Saturday Evening,
November 12, 2005,
Tel Aviv -
100,000 gather at the annual Rabin official memorial ceremony
for Yitzhak Rabin. Included were me and twelve of the bravest
and best Jews Israel has to offer. Here’s how we got there:
In late September, I vowed to gather people to come to the
ceremony with signs demanding the Rabin truth. The call to
gather was made more urgent by the promised appearance of the
disgraced ex-president Bill Clinton. By mid-October the
Committee To Reinvestigate The Rabin Assassination was on board
and two meetings were held to plan the rally. It was decided
that preceding the rally, they would hold a press conference,
with all members and me speaking for five minutes and then all
taking questions.
I prepared myself for the fiasco.
As I expected, you couldn’t get any of the speakers off the
platform with a hook for forty minutes each. When my turn
finally came, I announced the rally and got off the mike in five
minutes. Then I got out of the place, or at least I planned to
until who walked in but Yigal Amir’s sister Hadas, phoney wife
Larissa and their Shabak tagalong named Nachum.
So I spent a little time watching and talking to the official
Amir gang. What was clear was they had no intention of ever
freeing Yigal Amir. There was no family desperation to liberate
an innocent brother or husband. So I told them off for their
ingratitude and got out of the ugly atmosphere pronto.
Once I had left, the tagalong took the mike to explain what a
dangerous Shabak agent I was. Then the “wife” announced that she
would have nothing to do with anyone who considered Shimon Peres
a suspect in the murder.
I was told that sealed their fate for almost everyone in the
room. The Amir family is doing the Shabak’s bidding. Like I
didn’t know that anyway.
This was a press conference with almost no press and it had
nothing to do with organizing a presence at the memorial rally.
And in fact, only one member of this committee even showed up at
the rally and he left after half an hour, once the dirty work
began. The real planning of the rally belonged to me and Tova
Rubin. I wrote and she printed 6,000 flyers asking relevant
questions about the murder in Hebrew and English. I brought a
five foot long sign asking Who Really Murdered Yitzhak Rabin in
both languages and wore my tee-shirt with the same message.
Now add the twelve best Jews in Israel and we really rocked the
place.
Stage one - We handed out the flyers to the tens of thousands
of rally goers coming at us up Ibn Gvirol Street. Most took mine
and read them. Three threw them back in my face. And one called
the police to stop us. Fortunately for us, Attorney Dov Eben-Or
had arranged a city permit to be there and he was nearby to
scare the cops away. We were free.
Stage two - When the traffic thinned out and the proceedings
began we began parading. We proudly walked with my sign, two of
the men brought their own signs and I was wearing my shirt. It
was too crowded to get to the front of the gathering but we
found our perfect spot, under the screen where the ceremony was
being projected. Facing several thousand rally-goers we stood
firm and proud.
Then Peres began his speech and I took out a horn to blast his
words away. I was politely warned that this went too far and
desisted. Another in our group but a hundred yards away, David
Rutstein, apparently didn’t take the warnings and was manhandled
to the ground by the police and briefly arrested.
When the despicable Clinton began his speech, I booed long and
loud. This led to a ruckus. We were surrounded by a pretty angry
crowd and lots of cameras. The star of this moment was a tiny
Haredi lady named Reena, who stood her ground like a tiger.
After that, we were followed by the cameras wherever we went.
When the rally ended, we stood on the raised traffic island as
the proudest group in Tel Aviv and let 50,000 passers-by see our
message. We brought the truth to the lion’s den and the negative
cost was low. Twice the sign was ripped from our hands, and
twice we fought to get it back. But now, consider the plusses:
The next day, the IDF radio station broadcast our activities
and then interviewed Rabin’s daughter Dahlia. She admitted that
she also was dissatisfied with the official version of her
father’s death and wanted answers.
Then the popular Tel Aviv station FM103 reported our work and
interviewed a political scientist who concluded that because
Rabin’s murder was political, we had every right to be at the
memorial service doing what we felt was right. The station was
then barraged with faxes and e-mails commenting on his
controversial conclusion. We didn’t make world news as we had
hoped and as we would have if only another hundred people had
joined us. But we accomplished something undefinable and after
the ceremony was over, six of us sat together at a Tel Aviv pub
to figure out what happened that night. Here are some of the
notes I quickly took:
- Far, far more people read our flyers and politely ask to know
more than resisted them. When I spoke to the young people who
wanted to know what I meant by Who Murdered Yitzhak Rabin, I saw
the same faces as the settler youths who had asked the same
question at their rallies. The difference between these kids is
really minimal.
- The only people who violently opposed us were old men. And
there weren’t many of them. If there were 100,000 people at the
rally, easily half were wearing uniforms of the Scouts or
political youth movements. If these groups hadn’t been organized
to come en masse, there would have been almost no one in that
square mourning Rabin.
- And I was a hero to dozens of those kids, Peace Now included,
who saw me recently on television and had read my books. And
these kids, yes Peace Now as well, helped us all night long by
explaining our cause to those who didn’t understand it. And by
the way, the press photographers took rolls of film of this
magical encounter without being able to explain it to themselves.
- But as for the leaders of these kids…Here’s Noar Avoda at
work. To stop us from distributing the flyers, two Labor Youth
leaders volunteered to distribute them. After wasting a few
hundred we figured out they were ending up in the bins. So the
next generation of Labour is already being prepared for lying
and deceit. Anything for the right cause.
- And who should pass by me but Rabin’s Health Minister,
Ephraim Sneh. “Hey Sneh,” I shouted to him. “Was it two bullets
or three?” He knew what I meant. Bet he didn’t expect me there
to ask. He thought he was in hallowed territory, protected from
Israel.
- And, just like any other rally, I met people who admired my
work and passed on information. One young man proudly showed me
where I mentioned him in my Rabin book. Amir knew him from
school and ran to the other entrance of the sterile zone when he
saw him. He noted that he had a tiny role in history. Another
Laborite in his fifties told me, “You don’t know what you did in
the last two weeks. Peres was thrown out of leadership because
of the suspicions that he murdered Rabin. I know people who
switched to Peretz just to get rid of the murderer.”
The lion’s den was filled with my people and most were good.
All they needed were a few facts leading to an awakening. And
the twelve of us provided it to tens of thousands of our people.
Of the twelve, two were over sixty, and three were middle-aged
women.
Now, let us ask where everyone else was.
Where was the Committee To Reinvestigate The Rabin
Assassination? Weren’t they taking credit for planning this
counter-event? And where were the other Rabin investigators and
writers? It turns out it’s much easier to be brave behind a
computer screen. And where were the fine people of Kedumim who I
spoke to just a week earlier and told them this was a way to
save your homes. I guess they really want to be uprooted without
a fight.
And where were the Gush Katif activists? They had a chance to
arrive en masse and show the world what was done to them. But
they were far too busy having their winter coats stolen from
them by the Shabak and gathering in Jerusalem to talk to
themselves in an auditorium to take real action. And that goes
for all the right/religious protest leaders. It struck us all at
that Tel Aviv pub, that they are all too cowardly to face the
Israeli left. They are actually afraid of confronting scary
groups of teenage leftists and a few angry old men.
And that is why they are losing.
The Kempler
video