Two commemorative events will be held in early November to mark the 19th anniversary of former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination. The first, on Nov. 1, will focus on the issue of peace and the regional peace initiative. The keynote speaker at the rally will be former President Shimon Peres, a Mapai Party (mother party of today's Labor Party) alumnus and Nobel Peace Prize laureate for his contribution to formulating the 1993 Oslo Accord. The main speaker at the second rally, on Nov. 8, which will call for the preservation of democratic values in Israeli society, will be President Reuven (Rubi) Rivlin — a right-winger, a sworn advocate of the revisionist Zionist leader Ze'ev Jabotinsky doctrine and one of the leading opponents of the Oslo Accord.

Although Rabin paid with his life for choosing the route of peace with the Palestinians, the organizers of the two rallies opted to suppress — to the point of completely concealing — the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Both events will be ''stately,'' devoid of criticism for the policies of a government that is pulling Israel in a different, if not opposite, direction to that which Rabin espoused.

In an interview with Mazal Mualem on Oct. 17, Yuval Rabin, the son of the late prime minister and the founder of the Israeli Peace Initiative group that is sponsoring the first event, promised that “at the rally, we’ll be calling on the government to make good on what it says.” In that context, he brought up the speech in which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke about “new opportunities” that had arisen following Operation Protective Edge in the Gaza Strip. After seven years of Netanyahu’s rule in three separate terms in office — the worst seven years Rabin’s vision of peace ever knew — his son, so it seems, believes that the leader of the right wing will agree to give up more than 90% of the West Bank, evacuate 120,000-150,000 settlers and conduct serious negotiations over Jerusalem and the refugee problem. In my view, that is the price of a regional peace agreement, according to all indications.

Rabin’s approach is not unusual. The Yesh Atid Party, some of whose Knesset members consider themselves left-wingers, as well as Justice Minister Tzipi Livni’s Hatnua Party and its Knesset members Minister of Environmental Protection Amir Peretz and Amram Mitzna, formerly of the left-wing flank of the Labor Party, are all deeply embedded in a coalition that nurtures the settlement process and shortchanges the peace process. Neither Finance Minister Yair Lapid nor Tzipi Livni are likely to initiate a government walkout so long as Netanyahu is interested in keeping his coalition intact.