Days after the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, security and government officials here began examining ways to crack down on militant extremists.
As Israeli officials announced Tuesday that they would seek legislation targeting incitement to violence, a police spokesman said four people from the West Bank settlement of Kiryat Arba had been after they appeared on television welcoming the assassination.
Police also continued their efforts to establish whether Yigal Amir, the 25- year-old Israeli who confessed to the killing, had any accomplices or links to Jewish extremist groups.
His brother Hagai was detained Sunday, and a day later he admitted before a Tel Aviv judge that he had altered the bullets used in the assassination to make them more lethal. But he denied knowing of his brother’s plans to kill Rabin.
Meanwhile, Justice Minister David Libai said revisions had to be made to country’s freedom of speech law to exclude incitement as a form of protected speech.
Current laws “were not enough to provide efficient answers for protecting democracy,” Libai said in a statement.
Extremist rhetoric and vehement diatribes against Rabin have been widely blamed as a contributing factor to the assassination. And by Tuesday, inciteful graffiti began to reappear on the streets of Israel.
Police were investigating one incident in which a slogan had been scrawled on a wall in Jerusalem: “Rabin is a victim of peace and Peres in next in line.”
And at the West Bank settlement of Ma’aleh Amos, a sign reportedly read: “We are all Yigal Amir. No entry to Arabs.”
There was also an incident reflecting an angry backlash at settlers, whose protests against the Rabin government sometimes included hot statements denouncing the late leader as a traitor, murderer and Nazi.
An unidentified Israeli man defaced the grave of the gunman who carried out the February 1994 Hebron massacre, telling a reporter that the act was in protest of the Rabin assassination. The Kiryat Arba gravesite of Baruch Goldstein had been turned into a shrine by settlers who believed that the massacre was a heroic act.
In the political arena – amid the calls for unity, restraint and responsibility in the wake of the Rabin slaying – Knesset members began slinging accusations back and forth.
“Our democracy is broken,” Communications Minister Shulamit Aloni told Israel Radio. “We have self-appointed rabbis and prophets that make up their own laws.”
Aloni blamed leaders in the Likud, specifically party leader Benjamin Netanyahu, of tolerating right-wing calls to violence, and of fostering it in some instances as well.
A similar sentiment was expressed by Leah Rabin, the late prime minister’s widow.
In an interview with CNN on Tuesday, she explicitly blamed Netanyahu and Likud for her husband’s death.
Speaking of the “horrible language and horrible pictures” of her husband at right-wing rallies, she said Netanyahu “was there, and he didn’t stop it.”
“I do blame them,” she said.
She also told reporters that she would have preferred not to have shaken Netanyahu’s hand when he passed by Rabin’s coffin, which lay in state at the Knesset on Sunday. But, she added, she did not want to make a public scene.
For their part, members of the right-wing opposition charged the government with capitalizing on the assassination to stamp out all disagreement with its peace policies.
“It is very unhealthy that the government’s policies are a closed book, and anyone who disagrees becomes a part of this tragedy,” Likud Knesset member Ze’ev Begin told Israel Radio.
Meanwhile, an initial inquiry into the assassination by the Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence service, found serious flaws in the functioning of all those responsible for the prime minister’s security.
The Cabinet was scheduled to discuss the inquiry’s findings and to determining whether a state commission should be formed to investigate the circumstances surrounding the assassination.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
