The annual memorial ceremonies for slain prime minister Yitzhak Rabin on Monday became a political battleground in which politicians used the 1995 assassination to attack their rivals.
Speaking at a memorial ceremony in the Knesset, Netanyahu said he was justified in not attending an event repeatedly used to disparage his political camp in general and himself in particular.
“For 26 years, there have been those who have used the Rabin assassination to stain a large sector of the nation, the Right, which I am proud to represent, and me personally,” Netanyahu said. “The time has come to stop preaching to us.”
Netanyahu recalled that ahead of the assassination, he said on every stage that Rabin was neither an enemy nor a traitor, but rather that he was mistaken. He also recalled that he had agreed with much of what Rabin said in his last speech to the Knesset, weeks before his murder.
The memorial for former prime minister Yitzhak Rabin in the Knesset, October 18, 2021 (credit: DANNY SHEMTOV/KNESSET SPOKESPERSON’S OFFICE)
After a speech by Prime Minister Naftali Bennett was not heckled, Foreign Minister Yair Lapid used his address to attack Netanyahu and his political allies.
“The big struggle in Israel is not between Left and Right but between those who believe in democracy and those who are trying to destroy it,” he said, adding that the struggle has continued during the current political impasse.
Religious Zionist Party leader Bezalel Smotrich heckled Lapid after the Yesh Atid leader said current MKs are ideological heirs of Rabin’s assassin, Yigal Amir. Had the current government not been formed, Lapid said, such heirs would be cabinet ministers now under Netanyahu.
Religious Zionist Party MK Itamar Ben-Gvir boycotted all the Rabin memorial events. The Left had not learned the lessons of the murder and continued to incite against the Right, he said.
Bennett, who was a soldier at the time of the murder, recalled that after two years of not wearing a kippah in the IDF, he returned to wearing it because the religious-Zionist community as a whole was blamed for the assassination.
“I hope that since the assassination, Israeli society has learned how dangerous violence is but has also learned that an entire sector cannot be silenced,” Bennett said. “The Right didn’t murder Rabin; the religious didn’t murder Rabin: Yigal Amir murdered Rabin.”
Labor Party leader Merav Michaeli said Rabin had understood that to stand up to Iran, Israel had to make peace with its neighbors. Rabin was the first Israeli prime minister to make peace with Morocco, she said.