Fallout of the Rabin Assassination--The Religious Right

Jonathan Rosenblum in "The Beatification of Yitzchak Rabin," notes how Israel remembers Yitzchak Rabin, as opposed to the way former presidents Washington and Lincoln are remembered in the US. While Presidents Day recalls 2 great American presidents and their achievements, in Israel November 5 only commemorates Rabin's assassination. As a result of this:

November 5 has become an annual club to bash a large segment of the Israeli population, which until today stands accused of complicity in Rabin's assassination. Every year we find ourselves returning to the immediate aftermath of the assassination, when religious Jews all over the country found themselves subjected to taunts of "murderer."

...Among the pernicious "lessons" of November 5 has been that one side of the political map is the repository of all virtue and the other chiefly comprised of dangerous fanatics, who will not hesitate to shed blood. The inscription on the statute erected by the Tel Aviv municipality in honor of the late prime minister pointedly noted that the assassin was a "kippah-wearing Jew."

Jonathan Rosenblum points out that putting aside the reason for Tzom Gedaliah, historically the Rabin assassination was not the first in Zionist history, "nor has murder of one's fellow Jews been the exclusive, or even primary, province of the political Right."

In 1924, Professor Yaacov Yisrael DeHaan, the legal representative of the old yishuv, was assassinated on orders of the Haganah high command, on the eve of a trip to London to meet with British Mandatory officials. Decades later, the triggerman, Avraham Tehomi, said in a television interview, with Shlomo Nakdimon, co-author of DeHaan: The First Political Murder in Eretz Yisrael, that all Haganah actions in Jerusalem at that time required the specific approval of Yitzchak Ben-Tzvi, later Israel's second president.

The most tragic spilling of Jewish blood by other Jews was the Altalena affair. Long after the ship suffered a direct hit from Ben-Gurion's "Holy Cannon" and white flags of surrender hoisted, the Palmach soldiers continued to direct their fire at survivors in the water, likely in the hope of eliminating Menachem Begin. The Palmach commander would later recall his feelings at the time: "Jews shooting Jews – over a prolonged period. Jews killed and injured by the bullets of other Jews. But my heart is at peace with the decision of Ben-Gurion." If that commander ever had second thoughts, he never expressed them. His name was Yitzchak Rabin.

The lesson, though, is clear. Obviously there is an enormous need to be careful of one's speech. Words really can kill. Incitement is dangerous and must be stopped. But what good is the lesson if it is only applied to one side of the classroom?

Words that would be condemned as incendiary if spoken by one side – comments about the sometimes salutary effects of civil war (Ephraim Sneh), calls for an intifada against one's political or religious foes (Yonatan Gefen), or reveries about mowing down fellow Jews with a machine gun (Uzi Avineri) – are deemed harmless when uttered by those on the Left.

Attorney-General Mani Mazuz ignited a firestorm recently when he questioned the regnant orthodoxy that too lax an approach towards Right-wing incitement led directly to the Rabin assassination. Charges of incitement have become too valuable a club in the hands of the political Left to be tossed away so casually.

Israel is still paying dearly for the assassintion of Rabin.

See Fallout of the Rabin Assassination--Oslo

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