.”
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