25,000 youth rally for peace in Tel Aviv

by Hans Lebrecht

This article was reprinted from the April 12, 1997 issue of the People's Weekly World. For subscription information see below. All rights reserved - may be used with PWW credits.

On Saturday evening, April 5, about 25,000 Israelis, most of them young, filled Tel-Aviv's Rabin Square, following a call by the movement "Dor shalem doresh Shalom" (A whole generation demands peace).

This movement is recruited mainly from the Zionist Labor, Meretz and Shomer Hatza'ir youth movements. The only politician of the elder generation who was given the floor, was Labor chair and former Prime Minister Shimon Peres.

Peres asked the crowd to fulfill the legacy of Yitzhak Rabin, the former prime minister, assassinated at this same square on Nov. 4, 1995. Rabin was assassinated by a fanatic fundamentalist precisely because he started the peace process with the aim to achieve peace with the Palestinian and all other Arab neighbors. The assassin aimed to assassinate, together with Rabin, the peace process.

Conspicuously, besides Member of Knesset Yael Dayan, no other member of the Labor leadership appeared on the rally's rostrum. On the other hand, from within the Labor Party and the socialist youth and Meretz, opponents of Peres' inclination to join a broad Likud-Labor coalition cabinet raised slogans on banners and posters, as well as in speeches from the floor, such as "Bibi lehapeel velo lehatzil" which means: topple Bibi (Netanyahu) instead of saving him."

In related news, Leah Rabin, the widow of former Israeli PM Yitzhk Rabin, said this week she can never forgive Netanyahu for fostering a "hostile climate" that led to her husband's assassination in 1995.

Netanyahu, leader of the conservative Likud Party, and Rabin, head of Israel's Labor Party, were political foes. Leah Rabin described a photograph of Netanyahu leading a demonstration in which people were carrying a coffin bearing the sign "Yitzhak Rabin - the murderer of Zionism."

"He bears the responsibility," Leah Rabin said, "for creating a politically horrible climate against my husband, saying this man doesn't know where he's taking us, he's misleading us, he is really destroying our future."