Here’s the most routine sentence possible: Sunday marks the 21st anniversary of Prime Minister and Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s murder. There will be another class reunion, and only the number of participants – due to the rules of nature – is diminishing.
It’s a sort of class reunion of state officials who have to attend the ceremony by the power of their positions, family members and friends. Once again, we will meet at the memorial ceremony on Jerusalem’s Mount Herzl. Once again, we will meet at the Knesset plenum. Once again, memorial rallies will be held in different places in Israel, and once again Yitzhak Rabin will be mentioned.
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On the day of the murder, the State of Israel had a little more than half its residents today, and many don’t know what the memorial commotion is all about, and the memory is fading.
Fourteen prime ministers served the State of Israel (a few of them several times), but only three or four of them will be remembered throughout the generations: David Ben-Gurion, who established the state; Levi Eshkol, who was prime minister when the Six-Day War broke out; Menachem Begin, who signed the peace agreement with Egypt during his term; and Yitzhak Rabin, who was IDF chief of staff during the Six-Day War, a defense minister and prime minister.
These prime ministers will enter the state’s history books as the captains of a ship who managed to change the direction it was sailing in and place landmarks in Israel’s path. It’s possible that all other prime ministers were good and wonderful, but these four knew how to change the direction of history. One of them was Rabin, who is being remembered these days.
Rabin was the first prime minister, and hopefully the last, to be murdered in office. The incitement campaign waged against him on the days which led up to the murder has yet to be properly investigated. In a Facebook post published Saturday evening, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu argued that the accusation that he had led the incitement campaign which generated the murder was false. As long as there has been no investigation of this horrible incitement campaign, which generated the scum that shed Rabin’s blood, it will never be possible to respond in an orderly and accurate manner to the incitement campaign led by rabbis and right-wing activists.
Many of us know exactly who incited the murder, who ran the campaign which preceded that damned Saturday night and who are the people who prepared signs in advance in every city following every terror attack that did or did not happen. Many of those people are still promoting hate and incitement to this very day, and there is no law to stop this deterioration into the abyss.
Some of those who ran the murder campaign 21 years ago received job in government ministries, and those in charge of them were wise to give them junior positions so that they would not stick out among the public.
It may be time to reopen the account books and talk and interrogate those who were behind the murder, even if they didn’t believe at the time that it would come to the assassination of a prime minister. It may be time to put an end to this demand. The filthy murderer is in jail, and only the small family which meets on the mount and at the Knesset every year remembers and will likely never forget.
Eitan Haber is an Israeli journalist and publicist. He known for his writing on military and security issues. He served as the adviser and bureau chief for late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
