Thirty years after Rabin's assassination, how has Israel changed?
BarcelonaOn the night of November 4, 1995, Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated in Tel Aviv. Three shots ended the life of the then Prime Minister of Israel. The assassination was committed by Yigal Amir, a young man with radical, religious, and nationalist ideologies, who wanted to break the inertia of the Oslo Accords signed two years earlier with the Palestinians. And it seems clear that Amir achieved his objective, as we can see thirty years later. This weekend, Rabin's son, Yuval, who lives completely removed from public life in a remote town in Central Europe as an anonymous citizen caring for his dogs, gave a lengthy television interview to review the past and analyze the present. Three decades later, Yuval still considers Benjamin Netanyahu responsible for his father's death. Let us remember that Netanyahu won the immediate 1996 elections, and that he has subsequently been the prime minister who has served the longest in officeMore than David Ben-Gurion. During his long career, Netanyahu has managed to crush any hope of an agreement with the Palestinians, and now he is pushing for a radical transformation of the state and its institutions.
For many Israelis, Rabin's assassination is not a closed matter, but with each passing year, fewer and fewer think this way. Leaving aside the conspiracy theories that, without definitive proof, point to an assassination orchestrated by the state's shadowy apparatus, the political mood of many Israelis has changed over the last thirty years.
The Labor movement that created the State of Israel in 1948 has practically disappeared. This has not been a leadership problem, but rather a general transformation of the country, marked by a trend toward the most religious and nationalist far rightThis shift to the right is not unique to Israel, although it is particularly evident here.
The left, with negligible influence
Last year, the Labor Party merged with Metetz, a left-leaning liberal party, under the name The Democrats. A party that was once everything to Israel now holds only 4 of the 120 seats in the Knesset, a negligible representation with no possibility of independent action in Parliament.
The decline of Labor speaks volumes about Rabin's legacy. A visceral opposition to Netanyahu is the common thread among the Israeli opposition, which certainly has a chance of unseating Netanyahu at the polls, but is by no means a left-wing opposition. Left-wing parties are increasingly marginalized and will never be able to lead a government.
This is because much of the opposition is right-wing and has formed a temporary alliance with the left for personal reasons against Netanyahu. Much of the right-wing opposition is only thinking about ending Netanyahu's political career, but there is no other motive it shares with the minority left-wing parties.
Today's Israel is completely different from Rabin's. It is a country much less driven by social issues, increasingly materialistic, yes, but at the same time more religious and more nationalistic, a country that has become aware that its existence may be temporary and, therefore, that it is necessary to live it intensely, including with political intensity.
