INTO THE LION'S DEN
by Barry Chamish Saturday Evening, November 12, 2005, Tel Aviv -
100,000 gather at the annual Rabin official memorial ceremony for Yitzhak Rabin. Included were me and twelve of the bravest and best Jews Israel has to offer. Here's how we got there:
In late September, I vowed to gather people to come to the ceremony with signs demanding the Rabin truth. The call to gather was made more urgent by the promised appearance of the disgraced ex-president Bill Clinton. By mid-October the Committee To Reinvestigate The Rabin Assassination was on board and two meetings were held to plan the rally. It was decided that preceding the rally, they would hold a press conference, with all members and me speaking for five minutes and then all taking questions.
I prepared myself for the fiasco.
As I expected, you couldn't get any of the speakers off the platform with a hook for forty minutes each. When my turn finally came, I announced the rally and got off the mike in five minutes. Then I got out of the place, or at least I planned to until who walked in but Yigal Amir's sister Hadas, phoney wife Larissa and their Shabak tagalong named Nachum.
So I spent a little time watching and talking to the official Amir gang. What was clear was they had no intention of ever freeing Yigal Amir. There was no family desperation to liberate an innocent brother or husband. So I told them off for their ingratitude and got out of the ugly atmosphere pronto.
Once I had left, the tagalong took the mike to explain what a dangerous Shabak agent I was. Then the "wife" announced that she would have nothing to do with anyone who considered Shimon Peres a suspect in the murder.
I was told that sealed their fate for almost everyone in the room. The Amir family is doing the Shabak's bidding. Like I didn't know that anyway.
This was a press conference with almost no press and it had nothing to do with organizing a presence at the memorial rally. And in fact, only one member of this committee even showed up at the rally and he left after half an hour, once the dirty work began. The real planning of the rally belonged to me and Tova Rubin. I wrote and she printed 6,000 flyers asking relevant questions about the murder in Hebrew and English. I brought a five foot long sign asking Who Really Murdered Yitzhak Rabin in both languages and wore my tee-shirt with the same message.
Now add the twelve best Jews in Israel and we really rocked the place.
Stage one - We handed out the flyers to the tens of thousands of rally goers coming at us up Ibn Gvirol Street. Most took mine and read them. Three threw them back in my face. And one called the police to stop us. Fortunately for us, Attorney Dov Eben-Or had arranged a city permit to be there and he was nearby to scare the cops away. We were free.
Stage two - When the traffic thinned out and the proceedings began we began parading. We proudly walked with my sign, two of the men brought their own signs and I was wearing my shirt. It was too crowded to get to the front of the gathering but we found our perfect spot, under the screen where the ceremony was being projected. Facing several thousand rally-goers we stood firm and proud.
Then Peres began his speech and I took out a horn to blast his words away. I was politely warned that this went too far and desisted. Another in our group but a hundred yards away, David Rutstein, apparently didn't take the warnings and was manhandled to the ground by the police and briefly arrested.
When the despicable Clinton began his speech, I booed long and loud. This led to a ruckus. We were surrounded by a pretty angry crowd and lots of cameras. The star of this moment was a tiny Haredi lady named Reena, who stood her ground like a tiger.
After that, we were followed by the cameras wherever we went. When the rally ended, we stood on the raised traffic island as the proudest group in Tel Aviv and let 50,000 passers-by see our message.
We brought the truth to the lion's den and the negative cost was low. Twice the sign was ripped from our hands, and twice we fought to get it back. But now, consider the plusses:
The next day, the IDF radio station broadcast our activities and then interviewed Rabin's daughter Dahlia. She admitted that she also was dissatisfied with the official version of her father's death and wanted answers.
Then the popular Tel Aviv station FM103 reported our work and interviewed a political scientist who concluded that because Rabin's murder was political, we had every right to be at the memorial service doing what we felt was right. The station was then barraged with faxes and e-mails commenting on his controversial conclusion.
We didn't make world news as we had hoped and as we would have if only another hundred people had joined us. But we accomplished something undefinable and after the ceremony was over, six of us sat together at a Tel Aviv pub to figure out what happened that night. Here are some of the notes I quickly took:
- Far, far more people read our flyers and politely ask to know more than resisted them. When I spoke to the young people who wanted to know what I meant by Who Murdered Yitzhak Rabin, I saw the same faces as the settler youths who had asked the same question at their rallies. The difference between these kids is really minimal.
- The only people who violently opposed us were old men. And there weren't many of them. If there were 100,000 people at the rally, easily half were wearing uniforms of the Scouts or political youth movements. If these groups hadn't been organized to come en masse, there would have been almost no one in that square mourning Rabin.
- And I was a hero to dozens of those kids, Peace Now included, who saw me recently on television and had read my books. And these kids, yes Peace Now as well, helped us all night long by explaining our cause to those who didn't understand it. And by the way, the press photographers took rolls of film of this magical encounter without being able to explain it to themselves.
- But as for the leaders of these kids...Here's Noar Avoda at work. To stop us from distributing the flyers, two Labor Youth leaders volunteered to distribute them. After wasting a few hundred we figured out they were ending up in the bins. So the next generation of Labour is already being prepared for lying and deceit. Anything for the right cause.
- And who should pass by me but Rabin's Health Minister, Ephraim Sneh. "Hey Sneh," I shouted to him. "Was it two bullets or three?" He knew what I meant. Bet he didn't expect me there to ask. He thought he was in hallowed territory, protected from Israel.
- And, just like any other rally, I met people who admired my work and passed on information. One young man proudly showed me where I mentioned him in my Rabin book. Amir knew him from school and ran to the other entrance of the sterile zone when he saw him. He noted that he had a tiny role in history. Another Laborite in his fifties told me, "You don't know what you did in the last two weeks. Peres was thrown out of leadership because of the suspicions that he murdered Rabin. I know people who switched to Peretz just to get rid of the murderer."
The lion's den was filled with my people and most were good. All they needed were a few facts leading to an awakening. And the twelve of us provided it to tens of thousands of our people. Of the twelve, two were over sixty, and three were middle-aged women.
Now, let us ask where everyone else was.
Where was the Committee To Reinvestigate The Rabin Assassination? Weren't they taking credit for planning this counter-event? And where were the other Rabin investigators and writers? It turns out it's much easier to be brave behind a computer screen. And where were the fine people of Kedumim who I spoke to just a week earlier and told them this was a way to save your homes. I guess they really want to be uprooted without a fight.
And where were the Gush Katif activists? They had a chance to arrive en masse and show the world what was done to them. But they were far too busy having their winter coats stolen from them by the Shabak and gathering in Jerusalem to talk to themselves in an auditorium to take real action. And that goes for all the right/religious protest leaders. It struck us all at that Tel Aviv pub, that they are all too cowardly to face the Israeli left. They are actually afraid of confronting scary groups of teenage leftists and a few angry old men.
And that is why they are losing.
