Memory of Assassination Divides Israeli Society

TEL AVIV — On the vast, drab plaza that bears Yitzhak Rabin’s name, an Israeli group that promotes tolerance recently brought together a few dozen teenagers, some wearing nose rings and resolutely secular, some in the modest dress of the religiously devout, to consider the tragedy that occurred on that spot 10 years ago Friday.

On the night of Nov. 4, 1995, moments after an enormous peace rally that overflowed the square in central Tel Aviv, a young Jewish assassin who said he was acting in God’s name pumped three bullets into Rabin. The 73-year-old prime minister, who had spent decades fighting Israel’s wars before embarking on a mission to forge an accord with the Palestinians, died on the operating table.

The students who assembled in Rabin Square this week, all of them kindergartners at the time of the assassination, began talking about how religious and secular Israelis could find common ground. But then they bickered over old disputes and shied away from discussing the assassination.

A decade after Rabin’s abrupt and violent death, Israel’s religious and secular camps remain deeply isolated from one another, with little in the way of a common lens through which to view one of the most wrenching moments in the nation’s history.

“In terms of nationhood and the large events that mark it ... it is difficult to find a more fragmented collective memory than this particular one,” said Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi, a sociologist at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. “The assassination and how people feel about it now has become the ultimate expression of a divided society.”

Commemorations are spread out over the 10-day span between Friday’s anniversary and Nov. 14, when the event falls on the Hebrew calendar. A few ceremonies, including a graveside visit Friday by close friends and family, have already been held, but a round of elaborate state-sponsored events, including a tribute in Rabin Square next weekend to be attended by dignitaries including former President Clinton, are still to come.

For many in Israel’s secular left, this anniversary is an elegy to the promise of peace, yet also a vindication of the path taken by Rabin -- one that was ultimately accepted, they point out, by current Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who 10 years ago was an implacable opponent of any concession to the Palestinians.

But to those on the country’s religious right, many of them still embittered by the withdrawal of Israeli troops and the uprooting of Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip this summer, Rabin is a man to be remembered chiefly as a symbol of misplaced trust in Palestinians in general and the late Yasser Arafat in particular.

They believe the Oslo interim peace accords Rabin helped inaugurate in 1993 when he reluctantly shook the late Palestinian Authority leader’s hand on the White House lawn ushered in the bloody Palestinian uprising seven years later.

Moreover, the assassination itself remains a sensitive topic: Many religiously observant Israelis feel an entire social class was tarred by Rabin’s killing. With each anniversary, they chafe anew at the sense being unfairly punished.

“The whole religious-Zionist population was blamed as an accessory to murder,” said Bracha Drukaresh, a teacher at a religious school. “Seventeen-year-old students couldn’t walk down the street with a yarmulke on their heads. It was a terrible time for us too.”

That sense of polarization has returned. In recent weeks, the family and supporters of Yigal Amir, who is serving a life sentence for Rabin’s assassination, have launched a publicity blitz demanding that the 37-year-old be pardoned or granted a new trial. They back conspiracy theories that would exonerate him, and insist on his right to father a child with Larissa Trimbobler, an ultra-Orthodox immigrant from the former Soviet Union whom he married in a proxy ceremony not sanctioned by prison authorities.

For those caught up in mourning the late leader, the calls for Amir’s freedom, the assertions of his innocence and his growing status as a hero in far-right circles are an unbearable affront.

“It feels awful,” Dalia Rabin-Pelossof told reporters this week at the research and education center built in her father’s memory.

Israeli President Moshe Katsav said he would never grant Amir a pardon and urged his successors not to either. “This villain deserves neither pity or forgiveness,” Katsav said at a candle-lighting ceremony Thursday at the presidential residence.

For nearly all Israelis old enough to remember Rabin’s killing, the event is frozen in time.

“It was like the Kennedy assassination and the killing of John Lennon rolled into one -- everyone remembers exactly where they were and what they were doing,” said Vinitzky-Seroussi, the sociologist.

The night of Rabin’s shooting and the days that followed became a jumble of iconic images. Many of these haunting sights and sounds are reappearing in reprinted newspaper photos and in old TV footage.

Few here can forget Rabin’s grief-stricken aide Eitan Haber announcing “with astonishment” the prime minister’s death to the nation. Or Clinton’s voice breaking as he ended his eulogy with: “Shalom, haver” -- “Goodbye, friend.” Or Rabin’s teenage granddaughter Noa Ben-Artzi, red-haired and freckled as he had been in his youth, bringing onlookers to tears with her graveside tribute to “my eternal hero.”

Ben-Artzi, now 28 and trained as a lawyer, declined interviews about her eulogy. Instead, she declared to the Israeli media that she would speak to them some other time -- when she made news in her own right.

Rabin’s formidable widow, Leah, who died in November 2000 of cancer, is keenly remembered as well. After the assassination, she asked well-wishers bringing condolences why they had not come to show support sooner, when right-wing demonstrators were chanting death threats at the couple’s doorstep.

Hanging over all the observances is the haunting question of whether it could happen again. Most Israelis seem to believe it could. A poll commissioned by the Israel Democracy Institute, released this week as part of the anniversary commemorations, said 84% of respondents thought another political assassination was possible.

At the time of Rabin’s murder, much was written about the outpouring of revulsion over a Jew killing another Jew, an elected leader of Israel, and the belief that so terrible an act would never be repeated. But in the view of some, the taboo-shattering nature of the slaying has heightened the potential for its recurrence.

“For a long time, there was this notion that this assassination had been so very traumatic that it would diminish the likelihood of it ever happening again,” said Yoram Peri, a Tel Aviv University professor who has just published a book about the assassination and its aftermath.

“But I think the opposite is true, that this most extreme act of violence was internalized in some way in this country.... There was soul-searching, ostensibly, but in the end the assassination became a tool in our culture wars.”

In the months leading up to Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza, Sharon was vilified in a manner that was reminiscent of the campaign against Rabin before the assassination. In the autumn of 1995, opponents hung posters of Rabin with a target superimposed on his face; during the summer, Sharon’s right-wing foes likened him to Adolf Hitler. Some even staged an arcane kabbalah-inspired ritual meant to put a death hex on Sharon.

Many observers, including Peri, attribute the fact that Sharon came safely through that perilous period to the extraordinary level of security surrounding him rather than to a lack of highly motivated potential assassins. The prime minister rarely appears in public, and aides have said he might skip the main Rabin commemoration next weekend because his enormous security entourage could be disruptive.

In 1997, Israel passed a law mandating official commemorations of Rabin’s death, particularly through school programs. In right-wing circles, however, there is growing resistance to implementing them.

A member of the local council of a West Bank Jewish settlement set off a furor this week when he suggested that Israeli schoolchildren be taught quite another lesson about Rabin: that he was the man who allowed Palestinians to obtain explosives for making suicide bombs.

Rabin-Pelossof notes that when some conservative young members of Israel’s security forces make mandatory visits to the Yitzhak Rabin Center in Tel Aviv, they are surprised to learn that her late father was not only a peacemaker but also a military hero in Israel’s 1948 War of Independence and the army chief of staff celebrated for the swift conclusion of the 1967 Middle East War.

“They say, ‘What? We didn’t know any of that about him,’ ” she said, shaking her head.

With the passing of time, some of those who were close to Rabin fear the memory of him as a person -- the shy, uncharismatic and blunt-spoken man who became a figure on the international stage, the child of committed Zionists who at the end of his life believed that land could be traded for peace -- is already being subsumed by myth.

Haber, Rabin’s aide, likes to recall how his longtime friend warbled off-key during the peace song at the end of the rally that also marked the end of Rabin’s life. At the funeral, Haber held aloft the bloodstained sheet of lyrics, which the prime minister had folded and tucked into his pocket.

“He wasn’t a visionary or a prophet; he was the most pragmatic and analytical man I ever met in my life,” Haber said. “But he was also the living history of Israel, part of every critical decision we made, in all our history. And when someone like him is gone, you will never see their like again.”

Times special correspondent Tami Zer in Tel Aviv contributed to this report.