Politicians including opposition Leader Yair Lapid, Democrats leader Yair Golan, plus public figures including former IDF chief of staff and centrist MK Gadi Eisenkot, and freed hostage Gadi Mozes gave speeches at the event.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was the opposition leader at the time of Rabin’s assassination did not attend.
Addressing the crowd, which held aloft peace signs, Israeli flags and posters reading “Rabin was right” – Mozes said: “If Yitzhak Rabin were prime minister today, no one would have been left behind. He would not have given up on us, the hostages, for two years … He would not have slept until everyone was brought home.”
Former hostage Gadi Mozes spoke movingly at the rally (Picture: Avshalom Sassoni/Flash90)Flash90
The politicians took aim at their far-right counterparts in their speeches: “There are people who distort Judaism and turn it into a politics of hatred and violence,” Lapid told the crowd. “Those people today sit in the government.
“Judaism does not belong to the extremists, the corrupt, or the shirkers [of mandatory military service]. It is not theirs to own,” he continued, adding that they were not just there to mourn Rabin, but to “draw strength from him.”
Golan, meanwhile, said that “the echoes of those three shots [fired at Rabin] have not faded.”
“They still resonate today in every act of this government that works against its own people,” he said. “Every time patriots are called traitors, every time demonstrators fulfilling their civic duty are beaten, every time the media is silenced and the judiciary is trampled – those same shots still echo.”
Rabin was not just remembered in Israel, but by Jews and politicians around the world.
In London, around 300 British Jews, Israelis, and allies gathered in Whitehall to mark the anniversary and show solidarity for democracy and peace in Israel.
Speakers included Sir Mick Davis, former chair of the Jewish Leadership Council and chief executive of the Conservative Party; Rabbi Charley Baginsky, joint-CEO of Progressive Judaism; and Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg, Senior Rabbi of Masorti Judaism.
Both the Tel Aviv and London rallies ended with a rendition of Shir LaShalom (Song for Peace), the song Rabin sang moments before he was murdered.
Speaking at The Temple Emanu-El Streicker Cultural Centre in New York, former US secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton talked about her husband, Bill Clinton’s, relationship with Rabin, who was killed during the US former president’s time in office: “My husband absolutely loved him. And he loved him because he was a man of strength and integrity, and he was willing to do something really really hard. And that was to try to make peace with his enemy.”
Rabin signed the Oslo Accords with Palestine Liberation Organisation leader Yasser Arafat in 1993. His killer – who is serving a life sentence – strongly opposed the accords’ transfer of West Bank territory to Palestinian control, and apparently also believed that Rabin deserved to die under the Jewish principle of din rodef, whereby someone who is about to kill another may themselves be killed.
