A few words for Carmi Gillon

This call – which is never "superfluous" – was completely ineffective. Yigal Amir tried at least twice to kill Prime Minister Rabin, and according to all indications, he would not have listened to the people the Shin Bet asked to sound warnings in any event.

But the head of the Shin Bet is also supposed to consider this possibility. With or without warnings, tax payers pay his salary in order to uncover radical elements, and to protect the life of the prime minister from these elements if they are not uncovered in time.

He is not expected to be able to do everything, but simple logic would dictate he should have prepared his men to thwart a direct attempt on the prime minister's life from point-blank range.

It was for this reason that Rabin's security guards kept close to him during the last hours of his life.

Now, 10 years after that terrible failure in carrying out the most basic duty of the job entrusted to him, Carmi Gillon is back with several pearls of wisdom about the Rabin assassination.

The fatal mistake made by security guards that fateful night was that they failed to kill Yigal Amir "like a dog," says Gillon now. If they had done that, the Shin Bet's deterrence power would be greater now, we would not have to consider letting the murderer get marry now, and there would be no fuel to pour on the fire for the next political murder.

Gillon also tells readers that, "After Rabin was murdered, they dealt with all the political, social and legal issues as one big glob."

Three points

On first thought, we should remind Gillon that all the screw-ups that stemmed from the fact that security guards didn't kill Amir on the spot ("as we taught them to") would have been much easier to prevent if those same guards had managed to foil his murderous plan (assuming this is also part of their training).

Secondly, Carmi Gillon is hardly the person to lecture Israeli society about the Rabin assassination. And we might also remind Gillon – and others – that demagoguery is hardly beneficial to societal health.

Demagogic phrases such as "one big whitewash" to describe our preoccupation with the different meanings of the Rabin killing.

If there was an attempt to whitewash something - just who prevented who from responding about these attempts? What public forum to discuss the murder and lessons to be learned from it was silenced "from above"?

It is demagogic to say that the change in Israeli society since the Rabin was killed "is only for the worse", as his opinion that "polarization between right and left gains strength, mainly against the backdrop of political developments."

The picture is much more complex than this simplistic explanation, as the low level of violence during the disengagement proves.

It is demagogic to expect the entire public to accept the political opinions and programs of those politicians who view themselves as "Rabin's heirs," simply because it is 10 years since the murder.

And demagoguery, to paraphrase Rabin himself in another context, does not make democracy.