Bill Clinton: Rabin Would Have Approved of Chelsea Marrying a Jew
If the Israelis and Palestinians cut a peace deal, Syria likely would ally itself with the West over Iran, and Lebanon would be truly independent, Bill Clinton said.
The former president also warned that Israel will need friends in the region for a future when attacks from Gaza are conducted not with crude, inaccurate rockets but with rockets that inevitably will make use of technological advances to stage GPS-like precision attacks.
Clinton spoke at a memorial service in New York on Thursday aboard the U.S.S. Intrepid commemorating the 15th anniversary of the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. The late prime minister recognized early on that demographics in the Holy Land made a Palestinian state necessary to preserve Israel’s democratic and Jewish character, Clinton said.
Calling the day Rabin was shot “one of the saddest days of my life,” Clinton also shared personal remembrances of Rabin, who was killed on the night of Nov. 4, 1995 after a peace rally in Tel Aviv.
Clinton said he thinks of Rabin all the time, including five minutes before he walked down the aisle at the wedding of his daughter, Chelsea, to Marc Mezvinsky, her longtime Jewish boyfriend. Clinton said he imagined having a conversation with Rabin, who would have said Clinton finally got something right by having his daughter marry a Jewish guy.
Recalling the moments before the famous White House lawn handshake in 1993 between Rabin and Yasser Arafat, Clinton quoted Rabin as saying, “I’ll shake his hand as long as I don’t have to kiss him.”
It’s our birthday and we’re still celebrating!
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news.
This week we celebrate 129 years of the Forward. We’re proud of our origins as a Yiddish print publication serving Jewish immigrants. And we’re just as proud of what we’ve become today: A trusted source of Jewish news and opinion, available digitally to anyone in the world without paywalls or subscriptions.
We’ve helped five generations of American Jews make sense of the news and the world around them — and we aren’t slowing down any time soon.
As a nonprofit newsroom, reader donations make it possible for us to do this work. Support independent, agenda-free Jewish journalism and our board will match your gift in honor of our birthday!
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
