Israel Remembers Slain P.M. Rabin

Ten Years Later, Israel Still Has Many Questions, Strong Feelings

(CBS/AP)  Israel on Friday began more than a week of commemorations marking the 10th anniversary of the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin with a small candlelight ceremony at his grave attended by friends and relatives.

The anniversary reawakens bitter divisions in Israeli society, reports CBS News correspondent Robert Berger. The dovish left still accuses the right of fomenting an atmosphere of incitement that led to the assassination.

"Israel will never be the same, it's something that we can't ever come to terms with," an Israeli man told Berger.

"I don't know what is going to be with our country, I'm very worried. There's a lot of hate," added a woman.

In his first interview since the assassination, the man in charge of Rabin's security the night he was killed called for a new inquiry into the killing, saying key questions remain unanswered.

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Rabin Assassination: Hear excerpts from CBS Radio News' award-winning coverage of the killing of Israel's prime minister 10 years ago.

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Rabin, who negotiated the historic Oslo peace accords with the Palestinians, was assassinated on Nov. 4, 1995, after a peace rally in Tel Aviv by Yigal Amir, an ultranationalist Jew who considered Rabin a traitor.

Amir "hurt in a very, very severe way, the peace process itself," said former Rabin aide Danny Yatom.

On Friday, Rabin's family and friends from his Labor Party gathered at his graveside in Jerusalem to light candles, lay wreaths and remember the man who paid with his life for negotiating Israel's first peace agreement with the Palestinians.

"What he started will never be forgotten and we shall continue to act in the same way until we shall achieve the most noble goal of our life, and that is peace among ourselves and our neighbors," said Shimon Peres, Israel's vice premier, who shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Rabin and Yasser Arafat for forging the 1993 interim peace accord.

In Tel Aviv, dozens of Israelis flocked to the square where Rabin was gunned down. Many mourners fretted about the divisions in Israeli society and expressed fears of another political killing.

"When he was murdered, I felt like someone who lost his father," said Nachum Lev, who came to pay his respects. "When we see everything that is going on today, the division among our population, I'm afraid we have a lot of work to do in order to prevent such cases in the future."

A poll shows 84 percent of Israelis believe another political assassination could take place.

"Many of us amongst the Israeli society did not draw any lesson," said Yatom.

In the run-up to last month's pullout from the Gaza Strip, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon — a vocal opponent of Rabin at the time of the killing — was surrounded by heavy security due to widespread threats and incitement against him. The assumption was that any attempt on his life would most likely come from Israel's ultranationalist wing, which strongly opposed the pullout.

Amir, who is serving a life sentence for the killing, has never expressed remorse and remains something of a hero for an extremist fringe. The anniversary has given new life to long-simmering conspiracy theories among extremists that Amir did not act alone, and perhaps even was assisted by Israeli security personnel.

Dror Yitzhaki, the official responsible for Rabin's security the night of the assassination, brushed off such conspiracy theories. But in his first interview since the killing, he called for a new inquiry into intelligence and security failures leading up to the killing.

Yitzhaki, who headed the Shin Bet internal security service's bodyguard unit, noted that none of the prime minister's security detail fired at the killer. Amir was arrested on the spot.

"The security guards ... had been trained for years ... that the second bullet, if not the first, would be theirs," Yitzhaki, who resigned after the killing, told Channel Two television.

Yitzhaki also said a sergeant in an intelligence unit overheard a conversation in a public restroom about a "little Yemenite guy" who had a gun and had serious intentions to kill Rabin. But that information was never passed along, he said. Amir's family traces their roots to Yemen.

Because questions remain about the events leading up to the assassination, Yitzhaki said he wonders "whether there is room to set up another state inquiry to investigate the truth."

The Rabin commemorations also have rekindled debate about Rabin's legacy. Some argue that Amir radically changed the course of peacemaking.

Six months after the murder, the dovish Peres lost an election to Likud hard-liner Benjamin Netanyahu, who in turn was defeated by Rabin protege Ehud Barak. Neither could drive peace forward, and in late 2000, a new Palestinian uprising erupted. More than 1,000 Israelis and 3,500 Palestinians have since died, though the bloodshed has slowed since a truce declaration last February.

Others say the peace process would have run aground anyway, because the Oslo deal didn't address contentious issues such as conflicting claims to Jerusalem and the fate of West Bank Jewish settlements. The Palestinians claim the West Bank and Gaza for an independent state, with east Jerusalem as its capital.

Today, Israelis today are less divided over land concessions than in 1995. The Gaza pullout met less resistance than feared, and polls show most Israelis supporting the idea of a Palestinian state.

At the same time, a recent poll found that about a fifth of Israelis think Amir should be pardoned.