Political rifts mar the State ceremony commemorating Yitzhak Rabin
The state ceremony commemorating Israel’s late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, 22 years after his murder by Yigael Armir, took place Wednesday on Mount Herzl, in Jerusalem. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said in his speech: “That shocking murder was a fundamental test, amid the peril of self-destruction and the unraveling of democracy, of our unqualified commitment to the basic rule of democracy, whereby national decisions are taken at the polling booth.” He went on to note: “Rabin held consistently that the Jordan Valley must be Israel’s eastern security boundary. That is my view too and it is shared by most Israelis.”
President Reuven Rivlin commented: “Yitzhak Rabin was willing to make concessions for peace, painful concessions. But when it came to Jerusalem, he was a solid wall.”
Yuval Rabin, son of the late prime minister said: “The machinery of incitement and disunity directed against Yizhak Rabin continues to strike us. Dissenters are automatically branded traitors. Rabin never ran away from responsibility and never whined.” His innuendo was not lost on Netanyahu who sat beside him at the ceremony.
Not all the invited personages attended the ceremony. Objections were raised to a speech by a member of one of the communities of Judea and Samaria, while others cancelled their attendance out of concern that the slogan of unity would be set aside for a left-wing rally against the “Right.”
We remember the positive aspects of Rabin, but let us not forget that he castrated the frightened right wing, called them names and ignored their fears in his pursuit of an elusive peace.
It is my opinion that had he treated the right wing people with respect and understood their worries about giving over their settlements and villages, he would have been alive today.
I live in Israel and was living in Israel during these times and remember it well, perhaps too well.
I am a Christian and an American. I personally participated in programs in Israel to assist the IDF. Yitzhak Rabin was an inspiring figure and the right leader for the time. The Peace Process had to be given a shot, no pun intended. An attempt had to be made to go forward with the Peace Process and it exposed the singular focus of Arafat and other covert Islamists who only wished the destruction of Israel through political manipulations having totally and epically failed for decades, to raze Israel by military force.
But this path had to be taken by someone who believed in the process to act in good faith, we know for certainty the Palestinians have not acted in good faith and are more radicalized than ever no that their sham is exposed to intelligent people willing to accept the facts. Netanyahu is exactly the right man to lead Israel at this time Christianity is literally being burned out of the Middle Eastern Islamic nations, in the west its Islamophobic to witness historical events and comment on them. The bell hasn’t rung yet but in some aspects of the cultural and ideological war the west is losing. Peace, is not peace any more its an illusion I know this in part because of Yirzhak Rabin’s leadership and the two state solution, never embraced by the Islamists and Palestinians.