Viewed globally, Rabin was the top political official of a nation-state slightly smaller than Massachusetts with a population (5.2 million) smaller than New York City's. Its military budget for 1994 was $7.2 billion. According to military analysts, Israel possesses up to 300 nuclear weapons. Founded in 1948, it has no written constitution but it does have a republican form of government. Its tortured history includes six wars with its Arab neighbors.
Given this overall perspective, the shock of the assassination, along with a sense of personal loss, has served to unify public sentiment that Rabin's "peace legacy" should be fulfilled. The premise of the assassin-that a peace process begins and ends with one man-was (and is) an illusion. Rabin's martyrdom has actually the effect of reinforcing the Israeli public's and government's determination to continue the process.
But what exactly is this nebulous "peace process"? Does it involve a common law for Jews and Arabs living on a common land and forming a common citizenry? No. It is exactly the opposite: two states with separate citizenries are to be perpetually divided.
But a lasting peace cannot be established without a common law binding a common citizenry. The notion that states can "make peace" among themselves is a deadly fallacy-and can readily be seen as such through even a cursory examination of human history.
Adding to the self-delusion is the marriage of religion and politics. When God is invoked as providing a mandate over a certain piece of territory, the result is predictable: human conflict over whose god is to be recognized and obeyed. On May 6, 1967, Lt. Gen. Yitzhak Rabin's Israeli soldiers reached the Western Wall of the Temple Mount, the most sacred place in Israel. The Six-Day War was over. In tears, Rabbi Zvi Yehudi Kook, who had laid down the ideological framework of religious Zionism, declared that "We are living in the middle of redemption. The kingdom of Israel is being rebuilt. The entire Israel army is holy. It symbolizes the rule of the people on the land." His rulings that the present was a messianic age broke the traditional barrier between religion and the state. Thus was created the basis for the settlements on the West Bank, or biblical Judea and Samaria.
Then under the doctrine of "din rodef - doctrine of the pursuer," formulated by Maimonides, a 12th century Jewish scholar, one could violate the commandment against killing in order to prevent a pursuer from murdering the intended victim. But this doctrine begs the ultimate question: Is there no alternative to violence? Modern states justify "pre-emptive war" and "preventive detention" based on this "violence begets violence" theory. Ultimately, this leads to "mutual assured destruction" or "MAD," the ultimate fear of a bewildered humanity.
According to Prof Gerald Kromer of Var-Llan University's criminality department where Yigal Amir studied, "Yigal Amir acted in light of the conflict with which evvery man who is a religious Zionist has been dealing with since the beginning of the state of israel.." the "moral absolutism" in religious schools, and the uses of violence in the Israeli army. The nation had became the surrogate of religion, the "Golden Calf" of the 20th century.
Killing in the name of the deity thus became justified.
It is time, especially when tragedy unites us, for clear thinking on a vital point-and here I may offend certain sensitivities.
However our feelings may interpret, there is no law against killing a "Jew," or a "Christian," or a "Muslim." The law, both moral and civil, forbids the killing of a fellow human. Civil law, in every society, prohibits murder of any person. And moral, or God's, law has been spelled out in all religions by such as Isaiah, Ezekiel, Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha and Baha'u'llah: "Thou shalt not kill (a fellow human)."
Yitzhak Rabin was murdered by a fellow human, who happened to be a Jew.
And so the crisis of identity now confronts us all full blast in this assassination. This crisis does not pertain to the identity of Jews, Arabs, Christians, or members of any other denomination. These limited, sectarian identities have all long since been firmly established. Instead, the real crisis of identity concerns what it means to be a human. By finding the answer to this perennial question, we can at last ensure peaceful relations among all of us humans.
After all, what do we really mourn in Rabin's sudden passing? A leader of his people? A father and grandfather? A warrior turned peacemaker? Those definitions apply to many of us.
The naked truth is, we are mourning for ourselves, for our bewildered and threatened humanity.
Let's face it, viewed globally and historically, heads of state-Lincoln, Kennedy, Sadat, Ataturk, Gandhi-are dispensable; humanity is not.
Yitzhak Rabin was my junior by one year. His life and death, to me, is a metaphor for the modern nation-state system.
Although this entire system is a mere 200 years old, Israel itself is an even more recent phenomenon. The Jewish state was formed in 1948, three years after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, when only 55 nation-states existed. That was also the year when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly and when I renounced my U.S. nationality and declared myself a world citizen.
Meyer Levin, the writer, implored me back then to go to the newborn state of Israel and somehow turn it into a "world state." "They are making the classic mistake, forming another nation," he told me. "We have been wandering all over the world for 2000 years. Jews are all world citizens."
Levin registered his newborn son as a "World Citizen" at the Paris city hall.
My first trip to Israel did not take place until 1975-and even then I got to see only a tiny piece of the country. I traveled with a World Passport issued by the World Government. At Ben Gurion airport, I was refused entry.
"Garry Davis issues passports to our enemies," declared a right-wing parliamentarian in the Knesset. Another protested, "A terrorist would be a fool to use a Garry Davis passport." After several days at the airport jail, I was put aboard a plane bound for Paris.
My next trip was two years later, this time with a stateless travel document. I experienced no entry problem. On January 17, 1977, after proclaiming the sacred sites of the Holy Land to be "under the protection of World Law," World Citizen Toma Sik and myself displayed the World Government flag near Judaism's Western Wall, Christianity's Church of the Holy Sepulcher and Islam's Mosque of Amar.
"It was a symbolic gesture," we explained, "to show that God's sites are equal and can only be protected by world law, and that there is no protection for any territory under the laws of nations."
During that same trip, Ramallah Mayor Karim Khalif and his counterpart, Mohammad Mulhim from Halhul, signed on as World Citizens with World Passports and pledged that a future Palestinian state would be part of a "world state."
I tried to leave Israel via the Allenby Bridge to Jordan, but the Jordanian frontier police would not let me enter with the World Passport. I was escorted to the middle of the bridge to the very line separating the two countries. Both Jordanian and Israeli frontier police had their guns trained on me. I insisted the line was neutral, a "no-man's land," and belonged to humanity. Finally, the Israeli frontier police forced me aboard a bus commandeered from the Jordanian side, and I ended up in a Jerusalem jail that night. No charge was filed.
After writing to the Israeli President in protest against my "kidnapping," I boarded a plane bound for England. The airport Immigration Chief, frustrated that I carried only my World Passport, warned me never to return to Israel with it.
During the 1977 Camp David meetings between Anwar Sadat, Menachem Begin and President Carter, World Citizen News published Norman Kurland's article calling for "A New Nation in the Middle East," which he dubbed "The Abraham Federation."
On Oct. 30, 1991, when it appeared that the Middle East Peace Conference in Madrid might collapse, I sent the following message to the participants: ".... There is no Middle East peace so long as law concerning all humans does not relate one to one and one to all. For without law, there is anarchy; where there is anarchy, there is distrust, fear and, finally, violent conflict. You who invoke the will of the Messiah yet worship the Golden Calf of nationalism have not yet realized that the Messiah is here now. It is humanity itself...."
I enclosed "Abraham Federation Identity Cards" in the names of PLO Chairman Yasir Arafat, Prime Minister Rabin and King Hussein of Jordan in an August 1, 1994, letter addressed jointly to the three of them. The cards were described as "powerful and practical symbols of unity, equality and shared well-being for your citizens, the ultimate sovereigns bonded historically and spiritually by the ancient patriarch."
Following the Arafat-Rabin White House meeting last year, I wrote them both about the World Syntegrity Project, referring to it as "a revolutionary method whereby diverse peoples are enabled to arrive at consensus from the starting point of but one common objective: how to exercise governance as sovereign world citizens." I added that "the myth that an exclusive nation-state can provide security, well-being and freedom for its citizens is a slavish carry-over from past centuries, from the time before modern technology imploded time and distance, rendering national frontiers obsolete and impossible to defend."
I ask myself, given today's global crises, can the nation-state itself survive, say, beyond 2150? Or even 2125? If humanity survives, it will, indeed must, be transcended. After all, peace, that is, world peace, is indivisible in the nuclear/space age.