BYE BYE GAZA - Barry Chamish

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The next day, the IDF radio station broadcast our activities
and then interviewed Rabin's daughter Dahlia. She admitted
that she also was dissatisfied with the official version of her
father's death and wanted answers.
Then the popular Tel Aviv station FM103 reported our work
and interviewed a political scientist who concluded that
because Rabin's murder was political, we had every right to
be at the memorial service doing what we felt was right. The
station was then barraged with faxes and e-mails
commenting on his controversial conclusion.
We didn't make world news as we had hoped and as we
would have if only another hundred people had joined us.
But we accomplished something undefinable and after the
ceremony was over, six of us sat together at a Tel Aviv pub
to figure out what happened that night. Here are some of the
notes I quickly took:
- Far, far more people read our flyers and politely asked to
know more than resisted them. When I spoke to the young
people who wanted to know what I meant by Who Murdered
Yitzhak Rabin, I saw the same faces as the settler youths
who had asked the same question at their rallies. The
difference between these kids is really minimal.
- The only people who violently opposed us were old men.
And there weren't many of them. If there were 100,000
people at the rally, easily half were wearing uniforms of the
Scouts or political youth movements. If these groups hadn't
been organized to come en masse, there would have been
almost no one in that square mourning Rabin.
- And I was a hero to dozens of those kids, Peace Now
included, who saw me recently on television and had read
my books. And these kids, yes Peace Now as well, helped
us all night long by explaining our cause to those who didn't
understand it. And by the way, the press photographers took
rolls of film of this magical encounter without being able to
explain it to themselves.