Thirty years after Rabin’s murder, Israelis must stop fearing peace and start fearing life without it
Rabin anniversary rally in Rabin Square on Saturday night, 1 November 2025
Ayman Odeh writes in Haaretz on 5 November 2025:
I followed the rally marking 30 years since the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, held Saturday night in the square that bears his name. It was an important, emotional and necessary gathering. Around 100,000 people stood together, spoke, sang, called out and cheered for peace. They are our partners.
But along with the emotion, a few questions arose that can’t be ignored. How is it possible that not one lawmaker representing the Arab citizens was invited to the rally? How is the media silent about this fact? How is it that every Jewish opposition leader was invited, but those who represent the Arab community were excluded?
This starkly contradicts what Rabin himself understood and acted on. Boycotting the Arab community’s elected leaders isn’t a marginal detail, it’s the antithesis of Rabin’s legacy. This is especially the case when, since October 7, the clearest voices calling for an end to the war and a political agreement between the two peoples have come from the representatives of the Arab community. They’re calling out far more than the people who took the stage and spoke in Rabin’s name yet erased his most fundamental principle.
But I’m not ignoring the fact that the words of Dr. Nasreen Haddad Haj-Yahya, an expert on Arab-Jewish relations, were received with applause and emotion. She spoke about a Jewish-Arab partnership, and the crowd agreed. This only proves how ready the public is for a true political partnership, far more than the leaders who are supposed to represent them.
After all, Rabin’s courage didn’t stop at extending a hand for peace. It also included the simple recognition that the Arab community’s representatives are legitimate, especially when it comes to peace between the two peoples.
Suddenly I was back in Haifa in the early ’90s. I again saw the plaza in front of Rothschild House in the Carmel Center neighborhood – Jews and Arabs, young and old, holding hands and singing “A Song for Peace,” that big hit from 1969. Genuine joy, a hope that felt almost like air. I remember it well, even if sometimes it seems like it was only a dream.
There was something in the air back then, not merely hope, but a sincere feeling that the future was already here. That maybe the wars would finally be behind us and the occupation would end. That it would be possible to live here, all of us, without fear, Arabs and Jews together. That God not only “maketh peace in His high places” but also among us, here, in this land, between Israelis and Palestinians.
I was young then.
I felt that excitement in my bones, the happiness in the streets, people talking about the Oslo Accords as if they were the dawn of a new day. I, too, believed we could share this land among all its people.
But then, on that night in Tel Aviv’s main square 30 years ago, three bullets murdered not only Yitzhak Rabin but also the first Israeli leader who managed to convince a large part of the Israeli public that a real chance for peace existed. Those bullets were aimed at hope, at partnership, at the very idea that an Israeli-Palestinian peace was possible.
Thirty years after Rabin’s assassination, Israel has moved away from peace, not only politically, but morally. Especially morally.
It’s no coincidence that one of the first sentences the murderer Yigal Amir said in court, when asked why he killed Rabin, was “He’s not my prime minister as long as Rabin was elected by the Arabs, literally by the Arabs, 20 percent.”
As Haaretz reported three days after the assassination, Amir said: “I was at that demonstration; 50 percent of them were Arabs. Did anyone report that? Did anyone say they were 50 percent Arab? Are the Arabs the ones who will decide my future in this country?”
The right managed to instill in the consciousness of all Israeli leaders that they must not rely on Arab citizens. That they must not invite them to “peace camp” events, not even to the most technical opposition meetings, those merely on setting the Knesset agenda.
Already then, Benjamin Netanyahu and his camp realized that the only way to defeat the left was to eliminate the possibility of a Jewish-Arab partnership, because shared hope breaks down the walls between Jews and Arabs, between Palestinians and Israelis. It creates a strong political camp that threatens the Israeli right. So it must be annihilated, murdered.
This development is dangerous to them precisely because it’s possible.
In the 1996 election, in an effort to prevent Netanyahu from coming to power, the Arab community voted en masse for Shimon Peres, despite the pain of the horrific massacre in Qana in southern Lebanon earlier that year. Had the decision depended only on Jewish Israelis, Netanyahu would have won with 63 percent of the vote, not the actual result of 50.5 percent.
Since that night, one can clearly observe a process in which the right has labeled every attempt to talk about a partnership as a “security threat.”
And I, like you, see how those same forces that hailed the assassination, in words or in silence, are now part of the government, all under Netanyahu, the serial killer of peace.
It’s clear to all of us: The Kahanist right advances a policy that continues what began then, a policy of cruel occupation, dehumanization, annihilation, the denial of rights, racism, fascism, supremacy, institutionalized violence and wild incitement against Arab citizens and their representatives.
They didn’t only murder Rabin, they also managed to dispel the idea that the occupation can end and a just Israeli-Palestinian peace can be established.
But they didn’t manage to kill my memory.
They didn’t manage to kill the images of people dancing in Carmel Center, in Tel Aviv, in Ramallah, and of the young Palestinians who handed out olive branches at the checkpoints. And in Gaza, when Dr. Haider Abed al-Shafi, the head of the Palestinian delegation, returned from the 1991 Madrid Conference, even before Oslo, tens of thousands took to the streets, danced and rejoiced because they believed that the peace process was really about to begin.
They didn’t, and they never will, manage to kill the very deep understanding that there are two peoples here, and that without peace, we will not be able to live here.
Thirty years after Rabin’s assassination, we stand again at a decisive moment. After these terrible two years, we must say with courage: The right’s path must be condemned, exposed and isolated, because it’s not the way of the peace camp.
In the past 30 years, the Zionist left’s defining event was the Oslo Accords; the right used them to attack the left as naive, claiming that Oslo brought neither peace nor security.
Today the right’s defining event is October 7 and the war that followed, and this war was an absolute ideological defeat for the right. We must say to the members of this camp loudly and clearly: You exploited October 7 for political and messianic interests. Your path has failed. This war, despite all the destruction, all the suffering, and above all, despite all the victims, ended without a political victory over the Palestinian people.
The conflict cannot continue to be managed by force. We must all understand that what is not achieved by force will not be achieved by greater force. This war, more than any other, clarified for everyone the limits of power. There is no military solution, and there will be no military solution. We must also say that there is only one solution: a political one.
There are two peoples here, and both are here to stay: 7.5 million Jews and 7.5 million Palestinians who are prepared to live and struggle here. It’s better that we live than that we die. Thirty years on, perhaps the time has finally come to stop fearing peace and start fearing life without it.
Arabic, too, uses the expression “false dawn,” al-fajr al-kadhib. After the false dawn, the darkness returns deeper before the true dawn emerges.
Oslo was the false dawn. But it was a step. An important step. And the last two years have been, for all of us, the darkest night.
After this night the true dawn will come. When it does, it will shine on all of us, on all our children, Palestinians and Israelis alike, who so deserve to grow up with dignity, security and peace.
The sun will rise, and we will have to get up and begin to walk again. But this time we must walk together: Jews and Arabs, Israelis and Palestinians, side by side. I call on the 100,000 demonstrators who came to Rabin Square on Saturday night: We are your partners, and you are our partners
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