Two American presidents urged Israelis at a peace rally marking the 20th anniversary of the murder of the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin to take risks for peace — but neither has ever had any personal experience with taking such a risk themselves.
Thousands attended the rally Saturday night in Tel Aviv’s Rabin Square marking the 20-year anniversary of the assassination of the late prime minister during a peace rally on Nov 4, 1995.
Two U.S. presidents spoke at the event, and while both spoke on the importance of taking risks for peace, neither personally risked anything for that lofty cause at the rally, nor in the past, ever.
Israel’s President Reuven Rivlin also declared, “We should have no fear. Israel’s democracy is solid enough, and we are brave enough and strong enough to open wide Israel’s gates so that all the groups within us may play an equal part in shaping the character and future of the State of Israel.”
And Israel has indeed opened her gates. The gates are opened so wide that Israeli Arab Knesset members legally call upon constituents to destroy the very nation in whose parliament they participate, and with whose tax monies their salaries and benefits are paid.
“We should have no fear,” declared President Rivlin, but the question is, from what? Thousands of police forces have been called in to beef up security in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria, and Arab terror attacks continue to escalate in the current wave of terror.
Both American leaders called on Israelis to take risks for peace, while neither has ever physically done so themselves.
U.S. President Barack Obama spoke in a pre-recorded video, intoning, “A bullet can take a man’s life, but his spirit and his dream of peace will never die.” It was a message nearly identical to that of Hezbollah and Hamas, if one deletes the “dream of peace.”
Hugely popular former U.S. President Bill Clinton, who was the keynote speaker at the event, spoke from behind bulletproof glass.
“After all the fighting and battles he engaged in, he never stopped seeing other people, including his adversaries, as human beings,” Clinton said.
“All of you must decide … how to finish his legacy, for the last chapter must be written by the people he gave his life to, to save and to nourish.
“You have to decide that the risks for peace are not as severe as the risks of walking away from it,” he told those who attended the rally.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is more than familiar with those risks, having served in the IDF’s elite Sayeret Matkal special ops unit in his youth, met with Clinton at the prime minister’s office in Jerusalem on Friday.