The day peace in Israel died

All Israelis who have reached their 40th birthday clearly remember what they were doing on the night Isaac Rabin was assassinated.

"I was a teenager on November 4, 1995. My family of religious nationalists celebrated the death of the prime minister with songs and dances," recalls Yehuda Shaul, co-founder of Breaking the Silence, a pacifist NGO for Army veterans.

"I was in the same Tel Aviv square where he was shot during a political act," remembers the 68-year-old historian Meir Margalit.

“I cannot forget the feeling of helplessness that came over me after the shooting of the Jewish extremist Yigal Amir.

It was a nightmare night ”.

A quarter of a century after the assassination that turned the history of the Jewish state upside down, the peace process launched by the head of the Labor Government with the Oslo Accords (1993) has barely had an echo in the marches that over the weekend they have remembered him in several cities.

"This is where Benjamin Netanyahu, then leader of the opposition and declared enemy of peace with the Palestinians, incited violence," said 47-year-old university professor Eli Steinitz, pointing to the balcony where the leader of the conservative Likud party harangued his supporters 25 years ago.

The thousands of protesters who gathered in Jerusalem's central Zion Square on Saturday demanded one more week the resignation of the current prime minister, prosecuted for corruption - this time accompanied by photographs of Rabin in homage to his memory - but the oblivion of the era of "peace for territories" was evident in banners and slogans.

“Now we can say with certainty that Rabin's assassination was the death of peace,” 51-year-old writer Assaf Gavron muses aloud.

"Of course, not everything that has happened since then is due to that fact, but the gap that divides Israeli society has irreparably widened."

As political analyst Daniel Kupervaser recalls, the nationalist right led by Netanyahu furiously attacked the Labor leader for the Oslo Accords.

"Paradoxically, these pacts now represent the political lifeline of the Likud leader, who maintains a comfortable status quo, without a solution of the two states or having to take charge of three million Palestinians in a binational state," argues this Argentine-born commentator. in 1946.

Kupervaser believes that Rabin's greatest legacy - an officer in the Israeli war of independence (1948-1949) and head of the Army in the Six Day War (1967) - is to have shown citizens that Israel can defend itself. .

"Before being shot down, he came to the conclusion that conflicts with neighboring countries should be resolved through negotiations, not with weapons," says the analyst.

For Yehuda Shaul, who was commander of a military unit in the West Bank before joining the peace movement, "the political recognition of the Arab minority (20% of the population) was his most revolutionary legacy."

"Rabin was the exception to the rule in the history of Israel by having citizens of Palestinian origin in a moment of hope," stresses the person in charge of Breaking the Silence.

The left had clearly triumphed at the polls in 1992 thanks to the push of Labor (34% of the vote) and the pacifists of the Meretz movement (10%).

But only thanks to the external support of the Arab parties (4%) Rabin was able to be sworn in and to negotiate the Oslo Accords.

Since then, the progressive alternative of power has been fading in Israel.

The Labor Party obtained less than 6% of the votes in the legislative elections last March, in a coalition with Meretz and a small centrist party.

"My generation will no longer see peace," laments Meir Margalit, a professor at the Ono University Center in the Tel Aviv agglomeration.

"The murder of Rabin represented the extinction of a hope and the end of a utopia."

The immigration of about a million Jews from the former Soviet Union in the 1990s - with a markedly conservative bias - heeled the Israeli electorate to the right.

The outbreak of the Second Intifada (2000-2005) and the wave of Palestinian attacks against Jewish civilians finally tipped the balance against the left.

Far is the hegemonic era of Labor, which between 1948, with the birth of the State of Israel, and 1977, with the resurgence of nationalism at the polls, led all governments.

The occupation of the Palestinian territories and the political path of the two states no longer monopolizes the debate in Israeli society a quarter of a century after the assassination of Rabin.

The rift between the castes that make up a complex society - Jews and Arabs, secular and religious, Ashkenazi (Western) and Sephardic (Eastern) - has widened during the pandemic, with cross accusations between different sectors.

The long decade of governments under the almost exclusive control of Netanyahu - which have been peppered with cases of corruption - has led to ruptures such as the Law of the Jewish State, a noma accused by the opposition of relegating minorities to the status of citizens of second class.

A poll by the Institute for Democracy in Israel commemorating the 1995 assassination shows that only a third of conservative voters and a fifth of ultrareligious voters believe that Rabin, a ruler, should continue to be institutionally remembered today. who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Incitement to violence

Last Friday, when Israel commemorated the anniversary of the assassination according to the Jewish calendar, 25,000 candles lit in his memory the Tel Aviv City Hall Square, which today bears his name.

Almost at the same time, Netanyahu intervened in the Knesset (Parliament) in an act of tribute to denounce that "incitement to violence still persists in Israel", this time against him and his own family.

In addition to reiterating some threats that crash against the wall of bodyguards that surrounds him, he came to recognize that the process for three cases of bribery and fraud is beginning to take its toll.

Israel's attorney general, Avichai Mandelblit, has just invoked a "conflict of interest" to curtail the powers of the prime minister, who will no longer be able to intervene in the appointment of senior judicial positions.

"That he continues to hold office while he is being indicted is an exceptional situation," warns the attorney general before the effective start of the hearing against Netanyahu from January.

"I fear that Israel has not learned the lesson of my father's death," regretted Yuval Rabin, 65, in statements quoted by

"That same feeling of incitement to violence continues today in the street, on social networks, in the rhetoric of politicians."