Looks Like My Legacy Is People Arguing About My Legacy

By Yitzhak Rabin

Legacies are complicated things. The very idea that the teachings to be gleaned from the departed can be captured in a succinct fashion contradicts the complexity and nuance of his life and the lessons to draw from it, but I will say this: my legacy appears to be people fighting over who gets to define my legacy.

I understand my life and political career were complicated. I spent decades in the military and several more in government, and was instrumental in several defining moments of Israeli history: opening the road to Jerusalem in 1948; the 1976 Entebbe raid; the Oslo Accords. Summing up such a storied life and distilling it into a coherent legacy might lie beyond our capacity as humans, so it is with some regret that I acknowledge that what I have bequeathed to society is fierce disagreement over what I have bequeathed to society.

Chief among those who claim to hold my legacy are various political allies and associates. Naturally, since my career spanned many years, those alliances and associations shifted a number of times, and therefore my “authentic” legacy remains elusive. Political exigencies sometimes trump ideological considerations, and the actors in the drama often themselves remain unaware of where the differences between the two lie. What I’m saying is, it’s no surprise that people are arguing about what I was all about.

There are also members of ideological camps at odds with what they think I represented, most notably the groups opposed to the entire Oslo framework and the relinquishing of control over portions of Judea and Samaria. Some of these partisans trumpet statements of mine that “there will never be a Palestinian state” and other pieces of rhetoric. Of course I said those things. I also said lots of other things that contradict one another. It’s called politics. It’s called life. A guy is allowed to change his mind as many times as he sees fit. But that also means people with axes to grind co-opting my words and a muddling of what I would most want to impart to the next generation, which, let’s face it, looks a heck of a lot like a perpetual squabble over what I would most want to impart to the next generation.

This is hardly a new phenomenon, and it reveals more about the egos and assumptions of the participants in it than it does about my legacy per se, which is a good thing: my legacy apparently involves talk of my legacy being invoked in support of myriad mutually exclusive worldviews.

Hey, Jesus? I feel you, bro.