Thoughts Surrounding Rabin Assasination


Up until Saturday night I was under the impression that nothing had really changed in Israel since the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. We still had the same horribly contentious political discourse. Our culture and political elites were more interested in delegitimizing the opposition instead of actually engaging in legitimate political debate. However, two things happened this weekend to change this opinion. On Saturday night I was watching on television the rally commemorating Rabin’s death. Tzipi Livni, the right wing representative was scheduled to speak. I was very interested in how she would be received by the crowd. True, she is not tainted like Netanyahu or Sharon with partial responsibility for the hateful atmosphere leading up to Rabin’s assassination; and true, she is a Minister of Justice in a government that has recently pulled out of Gaza; however, the annual commemoration of Rabin’s assassination is generally considered a left wing affair. Their view was that only they have the right to mourn Rabin’s death.
I was pleasantly surprised. Livni was welcomed to the podium with applause not less (or more) than previous speakers and what she had to say was also well received. No boos were heard whatsoever. She declared that she did not vote for Rabin and was against the Oslo Accords, but she stated that Rabin was the elected prime minister of her country. Furthermore, that when he was murdered, it didn’t matter that she was in the political opposition, the elected prime minister of her country had been murdered and that was an event which struck people on all sides of the political spectrum. She completed her speech and left the podium to even more applause.
I was relieved to see that a right wing government minister could speak and have her words appreciated. It reinforced what had happened the night before. I was at a friend’s house for Shabbat dinner. During a conversation regarding the tenth anniversary of Rabin’s assassination my host stated that he thought that the right hadn’t learned anything from it. Nothing has changed I thought. Here was another involved, aware, intelligent person who was convinced that only the right had had to change the way it conducted itself in the wake of Rabin’s death. I was saddened because I was again confronted with the belief that the left was blameless when it came to charged atmosphere prior to Rabin’s assassination. I wanted to remind him that an atmosphere of political discourse, whether polite or contentious is created by more than one participant and one point of view. But then a curious thing happened. He acknowledged that the leaders of the settler movement had managed to avoid the violence during the disengagement that so many thought the right wing were capable of doing. He was stating that there had been a change. At least the political debate, as contentious as it is, had managed to hold itself back, to adhere to some red lines.
So what did it mean? Well, preconceptions and ingrained prejudice about the “other side” still remained, however, even though my host wasn’t able to intuitively acknowledge it-things had changed.
And Tzipi Livni, got up in front of a crowd of 200,000. Not the elite, not the press, not government ministers, but the citizenship of Israel, and spoke, and was applauded. This was a good thing. Perhaps things are changing.