Yitzhak Rabin assassination 30 years on: A lesson on condemning intolerance - opinion

I have several enduring memories of the slain premier.

The first is from a June 1967 newsreel which shows Lt.-Gen. Rabin, then-IDF chief of staff, receiving an honorary doctorate from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in recognition of his leadership during the Six Day War. The ceremony was held on Mount Scopus in the amphitheater overlooking the Judean Desert.

The newsreel resonated for me for two reasons: First, because it honored Rabin; and second, because I attended several graduation ceremonies in the same amphitheater while a faculty member of the Hebrew University.

A second memory dates from September 1993. Then, I was in the middle of a three-month assignment for the UN Development Program in Indonesia. From my hotel room in Jakarta, I watched on CNN the Oslo I Accord signing ceremony on the White House lawn.

I recall greatly admiring Rabin’s willingness, in the interests of peace, to shake the hand of arch murderous terrorist Yasser Arafat – even though his body language clearly showed, understandably, profound discomfort and displeasure in doing so.

A third memory I have is, together with my wife, Helen, being part of the throng of tens of thousands of people converging on the Knesset, the day after Rabin’s assassination, to pay their respects to the fallen prime minister, whose coffin had been brought to the Knesset forecourt.

At the time, I lived in Neveh Sha’anan, a small Jerusalem neighborhood within a short walk of the Knesset. The huge crowd was very quiet, stricken with grief and other emotions, emotions that I will refer to later.

The crowd was also highly diverse. There were secular Jews, Modern Orthodox Jews, ultra-Orthodox Jews, Christian clergy, and large numbers of Israeli Arabs and Druze – male and female, young and old. In all my years in Israel, this was the first (and last!) time I witnessed the gathering in one place of such a diverse range of Israelis.

And the fourth memory I have of Rabin is his image on some of the posters that were used by anti-Oslo Accord demonstrators in the period immediately preceding his assassination.

SOCIAL SCIENTISTS have long recognized that the preservation of social harmony in a diverse society requires that an etiquette of political discourse be maintained, by constraining the boundaries of legitimate public debate. In other words, in public debate “not anything goes” because allowing “anything to go” – allowing any words whatsoever to be expressed – can have negative and sometimes very dire consequences.

Limits need to be placed on public debate. There are some things that are unequivocally beyond the pale. Currently, the unrestrained expressions of anti-Israel and antisemitic sentiments in many countries around the world since the Hamas outrage of Oct. 7 have led to a huge upsurge in the intimidation of Jews, shootings, vandalism and arson of Jewish property, and physical assaults, even in previously relatively tranquil countries such as Australia and Canada.

And so I return to the posters used by some of the anti-Oslo protesters. Some of those posters portrayed Rabin as a traitorous, Hitler-like figure in a Nazi SS uniform. Though I eventually came to oppose the Oslo Accords in the wake of Palestinian noncompliance and the wave of suicide bombings soon following their signing, as a Jew and child of Holocaust survivors I was appalled that the democratically elected leader of the Jewish state could be so portrayed by other Jews.

As someone who had come to Israel from Australia, a country that had invested heavily and, until recently, quite successfully in engineering the peaceful coexistence of its diverse population, I was shocked by the depth of the incitement against Rabin, as well as that by elements of the Left against the Right. And as a social scientist, I feared for the impact of such unrestrained, vitriolic public expressions of political opposition on Israel’s very delicate social fabric.

SADLY, MY fears were confirmed. Rabin was assassinated on Saturday night, after Shabbat, in Tel Aviv’s Kings of Israel Square – later renamed Rabin Square – at a rally in support of the Oslo Accords. Because I had gone to sleep early on Saturday night, I did not become aware of this tragic event until the next morning.

“Know,” King David intoned, “that a prince and a great man has fallen this day in Israel.”

My shock and disbelief were compounded by the further news that Amir was an observant Jew who had attended a yeshiva high school. He had also completed a hesder program combining army service with yeshiva study and been accepted to study at Bar-Ilan University, a bastion of Religious Zionism.

Thus, Rabin’s assassination by Amir struck me as not simply an attack on Yitzhak Rabin the person and the Rabin family. Nor was it just an attack on the office of prime minister of Israel and thereby a serious challenge to the life and liberty that this and other democratic social institutions serve.

Rabin’s assassination was also an attack on the very foundation of Judaism by an observant Jew, a product of Religious Zionism’s educational and religious institutions.

IT WAS in consequence of this that, for most observant Jews and for many secular Jews, too, the assassination evoked a host of other emotions besides shock, sadness, and grief. It evoked a sense of shame, of guilt, of pain, of sorrow, and of humiliation. Rabin’s assassination was also seen by many as a herpa, a disgrace, of the highest order.

From the perspective of the Religious-Zionist community, the modern Jewish state was supposed to afford the Jewish people the opportunity to become once again a holy people in its homeland and to establish a unique society based on ethics and morality. The foundation of this society is embodied in the following and oft-cited quote from chapter 1, verse 27, of the Book of Genesis.

“So God made man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.”

From this proposition has flowed such profound ideas as the sanctity of human life, the dignity of the individual, human rights, the sovereignty of justice, the rule of law, and the idea of a free society. These ideas reflect the ultimate purpose of Judaism – namely, to honor the image of God in other human beings.

The assassination of Rabin was an affront to this foundation. The prophets had warned against a rift between the holy (i.e., our duties to God) and the good (our duties to our fellow human beings). Serving God and our fellow human beings, they pointed out, are inseparably linked. Amir, however, thought it was permissible to “sin for the sake of heaven” to reason away Rabin’s life.

He failed to value the sanctity of human life. He denied Rabin the preeminent human right – namely, the right to life. By claiming to be a ben Torah (someone who serves God) while engaging in murder, Amir committed a hillul Hashem – a desecration of God’s name.

It says in Ecclesiastes (7:20) that “there is none on Earth so righteous as to do only good and never to sin.” God asks us to acknowledge our mistakes and learn from them.

The years since Rabin’s assassination have given Israeli society pause for thought about the roles played by both the Left and the Right in creating the climate that engendered the violent vocabulary that eventually allowed Amir to take a gun and murder Rabin.

Since Rabin’s assassination, the notion that personal safety and human life are owed certain dignities that cannot be reasoned away on the basis of political or any other expediency has, sadly, not been sufficiently underscored across Israeli society.

ISRAEL REMAINS vulnerable to violence from within.

Witness the instances of violence prior to Oct. 7 on the part of some of the demonstrators opposed to Justice Minister Yariv Levin’s proposed judicial reforms. Since then, some of those opposed to the government’s handling of the Iranian and Iranian-proxy war against Israel have also engaged in violence, and vandalism, too (e.g., the burning of large garbage bins and the shattering, in June, of a window in a Supreme Court building during a large demonstration against the judiciary itself).

Peaceful coexistence is a precarious achievement in most societies. Israel’s social fabric often seems to be quite threadbare. The tensions between secular and religious Jews and between Jews and Arabs are sometimes palpable.

Peaceful coexistence is something that must be constantly reinforced if it is to endure. While some social conflict can be functional, the challenge for governments is to ensure that the level of conflict does not cross the threshold beyond which the stability of the state and its major institutions, its economic life, civil society, and the individual’s sense of being a state citizen – his/her civic identity – begin to come under threat.

Sadly, Israel’s leadership, both political and religious, has often been derelict in recognizing the need to invest heavily and carefully on an ongoing basis in managing the consequences of diversity – of political opinion, of religion, of race and national origin, and of socioeconomic status – in the interests of individual Israelis and Israeli society as a whole.

Yitzhak Rabin, rodef shalom (pursuer of peace) – may his memory be for a blessing. 