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By Jennifer Thompson The proclamations by governments and the media of former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin as a courageous "peacemaker" are not surprising given his Nobel peace prize, shared with his replacement, Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, and PLO Chairman Yassar Arafat. However the accolades for Rabin are based on a misleading view of his actions — both in the Middle East peace process and his history as a soldier-politician. In July 1948, Rabin commanded the Israeli force which captured the towns of Lydda and Ramleh south east of Tel Aviv. With the tacit agreement of Israel's Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, Rabin ordered the immediate expulsion of the 50,000 Arab inhabitants. Many died as they climbed towards the hill town of Ramallah in the mid-summer heat. As Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) Rabin prepared Israel for the 1967 war against Syria, Jordan and Egypt. During that war he ordered the total destruction of three villages, Imwas, Beit Nuba and Yalu in the Latrun area of the West Bank, driving out 9000 Palestinians. In 1987 when the Palestinian intifada began, he instructed Israeli soldiers to "break the bones" of school children who threw rocks at them. Since 1992 Rabin has been enforcing the US model for peace between Israel and Palestinians by cementing Israeli colonisation of Jerusalem and installing neo-colonial control over a future Palestinian state. Rabin was a part of the ideological wing of the Zionist colonial movement represented by the Israeli Labour Party. Zionism historically sought to fit its plans for a Jewish homeland in Palestine with those of the imperialist powers, chiefly Britain, by dispossessing the Palestinian people who had lived there for centuries. Labour remains committed to maintenance of a militarily strong Jewish state allied with the policies of US imperialism in the region. The Rabin Labour government was elected in 1992 on the popular slogan of "Land for Peace". Their plan for a settlement with the Palestinians — presently favoured by dominant 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ of Israeli capital and the US — is for the establishment of limited Palestinian self-rule on some of the occupied territories, which would be handed back by Israel. The peace "process" was accurately described by Yoav Peled in the August-September Middle East Report as decolonisation — a transition from direct colonial rule of the territories to a more indirect neo-colonial rule, primarily through economic domination. Settler groups' activity has played an important part in Labour's strategy in the negotiations process. Labor's policy of nurturing the settler movements and relative indifference to their methods legitimised the movements part in Israeli political life and set the stage for their violent rejection of the return of occupied territories to the Palestinians. In the October 18, 1990 Labour party paper Davar, Rabin responded to Likud (Israel's main conservative party) boasts of their expansion of settlements: "For all its faults, Labor has done more and remains capable of doing more [in expanding Jewish settlements] than Likud ... We have never talked about Jerusalem. We have just made it a fait accompli. It was we who built the suburbs [in East Jerusalem and its West Bank surrounds]. The Americans didn't say a word because we built these suburbs cleverly." This policy was continued after the signing of the 1993 accord with the PLO. In 1992, Rabin announced Israel was terminating government financial support to settlers. US President George Bush then provided Israel with US$10 billion in government loan guarantees which have since been used to expand the settlements. East Jerusalem and surrounding areas were excluded from the so-called "freeze" on new settlement construction, and West Bank settlements were "expanded". The result has been increased confiscation of Palestinian land and destruction of homes and highways for settlements. The respected peace and human rights activist Israel Shahak has pointed out the relationship between the settlers and Labour. In an article in the February/March 1994 Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Shahak documents the relentless violent attacks by settlers on Palestinians in the Hebron area. The IDF soldiers ignore the violence or even join in. Shahak concludes that "Rabin's real policy is to support the settlements in order to guarantee continued Israeli domination of the territories. To pursue that policy, Rabin needs to bestow favours upon religious settlers, because they alone are willing to settle in places like Hebron." The settler movements began after the 1967 conquest, but many were not religious. In November 1974, Rabin, then prime minister, announced that it was government policy to increase the population of the settlement in the Golan Heights and the Jordan Valley as a line of defence in war. In January 1977, he said, "There is a challenge here for all in the settlement movement who want to review, expand and establish defensible borders for the State of Israel". Some of the most ideologically driven have been the religious settlements in and around the West Bank city of Hebron. The first Israeli religious settlement in Hebron, Kiryat Arba, was established in April 1968 by 73 Israelis lead by Rabbis Moshe Levinger and Eleazer Waldman. Levinger and Waldman, still in Hebron and leaders of the right-wing settler movement Gush Emunin (Bloc of the Faithful), have, along with other Jewish fundamentalists, linked the prophesied "redemption process" culminating in the "coming of the messiah" with the settlement of the Jewish people in its "ancient homeland". The settler movement has also been represented in proto-fascist parties like Kach, lead by Meir Kahane until he was shot in 1990. Kahane had been an FBI operative prior to moving to Israel, where he founded Kach and became their sole parliamentary member. Kahane had attracted notoriety with his racist remarks, resulting in his banning from the Knesset in 1988. The Kach and Kahana Hai (Kahane Lives) parties were banned by Israel in 1994, but many of the militant members had regrouped in the Eyal group, linked with Rabin's assassin. Eyal, and a related underground group, Sword of David, based in the Hebron settlements have claimed responsibility for many recent attacks on Hebron's Palestinians. A new settler group was formed in July to "save the state of Israel" by concerted actions blocking all main highways in the West Bank, erecting "dozens of outpost settlements commanding the highways" and calling on supporters in Israel to join in actions blocking internal highways. Some prominent members of Likud and their small right-wing coalition partners and religious settlers groups advocate the large-scale removal — "transfer" — of Palestinians from the territories. Before Rabin's assassination Likud had been running a campaign against Labour which portrayed continuing negotiations with the PLO as a historical betrayal of Eretz Yisrael — a greater Israel. Likud leader Bibi Netanyahu had seized on the language and visibility of the right-wing religious settler movement's direct resistance to any land hand-over to the Palestinians. Rabin's murder by a member of the religious right-wing linked with the settler movement is evidence that the movement has overstepped the bounds of the role Labour envisaged for them, but is unlikely to mean a respite for Palestinians from their presence.