http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/
Call it Rabinstock or Rabinpallooza. It’s the annual anniversary of Yitzchak Rabin’s death transformed into a tawdry spirit rally for the even more tawdry remnants of Israel’s left.
The assassination of the former Israeli PM has become the “Camelot” of the left with Rabin as an unlikely JFK. American liberals nourished themselves on the fantasy that race relations would have been solved and Vietnam would have been avoided if only their golden boy hadn’t been shot in Dallas. It was more soothing than dealing with the reality that all the problems they cynically associated with Nixon would have happened even if Lee Harvey Oswald had stayed in Minsk.
The Israeli left has has always been behind the times. They had to wait until the Lebanon War for their Vietnam War and they are only now learning to embrace the post and multi everything order. And so they had to wait until the 90s for their own Camelot, their incarnation of the golden age that might have been if only Rabin hadn’t died.
Golden ages don’t depend on one man. If liberalism had led to a better America, it would have worked just as well when LBJ and Nixon implemented even more radical versions of JFK’s policies. If the peace process had worked, it would have worked under Peres and Barak and Olmert. It never did.
American liberals in perpetual mourning for Camelot are forced to ascribe everything to charisma. Israeli leftists don’t even have that comfort. Rabin was hardly a charismatic figure. Unlike American liberals, whose attempts to blame JFK’s assassination by a fanatical leftist who had defected to the USSR and attempted to defect to Cuba created a growth industry in convoluted conspiracy theories; their Israeli counterparts take refuge in reducing everything to a blame game for the right.