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Comment / Rabin memorial rally is no longer pro-peace
By Zahava Gal-On
Tags: israel news 

This is not my rally any more. This is no longer the rally of those committed to democracy and peace, those who recognize the need to divide the land, end the occupation, evacuate settlements and establish a Palestinian state alongside Israel. Above all, this is no longer the rally of people who acknowledge and respect painful majority decisions even if they don't like them.

So I will not be coming to the square on Saturday.

Yitzhak Rabin was murdered because of the policy he charted. In the early years, when the memory was still fresh, the rally reminded us of Rabin's political path and of what he was murdered for. But as the years passed, the organizers rewrote history, toadied up to the right wing and invited politicians from parties that refuse to compromise and end the occupation.
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Instead of a political rally, whose speakers would reflect Rabin's views and heritage - "yes to peace, no to violence" - we were left with a bland rally that no longer recalls the political assassination, a rally that legitimizes people not bound to the ideology of peace.

With the main speakers people like Defense Minister Ehud Barak and opposition chairman Tzipi Livni, the captains of Operation Cast Lead in Gaza, why shouldn't Education Minister Gideon Sa'ar, who is by no means a member of Peace Now, also speak?

These people should address an official state rally, leaving the rally in the square to those who were there on that bitter, dark night, those whom Yigal Amir's bullets were also meant to silence.

By turning the rally on Saturday into a nonpolitical event, they are erasing the fact that the prime minister's assassination was entirely political. They are erasing the rabbis' incitement against Rabin and the balcony in Zion Square.

They are erasing the fact that an entire political camp was engaged in a campaign to delegitimize the prime minister by claiming that a government supported by Arab votes was illegitimate and had no mandate to give up parts of the Land of Israel.

And thus they exonerate those political and public figures who were abettors and accomplices. Thus they take part in papering over the controversy and the rift.

But no fake consensus can be allowed to cover up this basic truth.
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