“It would be a mistake to conclude that Israelis aren’t interested in peace with the Palestinians based solely on the number of people that came here. This system of counting heads is anachronistic.” Knesset member Nitzan Horowitz of the Meretz Party said on Nov. 1, when journalists asked for his take on the number of people who attended the annual memorial for late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
The conversation with Horowitz took place in Tel Aviv's Rabin Square. In the background, former President Shimon Peres was addressing a crowd of 12,000 people, who had come to attend the memorial demonstration. The reporters’ questions expressed a need to assess the state of Israel’s peace camp today. Does it even exist anymore, 19 years after those three shots were fired in the square assassinating Rabin, after the second intifada and after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has spent so many years in office? Was 12,000 too small a crowd, especially when compared to the hundreds of thousands who protested the cost of living in the summer of 2011?
