After Rabin

Uri Avnery

The speaker of the Knesset invited me to take part in a special session to commemorate the 12th anniversary of the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. I debated with myself whether to accept the invitation. On the one hand, I would have liked to honour the man and the achievements of his last years. I liked him. On the other hand, I had no wish to listen to a eulogy delivered by Shimon Peres, who pretended to follow Rabin’s path but buried the Oslo agreement out of sheer cowardice. And even less to a eulogy from Ehud Olmert, one of the people who led the campaign against the Oslo agreement and its authors. And still less to a eulogy from Benjamin Netanyahu, who stood on the balcony while a picture of Rabin in SS uniform was paraded below. In the end I decided to stay away. Instead I sat at home and thought about the man.