80,000 gather in Tel Aviv to honor Rabin 30 years after assassination

The speakers, all from the left side of the political spectrum, took turns vilifying the current government.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

Eighty thousand people filled Rabin Square in Tel Aviv Saturday night to mark the 30th anniversary of the Nov. 4, 1995, assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on its Jewish date, at the place where he was murdered.

This was the first time in five years that the commemoration took place there, as the square had first been undergoing renovations and then wartime considerations did not allow for a mass gathering.

All the politicians who spoke were from the left side of the political spectrum, as was Rabin himself, who led the Labor Party.

This has been the case for almost all the annual events, as the assassin, Yigal Amir, came from the national religious, right-wing sector.

Rabin’s admirers have consistently charged that their political adversaries – and especially Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – had so defamed Rabin in their drive against the Oslo Accords that he had signed with Palestinian arch-terrorist Yasser Arafat, because it led to thousands of terror attacks instead of peace, that it led Amir to shoot the prime minister as he was leaving a peace rally at the square.

The speakers pleaded for unity while decrying the hatred and divisiveness that have reemerged in public discourse as the war with Hamas winds down, which they said was similar to what happened in the era preceding the assassination.

They did not hesitate to blame the right-wing government for it.

“Incitement and extremist nationalism” are ongoing in the country, said The Democrats head Yair Golan, whose party is a combination of the erstwhile Labor Party and extreme-leftist Meretz faction, and “the echoes of those three shots have not faded.”

“They still resonate today in every act of this government that works against its own people,” he added. “Every time patriots are called traitors, every time demonstrators fulfilling their civic duty are beaten, every time the media is silenced and the judiciary is trampled — those same shots still echo.”

Opposition leader and head of Yesh Atid Yair Lapid focused partly on the religious aspect of the murder, as Amir had acted according to rabbis who ruled that Rabin had been an imminent danger to the people, which allowed for his death.

“Yigal Amir is not Judaism. The violent racism of Itamar Ben-Gvir is not Judaism,” he said.

“Settler violence is not Judaism. Judaism does not belong to the extremists, the corrupt, or the shirkers,” he added, with the last comment an obvious dig at the ultra-Orthodox parties that support the government but reject the idea of their constituents leaving the Torah study halls for the army, which is in desperate need of manpower as a result of the war.

Former hostage Gadi Moses, who was held captive in Gaza for more than a year, indirectly criticized Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in his address praising Rabin.

“Rabin was an honest man and a courageous leader, and I know that if Yitzhak Rabin were prime minister today, no one would have been left behind,” he said. “He would not have given up on us, the hostages, for two years. And he would not have closed his eyes until everyone — even the fallen — returned home.”

“Yitzhak Rabin also knew how to take responsibility, and not just for his successes,” Moses said.

This idea was also touched upon by Gadi Eisenkot, who vilified the “polarization and incitement driven from above by corrupt motives” and called for the establishment of a state commission of inquiry into the failures surrounding the Revival War with Hamas, to force accountability on the top political and military echelons.

Eisenkot is considered a center-left figure. He founded his own political party in September after leaving the Blue and White party with which he entered the Knesset in 2022.