Rabin Memorialized a Year Later

A year after the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, an ever-divided Israel flocked to his graveside, the site of his murder and school auditoriums on Thursday, trying to resume a truncated soul-searching over the meaning of the peacemaker’s violent death.

The memorials to Rabin--on the anniversary of his death according to the Jewish calendar--were sad, if somewhat ritualized, in a country that has lived from crisis to tragedy for almost half a century.

Students donned the white shirts they wear on Israel’s Holocaust memorial day, and radio stations played a Hebrew translation of Walt Whitman’s “O Captain! My Captain!” written after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

Parliament held a special session in memory of the Israeli Nobel laureate gunned down Nov. 4 by a Jewish law student opposed to his policy of trading land for peace with Israel’s Arab neighbors.

Throughout the country, hundreds of thousands of yahrzeit candles were lit for the slain premier.

Yet the mourning revealed once again that the national unity that Israelis had hoped would emerge from their shared trauma is as elusive as ever. The only point of agreement between the left and right wings, and the religious and the secular, seemed to be that the divisions among Israelis are at least as deep as they were before the assassination.

“Each side feels he knows the truth,” Rabbi David Hartman of the Shalom Hartman Institute said.

“The rhetoric is uncompromising,” he said. “That hasn’t changed.

“But then nothing changes after [huge] events. God gave us the Ten Commandments, and people turned around to worship the Golden Calf.”

During the state memorial at Mt. Herzl cemetery, Leah Rabin stared coldly ahead as right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu laid a wreath on her husband’s grave. She is unforgiving, believing that Netanyahu’s harsh speech contributed to a climate of violence that led to her husband’s murder.

Netanyahu’s government, in turn, refused a family and Labor Party request to make the anniversary an official day of mourning. Two leftist members of parliament walked out on the prime minister’s speech appealing for national unity.

“The murder of Yitzhak Rabin must remind us of a basic truth: Peace begins at home,” Netanyahu said. “The choice before us today is to seal the rift and unite, or widen the division and disintegrate.”

But Israelis do not even agree on the definition of “unity.”

When left-leaning and secular Israelis speak of it, they mean pulling together the Jewish people and safeguarding the state of Israel. They, like the slain Rabin, believe in trading captured land for peace.

When religious and right-wing Israelis plaster bumper stickers on their cars calling for the “unity of Israel,” they mean the people must unite around Jewish land in Eretz Israel, or biblical Israel.

It is a call to hang on to the West Bank city of Hebron, which is to be handed over to Palestinian control, and to the rest of the West Bank land that Israel captured from Jordan in 1967.

Thus, while most Israelis believe that the assassination of the prime minister of the Jewish state by a religious Jew was a terrible thing, not all Israelis consider Rabin’s death as a loss.

“It should be borne in mind that what seemed to be the shattering of a dream for some Israelis was viewed by other Israelis as a message of redemption,” Yediot Aharonot newspaper columnist Nahum Barnea wrote this week. “For every Meretz [Party] and Labor voter who has in recent months been depressed, there is a National Religious Party or Likud voter who is feeling not bad at all.”

Rabin’s assassination set off an avalanche of political events. Labor Party leader Shimon Peres succeeded him, and--hoping to harness an outpouring of shock and initial support--called early elections. But Islamic extremists, opposed to the peace process for conceding too much to the Jews, launched suicide bombings that left more than 60 dead in three weeks last February and March.

Afraid they were giving up land without getting peace, Israelis turned to Likud’s Netanyahu, who promised them peace with security and won a narrow victory in May. Since then, the peace process for which Rabin was killed has appeared to unravel in clashes between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian police, threats of war with Syria and tensions with Israel’s Arab allies--Jordan’s King Hussein and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.

Most of the country expressed outrage at assassin Yigal Amir, who was tried and jailed for life in the slaying. Many called for a national commitment to nonviolence. There were efforts to bridge the chasms between the religious and the secular, the left and the right.

But the lesson seems not to have been absorbed by all.

On Tuesday, a religious Jew in a skullcap threw hot tea in the face of Yael Dayan, a left-wing member of parliament, during her working visit to Hebron. According to Naomi Hazan, another member of parliament who was with her, the attacker called the women “traitors” and “murderers,” as Rabin’s opponents had before he was slain.

Last month, an unidentified assailant threw a Molotov cocktail at the home of Yigal Amir’s parents in Ramat Gan. No one was hurt, but the house was damaged.

Meanwhile, some girls in Kiryat Gat formed a Yigal Amir fan club, and Supreme Court President Aharon Barak had to be assigned security guards after he came under attack in the ultra-Orthodox press for his rulings.

Security forces reportedly have received a growing number of threats against political leaders ranging from Dayan to Netanyahu, who is planning to redeploy Israeli troops from Hebron under Rabin’s accord.

Most students who spent Thursday discussing the value of human life, tolerance in public debate and preservation of democracy believed that there had been little improvement in these areas in the last year.

“People cried so much in the beginning and were supposed to learn what not to do, but they didn’t learn anything,” said Yasmin Cohen, 15, at the Rene Casin High School. “I think we are going in the opposite direction now, not only in peace with the Arab countries but among ourselves.”

Liat Galinsky, 16, of Denmark High School, observed: “Nothing has changed, really. The public is still divided. There are even those who think the murder was good. The other half of the public thinks this was the most terrible thing that happened to us. This comes up in classes all the time.”

The students echoed Yonatan Ben Artzi, Rabin’s grandson, who said at the graveside ceremony: “I want to ask your forgiveness, grandfather. A year has passed, and nothing has changed. It appears nothing has changed.”