Thirty years since Rabin: a moment for honest reckoning
November 4, 2025 marks 30 years since the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin—shot by an Israeli extremist at the culmination of a peace rally in Tel Aviv. I was 22 years old then, a combat soldier in the IDF. A few years earlier I had moved to Israel believing that I could be part of the national project of helping Israel live up to the highest ideals of democracy, including its quest for peace.
That might sound terribly naive when we look at Israel’s slide into autocracy, at the increasing violence that has become part-and-parcel of the settlement enterprise, and at the immoral and illegal actions of Israel’s government in the Gaza War. But at the time, Israel was on a different trajectory: the occupation was finally being wound down, Basic Laws passed three years before the assasination had turned Israeli courts into defenders of civil liberties, decades of discrimination against Arab and Mizrachi citizens were being confronted. And until that night, I – and many others – could not believe that internal political disagreements in Israel would be settled by firing bullets rather than at the ballot box.
Yigal Amir – Rabin’s assassin – showed up with his weapon in Tel Aviv that night after being immersed in a sea of incitement, which ironically was fostered by some of those who, today, hold high office in Israel. Benjamin Netanyahu – then a young opposition leader – presided over demonstrations where Rabin’s coffin was bandied about, where posters hung that depicted Rabin in a Nazi uniform. Chants of Rabin boged (“Rabin the traitor”) were common, and Netanyahu stood silently as they echoed. Similarly, current Internal Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir infamously threatened Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin weeks before his assassination. After the hood ornament from the prime minister’s official vehicle was stolen, Ben Gvir appeared on national TV holding the Cadillac emblem and saying, “Just like we got to this ornament, we can get to Rabin too.”
The same hateful, angry, and violent environment that these men encouraged thirty years ago has now washed over all of Israel.
My own son is now roughly the same age that I was when Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated. The Israel that he knows looks nothing like the Israel I knew in 1995. He has no memory of seeing an Israeli prime minister genuinely seeking to make peace with the Palestinians. Instead, he knows about the occupation, about a judicial system unable (or perhaps unwilling) to check the violence of settlers and right-wing thugs, and about a country that is plausibly accused of genocide.
It is no wonder that younger Americans – across all political affiliations – feel less warmly toward Israel than the people of my generation or older. We can still imagine that Israel could be a better place, a point of pride and not of shame.
Rabin once said: “We say to you today, in a loud and a clear voice: enough of blood and tears. Enough.” In revisiting that call today, we must ask: enough of what? Enough of occupation? Enough of the violence? Enough of fascism?
Thirty years later, our world looks more fractured, Israel is governed by immoral autocrats, the Palestinian horizon appears bleak, and it has fewer allies than ever.
Yet the past remains instructive.
Rabin’s assassination shows us that the internal rot – the degradation of discourse, the weakening of civic norms, the embrace of extremism – can kill not only a person, but the possibility of progress.
Let November 4, 2025 be more than a date. Let it be a marker of accountability – to ourselves, to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and to the Jewish state in its best sense.
Let us say: we choose democracy over despair, compromise over nihilism, and hope over defeat. Because to honor Rabin, we must act. To safeguard Israel’s future, we must engage. To enable peace, we must be brave.
