Assassinations have surely changed the course of history.
I saw it happen when an assassin targeted Yitzhak Rabin in Israel — slaying the prime minister and killing the peace process. In the aftermath, the war against peace remains bloodier than ever.
It happened again when former Lebanese prime minister Rafic Hariri’s motorcade was blown up by a massive bomb planted by Hezbollah’s terrorist network. All these years later, Lebanon remains almost ungovernable — at war with itself, not just external enemies.
How will the attempted assassination of Donald Trump affect the U.S. presidential campaign?
We don’t know yet, because no one can predict the future. Only when we look back at the history of this high stakes election will we know whether a failed shooting blew it all up.
Perhaps President Joe Biden was already predestined to lose the vote, after losing so badly in the first debate. Possibly a wave of sympathy and solidarity will push Trump over the top in swing states.
We won’t know until next November. But another assassination, on another November day decades ago in Israel, had an undeniable effect.
I was at a dinner party with fellow foreign correspondents, just a few months after starting my tour in the Middle East, when suddenly our pagers started going off. Hearing that Rabin had been shot at a political rally in Tel Aviv, we bolted from the table and barrelled down the highway to the hospital.
I arrived just in time to hear he’d been pronounced dead. The Israeli-Palestinian peace process has been moribund ever since, the birth of a two-state solution delayed for decades since his death.
Had Rabin lived, had he survived as Trump did this week, he might have continued to shepherd the Oslo Accords — stressing both sovereignty and security for two peoples. Instead, it all unravelled.
After Shimon Peres succeeded him as prime minister, Hamas launched a brutal bombing campaign while Hezbollah launched a war from the north. Lacking Rabin’s military background and security credentials, Peres seemed powerless to rally Israelis.
Without the assassination, without the two-pronged attacks from Hamas and Hezbollah, Benjamin Netanyahu might never have become prime minister. But Rabin died and Netanyahu ultimately came to power.
A decade later, Lebanon’s Hariri was killed on orders of Hezbollah, led by Hassan Nasrallah. The country has never been the same since, falling into a debt spiral and democracy deficit that have rendered it a failed state, an ungovernable colony of Hezbollah’s patrons in Iran.
I interviewed both Netanyahu and Nasrallah in the late 1990s, but I could never have anticipated that all these years later they’d both still be in power — while the legacies of Rabin and Hariri would be forgotten so fast.
That’s how things turn out when an assassination works out. To be sure, there are no direct analogies to the failed attempt on Trump — he was targeted by a registered Republican whose motives remain unclear; Rabin was slain by an Israeli Jew who opposed the peace process.
But the weekend incident may well seal his success in the presidential campaign. The arc of history is easy to upend, even if the trend is difficult to discern in advance.
In retrospect, Netanyahu owes his political rise to Rabin’s death. A few years from now, historians may cite a direct link between the attempt on Trump’s life and his political reincarnation.
Past U.S. presidents have cheated death and enjoyed political revivals (Ronald Reagan). Others have survived attempted shootings only to go down to defeat (Gerald Ford).
The difference between then and now is that in the time of Trump, times have changed. And he has changed the tenor of our times.
The iconic image of Trump’s upraised fist against the backdrop of an American flag — choreographed after the fusillade by the master himself — was transmitted in real time and transmuted online into a mystical and spiritual revelation by those who revere him. The strength projected by Trump in that scene (after first worrying about his missing shoes on an open mic) is both unprecedented and unpredictable in a time of virality and virility.
The great weakness of democracy is that people so often love a strongman. Trump, like Netanyahu, projects strength and steadfastness — as if all the world’s problems are always resolved through uncompromising and unyielding brinkmanship (imagine either of these leaders during the Cuban missile crisis).
An assassination changed Israel and another one changed Lebanon. Will an attempted assassination change America?
We will know soon enough. The only certainty is that an event that might have been forgotten in an earlier era will be remembered and memorialized in the online era.
