THE OTHER DAY IN ISRAEL there was the annual “Remember Yitzhak Rabin” Day.
It remembers the State’s shame of having a former prime minister slain.
But it also eulogizes a man whose past is bloody.
I REMEMBER YITZHAK RABIN as the man who ordered Ben Gurion’s Haganah to open fire on fellow Jews bringing personnel and weapons to fight for Israel’s survival. Rabin was the “on the shore” commander pledged to do what his self-important boss told him. Ben Gurion hated – and that is not too strong a word – Menachem Begin, a leader of Lehi and political foe of Ben Gurion.
Lest anyone forget, Ben Gurion ordered Rabin to take troops to the shore and to confiscate all weapons Begin’s people had acquired in Europe. Begin had agreed to share the weapons with Ben Gurion’s Haganah. The boat was the Altalena1.
Then there was Oslo, a one-sided agreement with Yassar Arafat. Israel lost, the PLO gained – and never, to this day, has the PLO lived up to the agreement.
Meanwhile, Rabin received the Nobel Peace Prize along with his own Minister of Foreign Affairs Shimon Peres and the PLO’s leader Yasser Arafat.
It was the agreement that caused Rabin’s assassination by Yigal Amir, a Jewish Israeli student in 1995 in Tel Aviv.
On the positive side, Israel now has peace agreements with former enemies Jordan and Egypt.
Did Rabin arrange the peace agreement with Egypt?
No, it was Began – vilified by Rabin’s mentor Ben Gurion, and Anwar Sadat.
Rabin was Prime Minister at the signing of the Israel-Jordan agreement.2
Assassinating political leaders is all to common around the world, and more than a few were murdered in ancient Israel. However, killing a prime minster in Israel was a shock and brought shame to the country, no matter what justification Amir believed he had for the murder.
At the most recent Rabin memorial event, his relatives broke with the tradition of trying to heal differences and excoriated members of the current government.
In other words, they behaved like American leftists after losing an election.
According to the Jerusalem Post3,
Slain prime minister Yitzhak Rabin’s grandchildren blasted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during services marking the 23rd anniversary of Rabin’s assassination on Sunday, in one case falsely accusing Netanyahu’s spokesperson of a tweet referring to Rabin as a traitor.
Noa Rotman, speaking at a ceremony on Mount Herzl, harshly criticized the country’s political leadership and said that people in positions of authority were taking part in incitement.
“If you don’t stop the journey of incitement, blood will be spilled here,” she said, as Netanyahu sat in the front row alongside President Reuven Rivlin.
At the Knesset two hours later, Netanyahu referenced Rotman’s statement, and said he was “astonished” by the accusation, and that it was completely baseless. The tweet in question was posted by Caroline Glick of a satirical poster before Yom Kippur showing pictures of various left-wing figures and organizations under terms used in the traditional confession Jews say on Yom Kippur.
Over a picture of Rabin shaking Yasser Arafat’s hands on the White House lawn was the caption, “we sinned.”
“I was shocked, because I did not believe for a minute that someone in the Prime Minister’s Office did such a thing,” Netanyahu said. “But I immediately asked to look into it – and it turned out that it really did not exist. This is a tweet from a journalist who has nothing to do with the Prime Minister’s Office.”
Sounds a great deal like the Democrats claims about the U.S. president.
The Times of Israel4 reports that
Yonatan Ben-Artzi, Rabin’s grandson, used his speech on the Hebrew anniversary of the murder to attack Netanyahu for dividing the country, arguing it would lead to Israel’s destruction.
“A leadership that encourages division and violent attacks on other opinions. He who drives and incites against anyone who thinks differently from him as a sourpuss or a leftist will lead to the destruction of the next Temple,” charged Ben-Artzi.
“The citizens of the state are entitled to a leadership that cares for their needs and is not bored with them and their requirements,” he said. “A leadership that mocks and disparages those that feel distress is the source of that evil, and it will deepen the rift, division and internal conflict.”
That is reminiscent of the Israeli Labor party politician who told an American woman who dared raise an issue to “Go back to America.”
The Rabin memorial event has, in the past, been nothing less than a paean to the slain former leader; it was not, until this year, used as a bully pulpit to castigate political opponents.
The only thing the Rabin descendants have accomplished by their vitriol is to send people to their history sources to learn about Rabin before he became a murdered “hero.”
The Altalena proved that both Ben Gurion and Rabin had feet of clay.
Rabin’s memorial should be noted as a moment in modern Israel’s history when the rule of law was superseded by a religious zealot.
Sources
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altalena_Affair
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel%E2%80%93Jordan_peace_treaty#History
3. http://tinyurl.com/ybqoonno
4. http://tinyurl.com/yat259t7
PLAGIARISM is the act of appropriating the literary composition of another, or parts or passages of his writings, or the ideas or language of the same, and passing them off as the product of one’s own mind.
Truth is an absolute defense to defamation. Defamation is a false statement of fact. If the statement was accurate, then by definition it wasn’t defamatory.
