Court allows television to air documentary on Rabin killing

JERUSALEM, May 13 (JTA) — At the eleventh hour, Israel’s High Court of Justice rejected petitions that would have prevented this week’s screening of a television documentary on the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. On Tuesday, Israel’s Channel 2 television broadcast Michael Karpin’s film, “The Government is Shocked to Announce…,” about the political atmosphere prior to Rabin’s assassination. The documentary portrayed the extreme right wing as having fueled — and the Likud Party having tolerated — a campaign against Rabin the person, and not just his policies. The petitioners, representing right-wing groups, had argued that the film was tendentious, inaccurate and hurtful to a large segment of the population. Jewish settler leaders said the film’s producers had an agenda, and concealed this when they interviewed Jews in the West Bank and Gaza for the documentary. In a related development, Likud Knesset member Michael Eitan said Tuesday that he had asked the attorney general to reopen an investigation into Avishai Raviv, a right-wing activist who was acquainted with Rabin’s assassin, Yigal Amir, and was alleged to have been an informant for the Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic security service. Eitan told a news conference that it was unfair to accuse the right wing of inciting political violence before Rabin’s murder, while at the time Raviv was allowed to wander and, in his view, tried to incite the national camp to violence. Eitan charged that there had been “an order from above” to halt the investigation into Raviv’s activities.