Word: arabism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...BLOOD OF MARTYRS HAS fertilized political and religious causes for thousands of years. So too in the case of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. His murder by an anti-Arab Jewish fanatic gave immediate new life to the cause of peace with Israel's Palestinian and Arab neighbors that Rabin had determinedly pushed...
...funeral and mourned him as a martyr to peace. King Hussein of Jordan and President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, the two countries that have signed peace treaties with Israel, delivered eulogies. Government ministers from Morocco and the Persian Gulf emirates of Oman and Qatar attended too, even though these Arab states have no diplomatic relations with Israel. The generous sprinkling of red-checkered kaffiyehs and flowing Arab robes among the black mourning wear of Jews gave Israelis watching the funeral on TV visual proof of how far Rabin had progressed in ending Israel's isolation from its neighbors...
...shocking assassination of the Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on November 4 is undoubtedly a huge loss to Israel, the Jewish community and the peace process in general. Rabin was not only an initiator and an architect of the ongoing peace process with Palestinians and other Arab countries, but also instrumental in overcoming many of the current domestic obstacles facing both Israelis and Palestinians as they march in the direction of peace. I was hardly surprised when the New York Times and the Boston Globe quickly alerted their readers in front-page articles to the parallels between the assassination...
Despite the apparent parallels, however, one should realize that the political circumstances surrounding Rabin's death are extremely different from the early 1980's when Sadat was assassinated: Sadat's historical visit to Jerusalem followed by the Camp David Accords in 1979 visibly shocked the Arab peoples who still desperately wanted to believe in Nasserist slogans calling for Pan-Arabian and the destruction of the Jewish state. Admittedly, Sadat's peace initiative had tremendous historical as well as symbolic value, but it was never intended to transcend the realm of symbolism. Sadat was celebrated as a hero in the West...
Rabin's tragic death, however, should be viewed from a different perspective: it should be regarded as a signal that both Arabs and Israelis are taking the peace process seriously for the first time since the beginning of the Arab-Israeli conflict. As paradoxical as this sounds, it is true: the inter-Arab rivalry, which erupted most recently in the Middle East Economic Summit in Amman last week when Egyptian Foreign Minister Amr Mousse warned Arab countries against "scurrying after" normalization with Israel only to be interrupted by King Hussein, who fired back that the "scurrying" is only to catch...