A Legacy Revealed - Dave Kaplan

A Legacy Revealed
Following in the Footsteps of Rabin
A Walking Tour through the Past with daughter Dalia

While Yitzchak Rabin has been gone some 15 years, his ideas, aspirations and commitment to peace live on in a new inter-active museum dedicated to his memory. Prior to an exclusive interview, Dalia Rabin, the former Deputy Minister of Defense and daughter of the late Prime Minister and Nobel Peace Laureate took Hilton Israel Magazine on a tour in the recently opened Museum at the Yitzchak Rabin Center in Tel Aviv.

From Dalia Rabin’s office, one has a panoramic view of Tel Aviv.
More significantly, the people of Tel Aviv - particularly the thousands of commuters who travel each day along Rokach, Tel Aviv’s major boulevard adjacent to the Hayarkon River - cannot miss the imposing structure of the Rabin Center. It projects an amalgam of strength and tranquility, reflecting the twin components of the former Prime Minister’s persona - the soldier at war and the warrior for peace.
“Yes, by its sheer size and elevated position it attracts attention,” begins Dalia Rabin “and that is our purpose. Igniting curiosity, it invites all to visit.” But Dalia is quick to add, “But in other ways it contradicts my father’s personality. As everyone knows, Yitzchak was a modest man with simple tastes and would not have approved of something like this to memorialize his name.”

So how did you resolve these contradictions?
It is for this reason that we did not call the museum - the main attraction for the general public - the Yitzchak Rabin Museum, but the Israel Museum in the Yitzhak Rabin Center.  It is foremost the history of Israel, of how the people successfully forged a democracy under trying circumstances and challenges. Parallel with this, there is the history of my father as it intersects with the history of the State. In other words, it’s a twin track tour.
The last thing we wanted was to create a mausoleum. My father had been a happy man; he loved life and loved his tennis; yes, you saw his rackets and tennis balls in the cabinet.
So we wanted to capture his zest for life in the Center. It had to be a place that welcomes everyone, irrespective of their politics, culture or religion - a meeting place, where people can learn, exchange ideas, grapple with issues and simply enjoy each other’s company. If this is achieved, I believe my father would be pleased.

How did you achieve the balance between the parallel histories of man and State?
The museum is built in a downward spiral - in part like the Guggenheim Museum in New York - as it presents two parallel narratives - the biography of my father and the history of modern Israeli. It works well. Following an inner path, you are presented the personal and public life story of Yitzchak, while all along this route, there are detours into alcoves where you are confronted with the historical turning points in the country’s development, grappling with its conflicts, social challenges and dilemmas.
Each major milestone in the nation’s history involved costs, where difficult decisions had to be made and prices paid.

Can you provide some examples?
So many. If in the early stages of the State the country was enjoying a much needed influx of new immigrants, it also brought with it unavoidable social and economic problems.
While we had strongly-motivated groups fighting in the War of Independence, they were militarily and ideologically independent and a threat to national unity. Ben Gurion had to make tough decisions which my father had to execute, notably the Altalena affair, where Jew fired on Jew. These were classic and heart wrenching dilemmas.
And then, for the sake of peace with Egypt, our most formidable enemy, our price was to leave the Sinai. You will see in the museum’s movies and interviews, the sad faces and hear the cries of Jews having to leave their homes in Yamit and other settlements there. All tough choices but necessary. These were all existential issues.


What are your expectations of the museum having an impact on future generations?
To impact on the future, we need to reach today’s young generation. We believe that our initiative to ensure every schoolchild in Israel should visit the museum and hopefully thereafter attend our workshops will help address some of the pressing issues confronting our society.
We are all concerned about the increased level of violence, a thread, I believe, traceable to the night of the assassination. People woke up the next day to a new reality they were not prepared for. Unfortunately the shock was never dealt with by the leadership of all political parties at the time and that has impacted on our culture. When you have tensions that are not addressed, when your minorities do not have adequate platforms to express their ideas and beliefs, it leads to frustration. Seeking an outlet, this pent up frustration can lead to violence.
When youngsters walk through this museum they will have a better understanding of their history and the disparate components of this society. Through our workshops we plan to facilitate ways to work through all the issues.

Most museums generally chronicle the past; this museum seems have one eye on the past the other on the future?
We present the past in a way that should lead Israel to a better future. And this was actually my father’s vision - his agenda. He wanted to make peace with all our neighbors because he realized it would release the potential to make this place a wonderful country. Israel is a wonderful country, but it could be even better. His main concern was improving the quality of life. This is why during his second term as prime minister he changed the order of priorities increasing substantially the budgets for education and infrastructure. You may recall that during his time as PM, our national growth increased and unemployment declined.
And from a personal point of view, there are always good things still happening that keep him so alive for me.

What do you mean?
Well, when I was Deputy Minister of Defense, I flew down to Eilat for the official opening of a school named after my father. At the ceremony the mayor took me aside - and he was from the Likud Party - and said to me, “You know Dalia, when I was in charge of education in Eilat in the early 1990s at the same time your father was Prime Minister, he pushed through a budget that enabled us to open not one, but three new schools here - the Yigal Alon, the Menachem Begin and now today the Yitzhak Rabin.”
Dad’s center of gravity was not Tel Aviv and Jerusalem - it was the whole country. This is why he pushed for using the loan guarantees that came in with the first Bush administration to improve the country’s road infrastructure.

You mean like the ‘Kvish 6’ named today the Yitzchak Rabin Highway?
Absolutely. Our cross-Israel Highway, which so many people initially opposed and which he fought so strenuously for, opened up the country to the north and the south. We have a big section of this in the museum, where you will see video interviews of thankful motorists relating how long it used to take them to get to work before and after this highway and other major road works.

From tarred roads to the road he sought for peace - what made him shift direction so dramatically with the Oslo peace process?
Look, for many years he was trying to deal with the local Palestinian leadership in the West Bank. He set up a forum, when they used to meet in his office on Friday mornings, but he realized that no sooner had they returned to their offices in Ramallah, they would call the guy in Tunis who called the shots.
So he reasoned, rather than talk to Tunis via Ramallah, why not talk directly to the guy in Tunis. If he is so strong, respected and charismatic, maybe he is the one who can deliver the goods and bring peace and so began the dialogue between my father and Yasser Arafat.

Nearing the end of the interview, Dalia concludes that the ‘journey’ through the museum, begins on her father’s last night, “November the 4th 1995, when he was addressing over 100,000 people on what was then called The Kings of Israel Square. As if standing in the square, you will hear his speech in sensu-sound and his appeal to the People of Israel to give peace a chance. The atmosphere pulsates with screaming crowds, my parents smiling. These were moments of joy and hope and my dad had joined in the singing and was hugging Aviv Geffen.”(Local popular vocalist). 
“Two hours or so later, you end the tour in the memorial room, where through the blur of water, you will read:
“I, military ID 30743, Yitzchak Rabin, retired general in the IFF, consider myself to be in the army of peace.”
“This Center and its museum,” says Dalia, “will continue his work in pursuing his vision.”

Down the Road
Leaving the museum, this writer could not fail to think back to a meeting he attended in the Prime Minister’s office in 1995 with a delegation of South Africans. Rabin was speaking about the situation in Israel and suddenly he paused and asked, “Do you know what still excites me?”
The question was rhetorical, so no-one ventured an answer, but for sure, most were thinking, “What could still excite a guy who was in his second term of Prime Minister, had been Minister of Defense, Ambassador to the USA, Chief of Staff and participated in most of the major national events, from all the wars to the Entebbe Raid?”
“What’s left?” I thought at the time.
Rabin answered: “Waking up on mornings, knowing that I would be cutting a ribbon that day opening a new stretch of road, a bridge or an underpass.”
Only on the drive back from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv, did I understand. It was not so much the short “stretch of road, bridge or underpass” where Rabin was cutting the ribbon that was so significant -  it was what potentially lay ‘down the road’. The ‘road, bridge and underpass’ signified to the Prime Minister easy access to a better future - for they would lead to expansion - new towns, new factories and new lives. 
This museum captures the essence of the man, his past and his nation’s future.


In a Box

What If……
At each station along the ‘national-track’ of the tour there are turning points, at times apocalyptic moments in Israel’s history, where visitors cannot resist asking “what if?” 
- What if Rommel’s African Corp had not lost the Battle of El Alamein in 1942, leaving the Germans free to venture northwards to Palestine?
- What if David Ben Gurion had not demanded the unification of ideologically diverse Jewish armed forces during the War of Independence to forge a national army?
- What if Israel had not taken out the Egyptian Air Force in the opening round of the Six Day War?
- What if Prime Minister Menachem Begin had not embraced the peace process with Anwar Sadat of Egypt or authorized the surprise bombing of the nuclear facility in Iraq in 1982?
…and then on the Rabin biographical track there was a poignant moment listening to a recording of Yitzchak Rabin relating his encounter with Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, when he approached the Prime Minister to consider him for the position of Israeli Ambassador to the USA after completing his service as Chief of Staff.
“What; hold me down before I fall off the chair? Yitzchak, you really think you are cut out for the Washington cocktail circuit? You?” 
 “Eshkol, being ambassador is not about cocktails; there are essential matters on hand and I am asking you for this opportunity.”
Visitors are left to surmise what would have happened had Eshkol turned Rabin down. How would history have been different?
What if?
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Box 2

About the Museum
While the recommendation is no less than an hour-and-a-half to two hours to tour, this writer strongly suggest longer; with over 180 documentary films and 1500 still photographs and hundreds of memorabilia, there is so much to see and absorb. There is a pleasant restaurant, so one is free to take time out from such an enriching tour and enjoy some refreshment.
Visitors receive audio devises allowing the individual to tour at his or her own pace. There are guided tours in English and Hebrew recommended for groups of students and soldiers as well as families and groups from abroad.
For information call the museum at 03- 745 3313 or 03- 745 3319
Email: Order1@rabincenter.org.il or Order2@rabincenter.org.il