Is Jared Kushner the key to peace in Karabakh?

Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin trotted down the steps of Tel Aviv’s City Hall one November evening in 1995 when a gunman discharged three rounds from a concealed Beretta 84F. The PM had just concluded a rousing speech at a peace rally in support for the Oslo Accords, which he had begrudgingly signed along with an equally apprehensive Yasser Arafat less than six weeks earlier. The nearby Kings of Israel Square (now Rabin Square) was still teeming with people when Rabin collapsed onto the ground, just feet away from his car. Forty minutes later, he would be pronounced dead. From his pocket, the doctors pulled out a blood-soaked sheet of paper inscribed with the lyrics of the popular Israeli song “Shir LaShalom” (Song for Peace).

His assassin, the radical-Zionist Yigal Amir, was immediately apprehended while still grasping  the murder weapon. He later told investigators that he had acted on “the orders of God.” In the weeks preceding the murder, religious conservatives brandishing posters depicting Rabin in a Nazi SS uniform, and Zionist hardliners chanting “Rabin is a traitor” marched in a series of rallies across the country led by a certain Benjamin Netanyahu. Opponents of the Oslo Accords denounced the peace plan as a capitulation to Israel’s enemies, and the Israel Defense Forces’ unilateral withdrawal from “occupied territories” a heresy which denied the Jewish people’s “right to biblical lands.” In court, the deeply religious Amir later testified, “I acted according to din rodef.”(a death sentence issued under rabbinic law)