Have Israelis forgotten that Rabin was killed over politics?
After years of sidelining the fact that Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's assassination was politically motivated, his son Yuval Rabin stands up and denounces the political incitement that led to the murder.
At a ceremony beside Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's grave to mark the 22nd anniversary of his assassination, Rabin's son, Yuval Rabin, launched a stinging attack against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Yuval Rabin's remarks were yet another attempt to bring discussion of the assassination back to the political arena, after years in which various elements in Israeli society tried to focus the commemorative narrative on such neutral and artificial terms as "tolerance" and "unity."
Rabin once attempted to get closer to Netanyahu to win his support for various diplomatic initiatives. It is possible that Rabin has since come to the conclusion that his own actions also helped obfuscate the memory of his father's assassination and the causes that led to it.
On Nov. 1, he used the only public forum left to him — his speech at the memorial service for his father — to remind everyone that the assassination was politically motivated and that it was preceded by uninhibited incitement. As he pointed out, 22 years later, "The mechanism of incitement and divisiveness continues to strike at us, and anyone who thinks otherwise is branded a traitor." Rabin didn't mention Netanyahu by name. Nevertheless, his stinging arrows were clearly hurled at the man who served as opposition chairman head of the Likud at the time of the assassination, and who has been accused ever since of failing to rein in the incitement against Yitzhak Rabin, when it reached a frenzied pitch among the right following the Oslo Accord.
Yuval Rabin recalled that his father was also criticized by the Supreme Court and extra-parliamentary organizations (for his role as defense minister during the first intifada). Nor did Yitzhak Rabin receive preferential treatment from the media. Nevertheless, "He did nothing to silence people, he did not try to evade his responsibility and he did not whine about it. Even his harshest critics found his door open, when they approached him. … He was the prime minister of everyone," Yuval Rabin said.
