Rabin's legacy
Rabin would have wanted us to express anger, not light candles and sing melancholy songs
For twelve years the nation has been internalizing Yitzhak Rabin's legacy, albeit it being short and simple and which by no means necessitated 12 years of study.
The entire doctrine can be summed up in eight words: Do not murder, do not incite to murder. And he who harms a public figure will rot in jail.
Yitzhak Rabin was one of this nation's greatest builders. He served it well, with devotion and wisdom, as a soldier and as a politician. As the majority of his generation, he was a pragmatist, a man of deeds: He was not Moses, but rather Aharon HaCohen.
The agreement with Yasser Arafat was far from the pinnacle of his dreams. He boarded the Oslo wagon because he believed that this would serve Israel's security interests, that it would moderate the hatred towards it in the region and would lead it to economic prosperity. He erred in some of his assumptions. In some he was right. In those that remained open we cannot know, because he was murdered in the midst of his work, and his successor was too intimidated to continue the same path.
For 12 years we have been internalizing Rabin's legacy, now there are no more words. With the absence of anything new, there are those who have began taking an interest in Yigal Amir's legacy. Murderers have always been good items with which to open the newscasts, and even more so political assassins.
Be angry
However, generally the murderers, Amir included, have no legacy to offer. Amir murdered Rabin because he understood the rabbis' homilies verbatim. He is not a monster, he is not Satan. The imaginative descriptions inflate his image far beyond reality and distort the real significance of the murder. Satan works alone. Yigal Amir acted on the inspiration of those much greater than him.
The bunch of losers who surrounded him are undeserving of the sacred rage that is leveled at them. Not his Trimbobler bride, not his mother, not his brother and not the singer Areil Zilber. They have nothing but a pathetic need for attention.
The anger should be directed at others. At the Shin Bet's security personnel that allowed the murder to take place. We should be angry at bodyguard Yoram Rubin who allowed the assassin to emerge unharmed. We should be angry at Yitzhak Rabin for refusing to surround himself with an extra security belt despite the many warnings, including from myself. We should direct our anger at Justice Meir Shamgar and the commission of inquiry he headed because it missed the opportunity to reach the root cause of the murder and to draw real conclusions from it. We should be angry at Shimon Peres because instead of dealing with the inciters he opted to turn over a page.
The following proposal should be made to those who belong to what is termed "the peace camp:" Don't light candles today and on November 4th. Don't sing sweet, melancholy Israeli songs that are full of self pity. Be angry, this is what Yitzhak Rabin would have done so well: Be angry. If you are in need of a legacy, this is it.
