PM Benjamin Netanyahu recently announced that he will not participate this year in the memorial ceremony for murdered PM Yitzchak Rabin. Since then he has come under some strong criticism for this decision being disrespectful and inappropriate.

I am not quite sure who he is trolling, maybe Merav Michaeli, but still funny..

The person who killed Rabin was a person with the initials YR - not Yitzchak Rabin. The person behind it was seemingly a leading politician who wanted to eliminate Yitzchak Rabin because he wanted to do away with the Oslo Accords.. From here I call out to remove the false titles "Classified" from all the documents that do not support the theory that the Right killed Rabin. The time has come, 24 years the Right is vilified, my university - Bar Ilan - is vilified. We are all vilified because of something Yigal Amir might not have even done. He is sitting in jail in solitary confinement. Why is he held in solitary? So that he cannot tell anyone the truth. 

  -- Dr Mordechai Kedar, at a pro-Netanyahu rally. Netanyahu rejected Kedar's assertions.

According to a news report on Behadrei and Srugim, 4 religious soldiers from a hesder unit in basic training were in a group on a trip visiting Har Herzl. During the trip one of the visits was to the grave of PM Yitzchak Rabin. The boys refused to visit the grave, for ideological reasons, and after being warned that they are due to receive a punishment for refusing orders they doubled down and escaped from the army base.

Soldiers need to know they are in the army, not in free society. Soldiers do not get to choose what they do and what they do not do. As long as they are not being given illegal or immoral orders, they need to be disciplined and follow orders. That is Army 101. An army cannot function without army discipline and a lot of what soldiers go through during basic training is to teach them the discipline required for military success.

So, if the army wants the group to visit a series of graves, you go even if you don't like one of them. Dont say tehillim on his grave or put a stone or whatever, linger in the back of the group, but go.

If the army was taking them to a series of graves of dead prime ministers and heroic soldiers, then go to them all, even Rabin's. However, and I don't know what graves the group was visiting, if the army is taking the group specifically to Rabin's grave to indoctrinate them in something, then I can understand their skipping out. The army needs to train the soldiers to fight and fulfill their various roles, not to teach them ideology or to decide who needs to be admired and who not.

It turns out Yossi Beilin did not really like Yitzchak Rabin, though of course he was upset at the assassination (he says he cried when he heard news of the assassination, even though he did not like Rabin). In a recent interview, Beilin even gave some backhanded support to the settlement movement, in his criticism of Rabin.

Beilin said on a recent radio show that Rabin had a short fuse and said things regularly without thinking first. Beilin said that is not appropriate for a prime minister. An example, he gave, is how Rabin treated the settlers. He says Rabin did not deal with the settler situation properly, but he would "stam" attack the settlers. If you want to evacuate thousands of people from their homes, you have to do so with sympathy.

I would point out that Rabin never advanced any plans for mass evacuation of people form their homes, though that very well might have eventually happened. the person who did it was Ariel Sharon, not Yitzchak Rabin. From Beilin's words it seems as if Rabin was actually planning such an evacuation.



Very interesting revelations. It seems nobody can be left-wing enough for Yossi Beilin...

Two different articles, on two different news media websites, making a very similar point, offer something very interesting to consider.

Basically, two journalists, Tali Farkash of Ynet and David Newman of the JPost, have both pointed to the recent yahrtzeits of Rachel Imeinu and PM Yitzchak Rabin and have commented on how the two are so close together, and share a yahrtzeit, yet are worlds apart from the perspective of who paid visits to those graves.

When we talk about one land for two people, it is generally referring to the Israelis and the Palestinians. But perhaps it is just as appropriate to be referring to the secular and the religious like that, as practically two separate nations...Newman even suggests that integrating some more haredim into the army, and some more into the workforce, might do good for them and their communities, but it wont bring the two sides closer together...

Do the visitors of one, care at all about the other, or about the visitors to the other? Is it symbolic of our seeming inability to live side by side with some sense of a live and let live philosophy? mutual respect despite our differences?

It is an interesting observation to consider..




------------------------------------------------------
Reach thousands of readers with your ad by advertising on Life in Israel
------------------------------------------------------

------------------------------------------------------
Reach thousands of readers with your ad by advertising on Life in Israel
------------------------------------------------------

The picture above is of the memorial service for PM Yitzchak Rabin. You can see his grave, and the grave of his wife Leah Rabin, just in front of the cluster of Israeli flags and microphones. In the foreground of the picture is the fairly fresh grave of PM Yitzchak Shamir, beside his wife, Shulamit. As you can see, Rabin has been so canonized that the soldiers in the ceremony seem to think nothing of sitting on the edge of the grave of a different prime minister - nobody else besides for Rabin seems to matter.

------------------------------------------------------
Reach thousands of readers with your ad by advertising on Life in Israel
------------------------------------------------------

Quote Of The Day

To my great distress, manifestations of fanaticism have arisen among us. A criminal fanatic, wearing a kippa, violated one of the fundamental commandments of Judaism "Thou Shalt Not Kill". he murdered. he murdered a prime minister who was beloved among the people. The mark of Cain will never be removed from his forehead. I never told over my feelings after those three horrible shots. Even today I will only say that working together with Yitzchak and the impossible separation from him have left me a tearful person, missing him and believing in him until today.

 -- President Shimon Peres, at a meeting of "Rabin's government" to commemorate 20 years since the formation of Rabin's government.

------------------------------------------------------
Reach thousands of readers with your ad by advertising on Life in Israel
------------------------------------------------------

Interestingly, MK Michael Ben-Ari recently proposed that the name of a city street in Ashqelon be changed.

Ben-Ari proposed that the name of Rabin Street in Ashqelon be changed to Moshe Ami street.

Moshe Ami was the recent victim in Ashqelon of a rocket attack from Gaza. Yitzchak Rabin had "promised" after Oslo that they would never dare shoot rockets at Israel from Gaza.

Considering how many rockets have been shot at us form Gaza, Ben-Ari felt it appropriate to rename the street after a local victim rather than after Yitzchak Rabin.

Even more interestingly, someone, a local activist, filed a complaint against Ben-Ari with the Knesset requesting he be sanctioned for harming democracy. Carmel Noy, the activist who filed the complaint, wrote to Knesset Speaker Ruby Rivlin saying that (briefly):

1. The memory of Yitzchak Rabin is not specifically of him, but of the assassination and of the incitement and violence preceding it. Removing his name from different sites is an attempt to blur the discussion of democracy and give anti-democratic forces more strength.
2. Yitzchak Rabin was a general, chief of staff, defense minister, prime minister and filled many roles in the building of Israel, and does not encapsulate itself in one statement from one agreement at Oslo. Ariel Sharon did more than just the disengagement, and Menachem Begin did more than just give Egypt the entire Sinai, and Moshe Dayan did much more than just err in the Yom Kippur war. Even without agreeing with what he did, limiting his entire memory to just one thing is narrow-minded and indicates demagogic though.
3. Other prime ministers have run the country since Yitzchak Rabin, and you cannot blame him for everythign that has happened since. Had he not been murdered and been able to continue his work, maybe his promise would have been true. Many prime ministers have ruled since, each effecting changes along the way, and he cannot be blamed for everything since.

Most of the time we hear about the problems of the Jewish People being blamed on issues of tzniyus, modesty, or sometimes the lack of careful keeping of the sanctity of Shabbos or other such issues. It is always interesting to hear the connections other people, different rabbonim, make when they connect other issues to be the source of problems.

Rav Yoshiyahu Pinto, one of the leading mekubalim today and one of the most respected, if not THE most respected, of Ashdod, said, during the ceremony inaugurating his new house, that "many of the troubles that have fallen on Am Yisrael in the past 15 years have been caused because of the heinous murder of Yitzchak Rabin. A Jew killed a Jew in the name of faith." (source: Kikar)

I always wonder how anybody knows what to blame it on, but mekubalim always tend to know things we regular folk don't know...

With the annual "Rabin-fest" coming to a close, though it was not really so bad this year, I felt it was important to share an article, and some thoughts, with you.

The assassination of Yitzchak Rabin was a horrible event in our history. Not because it destroyed the Oslo Process or anything like that. It was horrible because the killing of a Jew by a Jew is horrible. And because of what it's done to us as a nation, making the divide between left and right much greater.

However, the worst of it is probably the fact that since the assassination, everybody thinks they have to continue Rabin's way, his "legacy". The man was a prime minister who was killed, but the fact that he was assassinated does not mean his "way" (if anyone really can lay claim to knowing what that really was) has to become the only way. Suddenly there has been no room for debate over what is right for Israel and the peace process. Everybody thinks that the only option is to adopt and continue Rabin's legacy. Even Benjamin Netanyahu feels the need to claim that the process he is leading is really the continuation of Rabin's legacy. I mean, what is wrong with rejecting Rabin's "legacy" and forging a new one?

Anyway, a particularly poignant piece was written recently by former President Bill Clinton in the New York Times called, "Finish Rabin's Work":

TODAY marks 15 years since an assassin’s bullet killed my friend, Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli prime minister. Since his death, not a week has gone by that I have not missed him. I loved him and his wife, Leah, very much. On the occasion of the anniversary of his death, his yahrzeit, the world would do well to remember the lessons of his life: his vision for freedom, tolerance, cooperation, security and peace is as vital now as it was 15 years ago, when he happily spoke and sang for peace at a huge rally in Tel Aviv just before he was killed.

Rabin was utterly without pretense. When David Ben-Gurion sent him as a young man to represent Israel during armistice talks in 1949, he had never before worn a neck tie, so a friend tied it, and showed him how to loosen it so he could preserve the knot for future use. True to form, two weeks before his assassination, he arrived in Washington at a black-tie event without the black tie. We borrowed one for him, and I still smile whenever I think about straightening it for him, just as Hillary does when she remembers how he complained when she made him go out on the Truman Balcony to smoke.

The story of Yitzhak Rabin and the story of Israel are intertwined. He took up arms to defend Israel’s freedom, and laid down his life to secure Israel’s future. When he came to the White House in 1993 to sign the Declaration of Principles with the Palestinians, he was a military hero, uniquely prepared to lead his people into a new era. Before shaking the hand of Yasir Arafat, a man he had long considered his mortal foe, he spoke directly to the Palestinian people:

“Enough of blood and tears. Enough. We have no desire for revenge. We harbor no hatred toward you. We, like you, are people — people who want to build a home, to plant a tree, to love, to live side by side with you in dignity, in empathy, as human beings, as free men. We are today giving peace a chance, and saying again to you, enough. Let us pray that a day will come when we all will say, ‘Farewell to the arms.’”

A decade and a half since his death, I continue to believe that, had he lived, within three years we would have had a comprehensive agreement between the Israelis and Palestinians. To be sure, the enemies of peace would have tried to undermine it, but with Rabin’s leadership, I am confident a new era of enduring partnership and economic prosperity would have emerged.

In many ways Rabin was ahead of his time. The end of his life overlapped with the emergence of the most interdependent age in human history, the explosion of the Internet and the era of globalization. The ties that bind the Israelis and the Palestinians — in his words, two peoples “destined to live together on the same soil” — are a powerful example of the connections that tie us all together across the globe. We are linked in so many ways that we cannot get away from each other.

Therefore, each in our own way, we must all take up the cause for which Yitzhak Rabin gave his life: building a shared future in which our common humanity is more important than our interesting differences. We can all do something, in our communities or around the world, to build the positive and reduce the negative forces of interdependence.

Rabin was a hard-headed idealist. His great gift was to keep the public’s trust while taking measured risks for peace. This approach was best reflected in his own guiding principle: he would work for peace as if there were no terrorism, and fight terrorism as if there were no peace process.

If he could speak to us today, he would ask us to remember him not by mourning what might have been, but by looking clearly at the opportunities and obstacles to peace and getting on with the work at hand.

There is a real chance to finish the work he started. The parties are talking. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has the necessary support from his people to reach an agreement. Many Israelis say they trust him to make a peace that will protect and enhance their security. Because of the terms accepted in late 2000 by Prime Minister Ehud Barak, supported in greater detail by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, and approved by President Mahmoud Abbas and other Palestinians, everyone knows what a final agreement would look like.

The remaining issues can be resolved, and the incentives to do so are there. Israel has its best partner ever in the Palestinian government on the West Bank led by President Abbas and Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, with its proven ability to provide security and economic development. The peace alliance put together by King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia offers Israel full political recognition and the prospect of security and economic cooperation with a host of Arab and other Muslim nations in exchange for an agreement. And many Arab states are engaged in their own economic and social modernization efforts, which prove they are ready to let go of past differences and eager to reap the possibilities of cooperation with Israel.

Meanwhile, the United States government remains committed to maximizing the benefits and minimizing the risks of peace, a conviction shared and manifested by President Obama; Secretary of State Clinton; George Mitchell, the administration’s special envoy; and their colleagues.

On that shining, hopeful day in 1993, Yitzhak Rabin stood on the White House lawn and spoke like a prophet of old when he said, “We are today giving peace a chance, and saying again to you, enough.”

Let us pray on this anniversary that his service and sacrifice will be redeemed in the Holy Land and that all of us, wherever we live, whatever our capacity, will do our part to build a world where cooperation triumphs over conflict. Rabin’s spirit continues to light the path, but we must all decide to take it.

The only debate we have allowed is not what is right for the country, what is an appropriate peace plan, but who is more faithful to Rabin's legacy, to his "lifework".

The question nobody knows the answer to though is, what was Rabin's legacy?

I don't know the answer to the question. Some say he was open to a peace deal that he was in the middle of working on, one that would have had serious concessions to the Palestinians. Others talk about how Rabin would have given the Palestinians everything they would eventually demand, including parts of Jerusalem. Others say he was in the process of retracting his concessionary attitude and would have offered much less from that point on. Nobody really knows, but everybody makes claims.

Rabbi Lau, the former Chief Rabbi of Israel and current Chief Rabbi of Tel Aviv, dedicated his weekly column in the Mishpacha magazine (Hebrew) a week and a half ago to describe an incident he had been directly involved in that might shed some light as to what Rabin's legacy really was.

I am translating and being brief, so any inaccuracies are my fault.

Rabbi Lau relates:
After the massacre in 1994 at the Mearat HaMachpela, access to the Me'ara was closed off and the government and army were entering discussions and debates as to what the future of the Me'ara would be. After much debate, including Rav Lau himself speaking to the committee of the importance of the Me'ara and how Avraham had purchased it  and how throughout Jewish history the Me'ara was treated with the utmost importance, the committee decided to slit the access to the Me'ara between arabs and jews, each with a different entrance and only a number of days of the year would each side have access to the whole Me'ara.

Someone asked, what would happen if the Muslim leadership rejected the proposal.

Rabin responded, "We will publicize around the whole world that w did not take advantage of our control over Hebron (Hebron had not yet been given to the Arabs in th Wye agreement, but Israel had control over all of Hebron at this point), and that our religious leaders have not found an attentive ear on the Muslim side. The whole world will know who looks to peace and who to war."

During the implementation of the division of the Me'ara, the local yeshiva of Shavei Hebron let out for bein hazmanim. Rumor had it that Rabin was seriously considering acting upon the advice to not allow the yeshiva to reopen after Pesach in its original location in Hebron, but to make the yeshiva move to Kiryat Arba, due to the sensitivity of the days.

Rav Lau met with Rabin after the conclusion of Pesach to ask what the fate of the yeshiva would be. Rabin responded that he has already given the order that on April 11 at 8 am the yeshiva would open its doors as usual in its regular location next to the Me'arat HaMachpela.

Rabin then continued to say, "I am against uprooting and Jewish hold anywhere in the land. Negotiations for peace, yes. Uprooting yishuvim - never. And, honorable rabbi, I will give you a concrete example.
In northern Gush Katif there is a little yishuv named Dugit. The residents support themselves mostly from fishing off the coast near their yishuv. The residents came to me with a request to move the settlement 5 kilometers further north towards Ashqelon, because the fish are not in such abundance in this location near the yishuv, and by moving the yishuv just 5 kilometers they might be able to better their quality of life greatly.

Rabbi, I answered them  in the negative. I refused. You ask why? Because today it is 5 kilometers, tomorrow it is 50 kilometers. Today it is for quality of life, for parnassa of the fishermen, and tomorrow it is for security reasons, political reasons or other reasons. Today is Dugit and tomorrow will be any other yishuv in Israel. I never gave, and I have no intention to ever give, the command to uproot any existing entity from its place. Rav Bleicher's yeshiva (Shavei Hebron) will open its doors as usual on April 11 at 8 AM."

Rav Lau concludes his column asking if any of those who lay claim to continuing Rabin's legacy know about what Rabin thought about this..

Rabin's legacy indeed.

ahhh... those were the days....



former Prime Minsiter Yitzchak Rabin, scoffing at the Likud scare tactics claiming that there would be missiles shot into israel from Gaza.....

I love Letters to the Editor. They always provide one of two sorts of satisfaction:

1. they provide insight in the way the regular person thinks, providing new thoughts and ways at looking at things.
2. they can be downright funny.

The following Letter to the Editor, printed in today's Yisrael HaYom newspaper, is particularly humorous. the writer demands that the world recognize November 4th as a holy day (Rabinfest), and claims America has tremendous chutzpah for holding elections on the day of the anniversary on which Yitzchak Rabin was assasinated. The writer compares it to Israel holding elections on September 11th.


There are just so many things wrong with this letter, and I think it belittles it to even start pointing them out. I think I prefer to let it stand on its own in and stew in the ignorance and imbecility of the author.

The first is a video of a game that took place Monday in Europe. An Israeli plays for the Liverpool team. Yossi Benayoun is his name. He scored a hat-trick (I know what that means from hockey - 3 goals) and added 2 assists... This is the first hat trick of the Champions League season and the first of an Israeli player in the league... (I am no soccer/football fan, but it is newsworthy and his athletic abilities should be applauded)..

the second clip was of the biggest news item of the week in Israel. A match between Beitar Jerusalem and some other team (I think Maccabbi Haifa but I am not sure) was the setting. As you can see in the clip they chose to memorialize the murder of Yitzchak Rabin at the game by having the teams wear shirts saying "Dai La'alimut" - no more violence. As they announce the memorial that Yitzchak Rabin was murdered, a section of Beitar fans broke out in cheers and booed Rabin and cheered Amir. (I first saw the Beitar clip at the Muqata)