Death of a Peacemaker

Gitai well remembers where he was when the Israeli prime minister was murdered on November 4, 1995. He would have been at the massive peace rally where Jewish extremist Yigal Amir shot the Nobel Peace Prize winner.  But a few days earlier Gitai’s mother was hit by a car. “Her life corresponded to macro events,” says Gitai gnomically when we speak over zoom a week before arriving in London.

 

So on that day in 1995 instead of being at the peace rally in Tel Aviv he and his family (he is married with two daughters) were in Haifa with his mother who had suffered a brain haemorrhage as a result of the road accident.   They were in her apartment when a news flash came over the radio.

 

“I think there was a programme about cinema,” remembers Gitai.  The subject is close to his heart.  An auteur and documentarian, his work has been shown in such august venues as the Pompidou Centre and Lincoln centres, while actors who have worked with the director include Natalie Portman and Juliet Binoche. So as that radio programme about his profession was interrupted there must have been a fleeting moment of irritation before the full force of the bulletin struck.

 

“I remember the [sense of] helplessness at being confronted with evil,”   says Gitai. “And of the weakness of the [left’s] political reaction.  Perez did not want to invoke [the assassination in the election campaign] which is why he lost, in my mind.”

 

Gitai’s view is that that  Rabin’s  murder was the culmination of vituperative attacks on Rabin from the Israeli right because of the Oslo accords.  He overcame his personal sense of helplessness by directing the docudrama Rabin, the Last Day which premiered in 2015. Out of that came that play now at the Coronet. Both works pull no punches when looking at the extent to which Israel’s religious and political right were responsible for ending both Rabin’s peace deal and Rabin himself. He doesn’t say that if Rabin had lived there would be peace. But he is no doubt as to what was lost.

 

“There was a moment,” says Gitai. “when Rabin and the Palestinians, and also Perez created many commissions dealing with the economy, water and other commission about Jerusalem and refugees. They decided to confront all these complex issues, to open them up and see what the possible solutions are. It was a rare moment, as the play says, of trying to find a way out if this endless conflict.  And it is this that was decapitated with the assassination of Rabin.”

 

In one of the film’s many remarkable scenes news archive of a large counter rally opposing Rabin before his assassination.  Disturbing footage shows Netanyahu giving a speech to the crowds some of whom are holding images of Rabin dressed in an SS uniform while others chant “Death to Rabin.”   For Gitai there are parallels to be drawn with the Trump rally held just before the storming of Congress.

 

“Netanyahu and Trump were best friends,” he says. “And they have similar tactics to get into power.”

 

As far as Rabin is concerned, “Netanyahu is not innocent in this matter,” he says. “I'm not saying they wanted to kill Rabin outright  But they really were interested to destabilise his government and his coalition and they had a part in in what happened.

 

Gitai sees political and professional hope with Netanyahu currently out of the picture. “For Israelis who did not share his point of view of it was really becoming very oppressive. Filmmakers were asked by the previous minister of culture to sign allegiance to the state, the kind of thing which was asked in the old Soviet Union or even worse regimes.”

 

As for Rabin, he thinks his leader’s spirit might yet return.  “Let’s believe in Shakespeare,” says Gitai invoking Hamlet in which a murdered King unleashed a kind of justice on those who unfairly inherited his throne.  “I think the phantom of Rabin will be back.”

 

Yitzhak Rabin: Chronicle of an Assassination” is at the Coronet theatre from Nov – 4 – 6.

www.thecoronettheatre.com