Two years after assassination: Week wasted on hatred instead of reconciliation

One week separated the date on the civil calendar and the date on the Jewish calendar marking the second anniversary of Yitzhak Rabin's assassination.

During that week, many of us would have liked to concentrate on mourning our slain leader -- but most of the attention has been focused on cockeyed conspiracy theories and a cynical political debate regarding the part incitement played in the assassination.

For the extreme right-wing lunatic fringe, it has been a week of joy and thanksgiving. I do not believe there is anyone in the current Israeli government who belongs to that group, or who does not wish that Nov. 4, 1995 had turned out otherwise. Nevertheless, the attitude of several members of this government toward the background to those events is highly disturbing.

There is no doubt that the role played by the extreme right-wing activist and provocateur Avishai Raviv, who was also a General Security Service agent, leaves many unanswered questions. But attempting to blame Raviv for all the incitement against Rabin and the peace process in the months before the assassination -- or hinting that the GSS might have deliberately used Raviv for this purpose -- is sickening.

Raviv may have been responsible for the poster showing Rabin dressed in an SS uniform that was hoisted at a demonstration in downtown Jerusalem's Zion Square. But there were thousands of other posters depicting Rabin as a traitor, for which Raviv was not responsible.

Furthermore, he was not responsible for the rulings of several rabbis that din moser (the halachic sentence on an informer) or din rodef (the halachic sentence on a persecutor) applied to Rabin, making him under these terms a legitimate target for an assassin's bullet.

Raviv was also not responsible for bringing out to the streets thousands of religious and secular youths who yelled in a frenzy befitting a Palestinian mob: "With blood and fire we shall oust Rabin."

Nor was he responsible for the vicious libelous venom that was published two years ago, and is still being published today, in the haredi paper Hamodia.

Others were responsible: others who later helped get Benjamin Netanyahu elected prime minister. And Netanyahu pretended not to have seen the banners they were carrying and not to have heard the words they were shouting.

Last week, Netanyahu argued that if Rabin were alive today, he would have found distasteful all the talk about incitement causing his own assassination. But Rabin is dead. He is dead because a religious law student who opposed Rabin's peace policy lived in an environment in which wishing Rabin was dead was considered right and proper.

Indeed, some rabbis assured Yigal Amir that din moser and/or din rodef applied to Rabin.

All this helped Amir to feel that many in the country would receive the despicable act he was planning with understanding -- perhaps even relief.

At the same time, it is not really fair to blame Netanyahu for not taking the incitement more seriously than he did, since Rabin himself did not either, as demonstrated by his refusal to wear the protective vest the GSS wanted him to wear.

Furthermore, today Netanyahu himself is the subject of unbridled incitement, in the form of photographs borne by left-wing demonstrators in which he resembles Mussolini, and giant newspaper ads in which he is proclaimed a national disaster.

While this has been going on, no leaders of the left have been warning about the danger of crossing the thin line that separates legitimate criticism from incitement. Under these circumstances, even if the prime minister were inclined to admit that his conduct before the assassination was somewhat irresponsible and to apologize, it is not surprising that he has chosen to attack today's opposition instead.

And so, instead of the last week having served as a focus for national reconciliation, it has been used to continue to perpetrate blind hatred.

It is the sort of hatred that, according to tradition, caused the destruction of the Second Temple and might eventually destroy us too.