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Friday November 2, 2007

Rabin's legacy: Put security before vengeance

Where were you on the night of Nov. 4, 1995? If you can’t answer that question, you are probably either very young or so old your memory is going. Or you weren’t in Israel.

Anyone in Israel — or any Jew for that matter — of a certain age remembers what they were doing the precise moment they heard that Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin had been assassinated. And if the phrasing of the question makes you feel that you need to come up with a police alibi, you probably belong to that half of the population that spent the days and weeks after the murder soul-searching.

I remember exactly what I was doing on that night 12 years ago. I was having a rare quiet evening at home, off-duty as the Jerusalem Post’s parliamentary reporter, watching “Crocodile Dundee” on television. As soon as titles came up announcing there would be a news flash, I turned on the radio to hear what warranted such a dramatic interruption. My beeper remained strangely silent.

It was like the silence between a terrorist’s bomb exploding and the start of the screaming of ambulance sirens.

Within minutes I was struggling to cope with updates and trying to make phone calls for cross-party political responses while the telephone network basically collapsed. The whole country seemed to be calling each other with the terrible news. Rabin was dead. Shot by a Jew. An Israeli.

How could we be expected to take in what this meant? One minute you’re sitting at home in a democratic country with a glass of wine laughing at a comedy; the next minute the prime minister is dead, democracy is wounded and there is nothing to laugh about.

I finished that glass of wine at about 2 a.m, the morning after the assassination. I needed it. Like many other reporters in those days before security had to be stiflingly tightened around the country’s leaders, I had had the privilege (and sometimes the pleasure) of seeing the prime minister close up, as a person.

While watching the footage of what were to be Rabin’s last minutes in life — in abnormally good spirits, giving Shimon Peres, his longtime rival, a hug — I recalled the Rabin I had known. Rabin signing the first Oslo accord, recognizing the PLO, in a tense and extraordinarily modest ceremony in his office in

September 1993, a very different affair from the stage show that later took place on the White House lawn.

There was also the Rabin I saw with Jordan’s King Hussein, at ease as old friends, showing the chemistry of two men who’ve been through a lot together and no longer need words to express how they feel about each other.

These memories came back last week, too, as Israel — a very different Israel — marked 12 years since the Hebrew date of his assassination.

This year, as every year, the issue of incitement again raised its ugly head. This year, however, media attention moved from Rabin’s legacy — or what is left of it — to the future of his murderer and the assassin’s newborn child.

Left-wing politicians and activists, those whose camp had no problem shouting “murderer” outside the window of Prime Minister Menachem Begin during the first Lebanon war, again tarred an entire community. The right again raised the conspiracy theories that inevitably are born with any political assassination.

The accusations remain, and so do some of the questions. Rabin is dead. Yigal Amir is in prison. But where, for example, is Avishai Raviv, Amir’s close friend and the head of the extremist Eyal group who seems to have acted as an agent provocateur for the Shin Bet itself?

Last week saw the launch of a nationwide Free Amir campaign, led by supporters of Rabin’s assassin who call themselves — presumably with intentional irony — the Committee for Democracy.

A spokesperson for the group released a statement arguing that if Israel is prepared “to release terrorists for peace, they must release Yigal Amir.”

A flurry of Knesset motions and statements followed in which politicians from both left and right made it clear that they believe that Amir should “rot in jail until his dying day.” Not that Amir, who demanded to see his child be born, seems to be wasting away.

Liberal sentiments on reforming prisoners and the intrinsic equality of all men tend to disappear with one look at Amir’s grinning face. But if Amir succeeds in making the country seek vengeance rather than security, he will have succeeded in his basic goal: using a bullet to deflect democracy from its natural course.

More than a decade later, one wonders what Rabin would have made of it all. One imagines the modest Rabin would find his standing as a legend, at the heart of discussions of this nature, bemusing at best.

But some things can’t be dismissed and should not be forgotten. Heaven help us if we choose to ignore how Rabin — the politician and the person — was cut down. For that will be the day that democracy dies.

Liat Collins writes for the Jerusalem Post, where this column previously appeared.

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