politics and vowing to defeat Labor, Bibi had seized on Oslo I to accuse Rabin

politics and vowing to defeat Labor, Bibi had seized on Oslo I to accuse Rabin of “surrendering” to Arafat, and by extension to Hamas terrorism. I couldn’t sleep the night before the cabinet meeting. I had no desire to be disloyal to Yitzhak. I certainly didn’t want to add to the pressures on him, much less add further impetus to Bibi’s rhetorical onslaughts. But the more I thought of it, the less I could see the point of entering politics if I wasn’t going to vote with my conscience. The cabinet meeting lasted for hours. It was near the end that I spoke, calmly and in detail, about my reservations. Many of the ministers seemed barely to be listening. They’d long since made up their minds. But when I’d finished, two ministers passed me notes. Both said the same thing: Ehud, don’t do anything crazy. Don’t vote against it. So I didn’t. But I couldn’t vote for it either. I abstained. Rabin was bitterly upset. He didn’t tell me directly. But when the meeting broke up, his longtime political aide, Eitan Haber, took me aside to tell me how that what I’d done was “terrible”. Giora Einy came to see me the next day, after Rabin had phoned him in a mix of anger and disbelief. “What is this,” he’d asked Giora. “The first big vote, and Barak abstains?” It wasn’t until a few weeks later that Rabin and I spoke alone, over a beer in his office. He didn’t raise the question of the vote. So I did. “Yitzhak, I understand it’s caused you pain,” I said. “But I think you understand I was acting out of what is genuinely my belief and my position.” I asked him why, unlike the other ministers, he hadn’t passed me a note before we’d cast our votes. “Ehud,” he said, “I never write requests or orders on how to vote. Ministers must vote according to their conscience.” He didn’t mean what I’d done was right. He meant my conscience should have told me, given the importance of the issue, to vote yes. The tension between us did ease somewhat in the weeks ahead. But the tension around us escalated after the cabinet vote. Opinion polls showed the country split down the middle. Settlement leaders and extremist rabbis launched a campaign against the legitimacy of the government, and of Rabin as Prime Minister. Right-wing religious leaders issued a decree rejecting the planned redeployments on the West Bank — “the evacuation of bases and their transfer to the Gentiles” — as biblically prohibited. A new group called Zu Aritzenu organized a campaign of civil disobedience to try to bring the government down. The sheer venom hit home during a pair of events I attended with Rabin, to award of the status of “city” to towns which had crossed the required threshold in population and economic activity. By tradition, this was marked by a 276 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028124