Stanley Sheinbaum, Yassar Arafat, Yitzhak Rabin, and the Impossible Dream

ENOUGH! I interviewed Stanley Sheinbaum so long ago I can no longer remember what we talked about. If my amnesia serves me right, I pretty much blew that interview. 

I bring up Sheinbaum because he lived here in Santa Barbara between 1960 and 1970. In that time, he would run for Congress twice as an anti-war Democrat, losing both times to a pro-war Republican Party hack named Charles Teague. In that period, Sheinbaum — once an economics professor at Michigan State University — would emerge as a whistleblower of national renown, exposing how the CIA used academics like himself as high-minded window dressing to sanitize blackbag missions in which the United States functionaries would train South Vietnamese police officers in the indelicate art of “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

Sheinbaum was no dupe and outraged at being played for one. 

In person, Sheinbaum was a bear hug of a man, a virtuoso listener, and an irresistible salesman in the clinch. An old-school progressive out of New York’s secular Jewish tradition, Sheinbaum could bend ears and twist arms. He had a warm laugh and lots of money. People listened. That’s good, because Sheinbaum had a gift for seeing what was possible when nothing seemed to be. 

I mention Sheinbaum now because I am desperate for some credible illusion of hope. I see what Hamas did and I am horrified. These are war crimes, premeditated attacks on civilian non-combatants delivered with an ecstatic cruelty worthy of the Old Testament. Murder charges should be filed. I am also sickened by the escalating reign of terror visited upon the Palestinians and depressed by the alarmingly tepid tones coming out of Joe Biden’s mouth in expressing his all-too-measured compassion for their suffering. 

But chanting lines from the Hamas songbook — “From the River to the Sea” — as some Palestinian supporters have taken to doing — is morally tone-deaf and self-defeating in the extreme. Right now, the focus needs to be on humanitarian solutions; lobbing accusations of genocide back and forth gets us nowhere. 

I mention Sheinbaum because the last time we had a credible illusion for hope with Israel and Palestine was in 1993, and he helped engineer it. That’s when Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) leader Yasser Arafat stood on the White House lawn and shook hands with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin — sworn, lifelong enemies. Sheinbaum played a key role setting in motion the chain of events making that impossible gathering possible. 

 For the first time, Arafat acknowledged the right of Israel to exist as a state. He also renounced the use of terror against Israel. In exchange Rabin recognized Arafat and the PLO as the rightful representatives of the Palestinians. They both pledged to work out the details in subsequent negotiations.

Spoiler alert: It didn’t work out as hoped.

Sheinbaum first jumped to Middle East diplomacy when the first intifada broke out in Gaza in 1987. Sheinbaum went to Israel. He concluded the spontaneous eruption of teenagers throwing rocks and stones at Israeli troops posed as much of a threat to Arafat’s leadership as it did to Israel, whose military response — at the time — was led by Rabin. A military leader in Israel’s wars of 1948, 1967, and 1973, Rabin ordered his troops to break the bones of Palestinians hurling projectiles rather than shoot them. It was, Rabin argued, a proportional response. Hence forth, he would be known as “Bone-Breaker” Rabin. 

Looking ahead, Sheinbaum saw that Palestinians were having a lot more babies than the Israelis and that the notion of “secure borders” was meaningless when nearby enemy states could lob missiles over the border. He was struck by Israeli leaders’ refusal to address the issues giving rise to the intifada; they had zero long-term plans. Peace needed to break out. To help engineer it, Sheinbaum was enlisted by a Swedish foreign minister to head a delegation of American Jews to meet with Arafat in Stockholm in the late ’80s.

 Arafat was wary. Who were these people? None were part of the American Jewish establishment. “We were nobody,” Sheinbaum said. First, they met with four Arafat lieutenants. Finally, they met with Arafat. Sheinbaum’s ace in the hole was a letter he solicited from Colin Powell, a national security advisor to then President Ronald Reagan. It stated the White House would respond favorably if Arafat renounced terrorism and recognized Israel’s right to exist. Arafat agreed.

 Even so, these were painful words for Arafat — whose career had been dedicated to the extermination of Israel. His first effort, Sheinbaum recalled, was so poetic as to be unintelligible. The second got murky and off-track when it came to Israel’s right to exist. But the third try would be the charm.

For his efforts, Sheinbaum was reviled by the American Jewish establishment. Dead pigs were thrown on his driveway. But his efforts eventually paid off. At least in the short term. Despite four years of delay during the first Bush administration. 

President Clinton picked up the ball, and Arafat and Rabin met on the White House lawn on September 13, 1993. Clinton nudged Prime Minister Rabin and the two lifelong enemies shook hands. “Peace, you don’t make with friends,” Rabin later said. A lifelong hawk and military warhorse, Rabin stole the show: “We the soldiers who have returned from battle stained with blood, we who have fought against you, we say to you today in a loud and clear voice: ‘Enough of blood and tears! Enough!’ ”

Two years later, Rabin was shot in the back by an ultra-nationalist, ultra-Orthodox settler who feared Rabin would return West Bank lands to Palestinians. The next year, Benjamin Netanyahu, who had marched in rallies with protestors chanting for Rabin’s death, was elected prime minister.

 Arafat got cold feet, and in 2004, Hamas came to power first by election and then by deploying the same Old Testament brutality on the PLO that it would use on Israeli civilians on October 7. 

“Enough!”