Like its predecessors, the most recent rally in memory of Yitzhak Rabin was supposed to be establishmentarian, and not just because the government funds it. This year, perhaps because of arguments that the speeches relate only to one section of the political map, it was decided that just one person, an esteemed author, would speak.

There was hope that this time, from this particular man, there would be realistic comments. That his messages about the future would be derived from past experience - the past of the last dozen years, the worst we have known since we have established renewed Jewish sovereignty here. Perhaps even comments that would assign to the enemy at least some responsibility for what happened in those years.

After all, the Qassam attacks on the Negev after the unilateral disengagement have accelerated instead of stopped; Hamas, and not the moderates, won in the elections; and from Lebanon, even after Israel returned to the Blue Line, Hezbollah continued to kill and kidnap and bring about the recent war.

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But in stating that the State of Israel didn't do enough, and even now isn't doing enough to move toward the Palestinians, David Grossman spoke like a propagandist of the left and not like a man of letters expressing the nation's central currents. He certainly did not speak like a prophet, as his supporters said, and not like a man of vision, as the less ardent said. Although he spoke poetically and fluently, Grossman broke up the occasion into political components, as we have heard and read for many years. And for listeners who had hoped that the occasion would be different this year, depleted of cliches, disappointment is the fitting reaction.

Grossman was, of course, right in his bombastic phrase about hollow leadership. Indeed, there is no king in Israel today. And the masses in the square - as the media referred to the crowd - prepared to anoint a leader. For one moment, Haaretz wrote the next day, Grossman entered that vacuum and filled the void. Except that Grossman did not fill any void. The "hollow" leadership has already said everything he said, and catastrophically, has also done it.

Twelve years ago, Yitzhak Rabin imported some 40,000 armed Palestinians. And after him, Ehud Barak was prepared to relinquish 96 percent of the territories, including the Temple Mount. And his heir, Ariel Sharon, uprooted 25 communities, among other reasons, to strengthen Palestinian moderates. After all that, Grossman declared that Israel rejects every "glimmer of peace" and ignores the Palestinian "moderates," receiving loud applause in the square and media the next day.

Those who applaud such comments - that is, those who ignore some 2,000 fatalities, primarily civilians, due to concessions to the Palestinian "moderates" - are not applauding a prophet. Grossman and those who take pleasure in his words are entertaining empty visions and "entrapped," as Grossman himself said, in their "fanaticism."

If Grossman's speech had been one of several speeches, as in the yearly format of the rally, the damage it would have caused would have been negligible. But he was positioned as the sole, special speaker of a large and important camp, and the masses - and along with them, the media - crowned him with prophecy and leadership. As a result, his descriptions of our physical and spiritual weakness, from which we can understand that we're heading toward destruction, also constitute intelligence information that confirms a belief also held by the enemy.

Hassan Nasrallah, for instance, can declare - and rightly so - that Grossman's speech includes elements similar to the spiderweb speech he gave in Bint Jbail. Indeed, Grossman also said that weakness and hopelessness have taken over Israeli society. The esteemed author's statement, that Israelis react feverishly to moves forced upon them by others, is particularly interesting. Everyone, including Nasrallah, Hamas, Syria, Iran, and even the Americans, have the right to think that Grossman was talking about them.

Grossman called for the shaping of a new reality. After the appeasement doctrine that has come from Rabin Square over the last decade - and has influenced the decision-makers to take fatal steps in Lebanon as well as in Judea, Samaria and Gaza - the time has indeed come to shape a new reality.

That is what Rabin would almost certainly have done. Throughout his entire life, he was a security-conscious Zionist activist, and primarily, he was realistic regarding compensation: They will never recognize the legitimacy of Jewish rule even over a small part of the Land of Israel, even if we relinquish most of our homeland, including Jerusalem.