Twelve years and one day ago, as a migraine kept me awake, I turned on the local radio and heard that then Prime Minister Rabin had just been shot (2 bullets reported at the time) at the conclusion of a large demonstration, around 9:30pm, and that he was in a very serious condition at the nearby hospital. I kept listening, and soon it was announced that Rabin had died on the operating table (at about 11:15pm). It would be learned on the following morning that the assassin had used exploding bullets (9mm caliber).
There had been a large demonstration of support for Y. Rabin and the government’s work towards peace. Perhaps 200,000 people from all areas in the country went to show their support, among whom people in the youth movement. This support brought great satisfaction to Rabin who had been under all sorts of attacks of the vilest sort in the previous few months. He had been compared to Hitler, associated with Arafat as a murderer (rotseaḥ), and called a traitor (boged), all things that hurt him deeply, as his face even made plain to see.
After his death, there was an extraordinary outpouring of emotion. All sorts of people, especially young people, began bringing candles and flowers to the spot where he had been shot. Many politicians were interviewed and gave dignified and emotional answers, avoiding political debates though journalists often prodded them to take sides. Some Labor speakers, however, could not help but accuse the right (without naming anyone) of having created the climate leading to the assassination. After an hour or so, we heard Clinton’s declaration in the White House (“Shalom, haver…”). We also saw Arafat giving a message of condoleance. It began in a political vein, speaking of “those opposed to peace,” but after some hesitation, Arafat came back to the microphone and offered his condoleances to Mrs Rabin, the government, the people of Israel, on his behalf, that of the PA, and the Palestinian people. This second part of the message was very important to my mind. Apparently, there were expressions of joy in the territories as well as in certain very conservative Israeli circles. There was an emergency meeting of the government in which Shimon Peres was named interim Prime Minister. He spoke of his friendship with Rabin. Peres too apparently was a possible target of the murderer, although the secondary one.
Next morning, we learned that Clinton, Bush and Carter (and Jim Baker) were coming to Israel the next day for the burial ceremony, as were King Hussein, Hassan II, Mubarak, Chirac, etc…. We also heard a number of Israeli political leaders, among whom B. Netanyahu, who was very civil and decent, utter compromising words. Rafael Eytan appeared defensive.
Rabin’s body lay in a coffin in front of the Knesset since noon on Sunday 11/5/95, and many thousands of people were coming from all over the country to pay their respects. It stayed there until about 2pm on Monday, when it was buried in a special ceremony. Perhaps over a million people passed by the coffin. Some people were bringing flowers or candles, even pictures or drawings, which were placed before the coffin by soldiers controlling the flow of people. The murderer, 27 at the time, was from Herzliyah. He was in his third year of law school (specializing in criminology, if I understood correctly) and computer studies at Bar-Ilan University. A TV show immediately gathered a few authorities in the legal and psychologigal fields, including people like Israel Lau. It was astonishing to see the latter immediately frame the event in biblical and traditional legal terms, everything flesh and human becoming grist for the theological commentary mill.
The wake in honor of Rabin continued the whole of Sunday night. Many heads of state and personalities attended the ceremony at Mount Herzl. According to the Jerusalem Post, Arafat wished to come, but the Israel government decided that it was better if he didn’t come, for security reasons. In the morning, the television showed Leah Rabin and her daughter thanking people for coming. We looked at TV images of the ceremony for several hours. The speeches by King Hussein, Rabin’s advisers (Haber, etc.), his grand-daughter, were moving. Clinton, Mubarak and the Russian foreign minister appeared to be more prepared, more political.
For days, throngs of people kept visiting not only Rabin’s tomb in Jerusalem but also the place where he was murdered, in the Tel Aviv square quickly renamed Kikar Y. Rabin. By Tuesday Nov 7, 1995, politics as usual had returned. Already on Monday night, Shulamit Aloni had severely criticized the Israeli and US religious authorities who, according to her, had created a favorable climate for the murder, and had not yet recanted, or had done so too late. On Tuesday, Ariel Sharon insisted on the unity of the Jewish people as being the most important thing to guard at the moment, but he did not forget to mention that M. Begin and he had been branded “murderers” during the war in Lebanon. Is one to conclude that a violent act did not necessarily flow from this kind of accusation, or on the contrary that they too had been submitted to the same type of violence as Rabin?
The name of Yitzhak Rabin would continue to live in the person of a 27 year-old Russian immigrant who Monday, at the time of qiddush after his circumcision, declared that this would be his name.
About Rabin’s assassination. One often heard comment was: “How could this happen, coming from a Jew?” Or: “How could this happen to us? It is not supposed to happen to us!” Others (few): “What if the killer had been an Arab?” Everywhere, on many cars and doors, the sticker שלום חבר, which didn’t prevent drivers from taking excessive risks. Old, more aggressive slogans disappeared for a while, for the most part, except some strong statements regarding the Golan (“The people with the Golan;” or “We shall not move from the Golan”).
Religious Jews (especially Zionist religious Jews) felt somewhat threatened or sheepish: one of “them” committed the murder, he came from the leading religious university, studied Torah everyday. They saw a need to fight for unity above all, because dispersion under the negative impression of more than half of the country would mean political dilution and loss of power.
Many people invoked the necessity of a חשבון נפש: couldn’t all kinds of individuals have done more to show their support for Rabin, and perhaps thus prevented the “right” from going too far. To my mind, it seemed naive to think that such good intentions, even realized, could have made any impact on the will of Y. Amir, Rabin’s killer. His reasoning was and probably still is of a different nature entirely. He heard a voice or a teaching (rabbi’s authority, coming from other authorities, etc….), telling him that relinquishing any part of Israel’s territory (i.e. what was conquered in 1967) is going against God’s promise, the highest crime against Judaism, and is therefore tantamount to high treason and punishable by death. The land itself is sacred, perhaps the Jewish people too, but as a collective first, and in that order. He also lived the frustration of a religious youth of traditional Yemenite background, upset by the threatening secularization of the country, especially where he lives (Herzliyah). In all of this, the near total absence of discussion about the real feelings of Palestinian Arabs was striking, either when talking about Rabin’s death or about the so-called peace process. Peace as a one-way street.
This morning, we went to a garage in Carmiel to have the car checked. On the way out of the kibbutz, on the entry road lined with olive trees and rock slabs emerging from the heavy ocre earth, we picked up two old ladies. One came from Hungary (mamash hungarit, said she, from Budapesht, and, with a touch of pride, I only speak Magyar!), the other one from Transylvania, from a region first belonging to Hungary, then to Rumania. As a little girl, she lived in a Hungarian village, but had to go to school to a Rumanian school. She spoke Magyar, Rumanian, and Yiddish. Without explaining her circumstances in any detail, but in a kind of side comment on the small difficulties at the beginning of our stay which we were mentioning to her, she told us that it is difficult to change. She herself had found exceedingly hard, she said, to change husband, children, country, language, and culture. The list was striking in its compactness. We didn’t ask about the first two items. Having lost everything, and in spite of all difficulties, she had embraced Israel as her country, a home where she felt at ease and free. The depth of this feeling expressed by a modest person should be the touchstone by which one may understand the value of the zionist movement, and it is at this level that one must place oneself when speaking of the “Palestinian question”: to have in mind the life of people on both sides of the divide — a life including the willfully preserved memory of previous generations as well as the desire or hope that their children may have a future to look forward to.
In the evening, we stopped in one of the malls of Lev haMifratz to eat Mexican food. The excellent food was prepared fresh by an Arab Israeli who had lived 17 years in California. Everywhere around us, sounds and sights invited Israelis to consume without any restraint and indulge their passion for objects, cars, electronic items, gadgets… Along the highway, high degree of pollution, impression of a mess in the transition from old industrial areas to the new kind of malls, the squeaky cleanliness of Toys R Us or Office Depot, and so on…. huge tiled and carpeted stores which in truth invite a real mess, but appear to be so clean, vast, efficient, organized, complete. A spotless conscience.
Rabin’s murder went to the heart of the Israeli political question and the impossibility to agree on a constitution. Two forms of zionism, one starting with the Biblical text and obeying the command to love Israel (ahavat Israel), the other one starting from a modern situation (but not without antecedents), the necessity to found a national home for the Jews of the world who need it, two forms of zionism locked in permanent struggle. Both perhaps necessary to each other?