JNW HEADLINE NEWSRabin remembered - Oslo's victims forgotten
By Stan GoodenoughNovember 13th, 2005
Tens of thousands of Israelis crammed into a Tel Aviv public square Saturday night to hear high-profile political figures call for the perpetuation of a “peace” process that has cost nearly 1,300 Israelis their lives.
Billed as an occasion to mark the 10th anniversary of the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, the event received extensive coverage on Israeli television networks, and was used primarily as a platform upon which to try and resurrect the widely discredited diplomatic process known as “Oslo”.
Notwithstanding the perhaps unrealistically expressed wishes of a number of rightist Israelis that the memorial remain above politics, the banners held aloft over the sea of faces in Kikar Rabin indicated that the crowd was overwhelmingly left wing.
So, too, was the message, delivered to waves of enthusiastic applause by such liberal leading lights as former US President Bill Clinton, newly-elected Labor Party chairman Amir Peretz, and the man he recently deposed, Vice Prime Minister Shimon Peres.
The speeches were detached from the reality through which Israelis have been journeying since September 2000.
Peretz, fresh from the flush of victory over Peres in the party primaries earlier in the week, declared that “Rabin’s” peace process was still unfolding.
“Oslo is alive and well,” he proclaimed.
[Ed note: Oslo’s nearly 1,300 Israeli victims of Arab terror are most decidedly dead and buried; but their sacrifice was not mentioned at the memorial.]
“[Oslo] breaths in your place. It blazes in your place, it breaths in every corner, and everyone knows that it is the hope” of Israel, Peretz said, somewhat quixotically.
Peres, meanwhile, called on his countrymen “to take the voyage of peace. Peace is in your hands, and I call on all of you to give your lives…give a true thrust to peace, as Yitzhak [Rabin] did.”
The State of Israel would be going “in the path forged by Rabin,” said the slain leader’s former bureau chief, Eitan Haber.
Clinton – who more than any other world figure provided impetus and sanction for the Oslo Process during his two terms in office, elevating terror mastermind Yasser Arafat to the level of statesman and pressuring Israel to take unparalleled “risks for peace” – gave an emotional keynote address that was unabashedly messianic in flavor.
Rabin had laid down his life for the crowd, Clinton declared. If they loved him they would take up his legacy and follow him.
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