Labor Party leader Isaac Herzog was right in his quick decision to assume responsibility for the annual memorial event marking the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995. It was a necessary move for his party, which has lost its way over the years and in many ways abandoned the legacy of its fallen leader.

On Oct. 30 it was published that this would be the first time that there would be no large annual gathering to mark Rabin's assassination. The event, which has always taken place in the Tel Aviv square that now bears Rabin's name, was canceled due to lack of funding. For the first 15 years, the Rabin Center produced the event. For the past five years, the National Association of Youth Movements took over. These latter events were apolitical in tone. Certain politicians were even excluded to ensure that the assassination was transformed into a collective memory that both left and right could live with.

Organizers were forced to walk between raindrops in their efforts to be politically correct. This was especially true in those years in which the diplomatic process with the Palestinians, a mainstay of Rabin's legacy, became a source of frustration for large swaths of the population, and as the Labor Party, Rabin's political home, decreased in strength and influence.

As the years went by and the assassination's memory became a thing of the past, memorial events for Rabin were held under more generic banners, such as the struggle for democratic values. That was when they began to lose their impact. Tens of thousands of youth movement members from the right and the left still arrived in buses to fill the square. But these joint mass ceremonies slowly erased the correlation between the collective memory of Rabin's assassination and the motivations that lay behind it.