An Israeli assassin, a right-wing extremist, killed Rabin on Nov. 4, 1995. Had Rabin lived, would the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have been resolved? Or would the peace process he started still have unraveled?
Nearly a decade after the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, his daughter fears that Israeli society has not yet faced up to the underlying causes of the horrifying crime by a Jewish extremist.
Nov. 4 marks the ninth anniversary of the single-worst moment in Israel\’s history: the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. With hindsight — although many recognized it at the time — it is clear that the Rabin murder achieved the goal of its perpetrator.
American Jewish organizations rushed Tuesday afternoon to express support for Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon\’s Gaza withdrawal plan.
Ten years ago this week, in the midst of a desert storm in the Arava Valley, the late King Hussein of Jordan and the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin of Israel signed a peace accord ushering in an era of hope that relations between the neighbors would become a model for a new Middle East.
A downtown Los Angeles courtroom this week relived the horrid 2003 crash in which the tranquil Santa Monica Farmers Market was shattered when 86-year-old George Russell Weller\’s foot hit the accelerator of his 1992 Buick and the speeding car killed 10 people.
It is hard to recall such despairing times.
A young Tel Aviv man spat three times on Yitzhak Rabin\’s memorial — the same number as the bullets that felled him — in front of a Channel 2 news crew a few days before the anniversary of his murder. Glaring swastikas were found splashed across the site on the morning of the yahrzeit (anniversary of his death). Both of these events bring to the surface some of the toxic undercurrents running through this country.
It is hard to believe, eight years later, that this national day of grief becomes an opportunity for some to demonstrate their despicable, baseless hatred. But maybe that is the point, as suggested by many since that terrible night, and in retrospect, we will remember it as the beginning of the destruction of the Third Temple. But just when you think we have sunk as low as we can go, more than 100,000 people turn out to honor Rabin in a memorial rally in the huge square that bears his name and to voice a collective \”yes\” for peace that hasn\’t been heard here in the last three years or more.
When I moved to Israel in 1992, I was a young religious Zionist believing in the Greater Israel. I was disappointed that the Likud\’s Yizhak Shamir had lost the elections to a man named Yitzhak Rabin.
Fast forward seven years. I am in Rabin Square in Tel Aviv, awaiting the 1999 election results. The numbers scroll up, live on a giant screen, 47, 48, 49, 50. By mere slivers of points, Ehud Barak beats Benjamin Netanyahu. Tears of relief stream down my face. Thank God, I think. In the end, peace will triumph. We are in the government after all. Peace still will come.
After Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated five years ago this month, his wife Leah cast herself as the unforgiving scourge of the Israeli right, which she blamed for fostering the atmosphere in which a Jewish radical, Yigal Amir, pulled the trigger.
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