Originally posted on The Guardian on 6th November 2020.
Israel, forced to confront its divisions by a Jewish assassin’s bullets, today buries the prime minister who promised peace, and looks ahead to a future suddenly filled with new fears of conflict.
The assassination of Yitzhak Rabin: ‘He never knew it was one of his people who shot him in the back’
Yitzhak Rabin was shot at close range after a triumphant peace rally in Tel Aviv on Saturday night by a 25-year-old law student, Yigal Amir, who told police: “I acted alone on God’s orders and I have no regrets.”
A known rightwing activist, Mr Amir had hoped also to kill the foreign minister, Shimon Peres, but was thwarted when his targets left the rally separately.
The killing of the premier and Nobel Peace Prize winner has made disastrously real the country’s worst nightmare: Jew killing Jew. It also puts the future of the Middle East peace process in doubt.
The signs of widening division between hawk and dove, right and left, were already apparent last night, even as tens of thousands of mourners poured past Rabin‘s coffin outside parliament in Jerusalem where the body will lie in state until the funeral in the early afternoon. Settlers on the West Bank said they feared a backlash once today’s funeral was over.
The national expression of grief and respect was echoed around the world. A tearful President Clinton declared: “Yitzhak Rabin was my partner and my friend. I admired him and I loved him very much. Because words cannot express my true feelings, let me just say ‘shalom, chaver’ – Goodbye, friend.”
The Prime Minister, John Major, said the Israeli leader “gave his life for peace. His best memorial would lie in achieving it”.Advertisement
Amid worries that the assassination could rob the administration of its greatest foreign policy triumph, Mr Clinton telephoned Arab leaders and Israel’s acting prime minister, Mr Peres, in an urgent attempt to ensure the peace process does not stall.
Mr Clinton and other foreign leaders are to underline their support for the process when they address a special session of the Knesset today.
The funeral guest list is headed by Mr Clinton, who leads a delegation including the former presidents George Bush and Jimmy Carter. Monarchs, prime ministers and leaders from every quarter of the globe were flying to Israel, including King Hussein of Jordan and President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt.
Mr Major will also attend, along with Tony Blair, the Labour leader. They will be among 4,000 mourners, guarded by 10,000 police and troops.
A conspicuous absentee will be Mr Rabin‘s fellow Nobel peace laureate, the PLO chairman Yasser Arafat. He decided not to attend the funeral, said aides, because he did not want to provoke Israeli hardliners.
In Israel, hawk and dove, left and right, exchanged recriminations. Supporters of Mr Rabin, and of his peace process with the Palestinians, bitterly accused the rightwing opposition of creating the climate for deadly vengeance by condoning, even inciting, political extremists.
Israel and its government are in deep shock, facing hard decisions about how to respond. The only response so far has been an indefinite closure of Israel’s border with the PLO-ruled Gaza Strip and the occupied West Bank.
For the moment Mr Peres is acting prime minister of a provisional administration. President Ezer Weizman is expected to ask him to form a new government.
Mr Peres has been prime minister before, in the 1980s, and is committed to the peace process which he did more than anyone to bring to life. But he lacks Mr Rabin‘s obsessive concern with security, and his flair for convincing the public that they can have peace with safety.
Binyamin Netanyahu, the opposition leader, has already pledged the support of his Likud bloc for a new Labour-led government. “In a democracy, a government is changed by elections and not by murder,” he said. But this support is unlikely to outlive for long the political truce.
Mr Peres, in visible shock, held an emergency cabinet meeting yesterday. At one end of the table was an empty chair swathed in black material: a symbol of the void Mr Rabin‘s death has left in the government, and in the Middle East peace process.
Link to original article: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/nov/06/yitzhak-rabin-assassinated-at-peace-rally-israel-1995
