Rabin's real legacy - Democratic Underground

GabysPoppy

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Sun Nov-02-03 12:34 PM
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Rabin's real legacy

This article written by my friend, David Kriss, is an advanced copy which he will be posting in a few days. I have full permission from him to post his entire words. I will post a link from a prior column of his. All of his archived articles and future commentaties can be reached with this link.

/www.totallyjewish.com/news/israeldiary/?disp_feature=2xybMi

Last Saturday night the 8th memorial ceremony for Yitzhak Rabin was held in Rabin Square in Tel Aviv. I didn’t go.

For several years I’ve had the feeling that the annual ceremony was missing the mark. The prescient words in his last speech ( ..You have proved that the people want peace and oppose violence which erodes the foundations of democracy.”) , the formal expressions of grief and slogans which now ‘The Rabin Legacy’ (‘We Won’t Forget and We Won’t Forgive’; ‘We Will Follow His Path’) were not getting through to the general public. The ceremony, attended mainly by polite ashkenazi, secular liberals had turned into the ritual of a shrinking tribe, covered fleetingly by the media, forgotten the next day

Perhaps I was also reluctant to submit to the emotional turbulence that the ceremony generates. Because if there is one single event in this country’s history that leads grown men to cry it is the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. What brings on the tears is not just the loss of Rabin the man – that gruff, impeccably honest, soldier-leader. Nor are tears shed only because Israel is so rent apart that it cannot solve its internal disputes without violence. Beyond all that, the tears fall in rage and frustration over the loss of our present and our future. For when the Jewish assassin Yigal Amir gunned down Yithak Rabin the man, he also murdered the hope that Yitzhak Rabin represented. Rabin’s assassination altered the course of history. Had he been alive today we might be inhabiting a brighter place than this dark tunnel of violence and intransigence. I didn’t want to have to deal with all that on a balmy Saturday night.

But this year’s ceremony was different. First, a day before it began, vandals spray-painted crude swastikas on the black memorial stones which mark the assassination spot outside Tel Aviv Municipality. They also painted ‘Kahana was right’ on his picture. Then a man was seen on TV spitting on Rabin’s memorial. The outrage that this sparked brought about 100,000 people into Rabin Square.

This year the ceremony also dropped the pretense of an event supposed to unite all Israelis and became what Ha’aretz called, “the biggest left wing demonstration held in years”. Rabin’s daughter, Dalia Rabin-Pelosoff and Labour leader Shimon Peres, among others, made passionate political speeches attacking the government. Is it a shame that an event whose original goal was to mobilise all political strands against political violence has been turned into a political demonstration? Perhaps. But the idea that by merely condemning the assassination we would be able to bridge gaps in the political discourse was in any case illusory.

Everything concerning Rabin’s assassination was and is overtly political. Yigal Amir assassinated Rabin because of what Rabin stood for - a pragmatic strategy for peace which would set permanent borders and establish Israel firmly as a western democracy based on the rule of law. Therefore, while broad swathes of Israeli society mourn his loss, equally broad swathes remain emotionally unmoved by the assassination or pay lip service to Rabin’s memory while steadily undermining his real legacy.

If Rabin was looking down on the square that bears his name, the politically charged atmosphere would have cheered him far more than any number of maudlin songs and memorial candles. Eight years after his death, maybe, just maybe, his presence is being felt again.