Let's revisit Benjamin Netanyahu's rise to political power in Israel and its origins in the murder, 23 years ago, of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. /1

Netanyahu first became chairman of the Likud Party in 1993, after the resignation of defeated former PM Yitzhak Shamir. Netanyahu easily defeated three internal rivals in an ominously nasty campaign. He then became the opposition leader. /2

Netanyahu spent his first two years as opposition leader viciously inciting against Rabin, the democratically chosen Prime Minister, hawkish labor party leader and former army chief of staff, who was elected in 1992 and soon began a historic peace process with the PLO. /3

The 73 year-old Rabin was no innocent and knew a thing or two about dirty politics, but he had never seen anything quite like Netanyahu: a young, energetic liar, lacking basic ethics, who had learned directly from extreme right-wing Americans how to incite, cheat, and lie. /4

Netanyahu was not the only one to incite against Rabin; the Israeli right as a whole (religious and secular) made similar arguments: that Rabin was relying on Arab-Israeli support for concessions made in the peace negotiations, and thus his decisions were illegitimate. /5

In nasty right-wing demonstrations, people called Rabin a traitor, a murderer, a Nazi, and openly called for his murder. In one notorious such demonstration, in Jerusalem, Netanyahu spoke to the crowd (from a balcony!) and accused Rabin of ignoring the people's wishes. /6

Rabin reacted to all the incitement against him with understandable anger and it probably prodded him to speed up the Oslo Process with the PLO in the few months before he was murdered, and to define himself, for the first time, as the leader of the Israeli "Peace Camp". /7

After months of this incitement, Rabin was shot and killed on November 4, 1995, at the end of a gathering in support of peace, in Tel Aviv, by a radical young nationalist, Yigal Amir. Rabin had made a speech in which he talked about what he was willing to do to achieve peace./8

Less than one year after the murder, elections were held and Netanyahu defeated Shimon Peres. One of the slogans in his campaign was "Netanyahu is good for the Jews" - a continuation of the anti-Rabin accusation that decisions relying on Arab voters support were illegitimate. /9

Since then Netanyahu has dominated Israeli politics. He's been elected four times and has grown increasingly autocratic and corrupt. There's a link between the destruction of Israel's (flawed) democracy under Netanyahu today and the circumstances of his arrival to power. /10

When he incited against Rabin, he showed his hatred of true democracy, his view of the left as illegitimate, and his bad-faith, racist conception of the country's politics. What is happening today in Israel is merely a natural sequel to what occurred in 1995 and 1996. /END