Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on October 20, 2021

The assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the hatred of Benjamin Netanyahu. Nothing else in the world occupies the Israeli center-lefts attention, energizes and unites it, arouses and stimulates it like the murder of the father and the hatred of the successor. The camps two major obsessions joined up this week to become one.

Netanyahu chose not to attend the memorial ceremony at Mount Herzl, where it was proclaimed that the power of the people had defeated the power of one. The people being the center-left and the one, of course, is Netanyahu. The enlightened and the beautiful understood the situation. Weve transitioned from darkness to light, as the Rabin family rejoiced with other Israelis. Better that Netanyahu wasnt there to spoil the affair.

It began with the mass candle-lighting the day after the Rabin assassination by young people, the youth who proclaimed the ugliness of the other camp, which walks in darkness. They sobbed in the city squares.

The candles soon went out, but those who lit them spread out in all directions with an entire generation demanding peace. Thus began the ritual that has continued over the quarter of a century since: Twice a year, once on the Hebrew date and once on the Gregorian date, they gather, lament, sing, vow no more, talk about a heritage whose meaning no one is quite sure of, despise the rightists, and mourn a country that has gone to rot. By doing so, they are cleansed and purified.

These purification ceremonies are essential for the center left, which has been out of power for most of the years since the assassination and, even when it has been in power, has been unable to effect change. Worse still, the center-left camp has lost its way and so it has come to use Rabins murder as its spiritual shelter. You can always be against violence, hate and murder whos for it? You can always be for unity and peace whos against it? You can always declare that the death of Rabin was the death of peace. But what peace? Where is it? Why did peace die when Rabin died?

Time has done its work. Half the country is now named after Rabin, but in the meantime, a generation has grown up who never knew him. The death cult has been unable to preserve the extinguished candle's memory and the leftist camp that has since been silenced. Thus was born the hatred of Netanyahu. The hatred that fills the vacuum, energizes the camp into action and gives it an intoxicating sense of civic engagement, concern, and a spirit of struggle.

But just like the commemorations for Rabin, where the mourners dont know what it is they are commemorating, the struggle against Netanyahu likewise failed to provide an answer. What are we proposing instead? What should be in his place? Who should be in his place? What path should we be taking? Whats the difference between our path and the path of the hated right?

These questions remain unanswered as the center-left focuses on the goal of eradicating evil at all cost. The good, they reason, will naturally arise when evil is removed. The ending will be happy, everything will be good.

The good has now appeared, and its name is Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid. But it is doubtful whether it really is good, and, of course, it has nothing to do with the left.

This week it all came together: The eloquent but hollow speeches without Netanyahu, who declined this year to listen to the annual round of insults hurled at him at Mount Herzl. They spoke loftily about values, but no one said a word about actually ending the occupation during their tribute to the greatest man of peace, supposedly, ever to arise in Israel.

Instead, they spoke about Israels glorious democracy. We prevented the attempts to crush democracy, Lapid said proudly. Rabins grandson, Yonatan Ben-Artzi, went even further: After a long war for freedom and the image of democracy, the people of Israel won.

Such hypocrisy and piety, alongside the self-beautification so characteristic of this camp. What will we do, we guardians of democracy, while we exaggerate the danger to Israels sensitive democratic soul from the rule of the one? No word about the five million people who live under one of the worlds cruelest tyrannies, the Israeli occupation.

Not a word is spoken of this tyranny; we only adorn ourselves with the deception of a democracy that Rabin sanctified and Netanyahu desecrated. And this we call the camp of values and democracy, as opposed to the boors of the right.

Read the original post:

The Israeli left's two obsessions and their consequences - Haaretz

Category: Israel
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