Death of a peacemaker
A new play revisiting the assassination of Yitzchak Rabin is on in London next week, John Nathan met its writer,the Israeli film maker Amos Gitai
INetanyahu and Trump were best friends and have similar tactics to get into power
CONSIDER IT a civic activity,” says celebrated Israeli filmmaker Amos Gitai of his art. Gitai is the man behind Yitzhak Rabin: Chronicle of an Assassination, a theatrical response to the murder which to the day opens on the 26th anniversary of Rabin’s assassination at west London’s Coronet Theatre.
Described as “halfway between a lament and a lullaby” the show features actors and musicians and draws on the memories of Rabin’s widow Leah whom Gitai interviewed extensively.
Gitai well remembers where he was when the Israeli prime minister was murdered on November 4, 1995. He would have been at the massive peace rally where Jewish extremist Yigal Amir shot the Nobel Peace Prize winner, but his mother was involved in a road accident. So instead he and his family (he is married with two daughters) were in Haifa in his mother’s apartment when a news flash came over the radio.
“I think there was a programme about cinema,” remembers Gitai. The subject is close to his heart. An auteur and documentarian, his work has been shown in such august venues as the Pompidou Centre and Lincoln centres, while actors who have worked with the director include Natalie Portman and Juliet Binoche. So as that radio programme was interrupted there must have been a fleeting moment of irritation.
“I remember the [sense of] helplessness at being confronted with evil,” says Gitai. “And of the weakness of the [left’s] political reaction. Perez did not want to invoke [the assassination in the election] which is why he lost, in my mind.”
He overcame his personal sense of helplessness by directing the docudrama Rabin, the Last Day which premiered in 2015. Out of that came that play now at the Coronet. Both works pull no punches when looking at the extent to which Israel’s religious and political right were responsible for ending both Rabin’s peace deal and Rabin himself.“There was a moment,” says Gitai. “when
Rabin and the Palestinians, and also Perez created many commissions dealing with the economy, water and … about Jerusalem and refugees. They decided to confront all these complex issues, to open them up and see what the possible solutions are. It was a rare moment, as the play says, of trying to find a way out if this was an endless conflict. And it is this that was decapitated with the assassination of Rabin.”
In one of the film’s many remarkable scenes news archive shows a large rally opposing Rabin before his assassination. Disturbing footage shows Netanyahu giving a speech to the crowds some of whom are holding images of Rabin dressed in an SS uniform while others chant “Death to Rabin.” For Gitai there are parallels to be drawn with the Trump rally held just before the storming of Congress. “Netanyahu and Trump were best friends,” he says. “And they have similar tactics to get into power.” As far as Rabin is concerned, “Netanyahu is not innocent in this matter,” he says. “I’m not saying they wanted to kill Rabin outright But they really were interested to destabilise his government and his coalition and they had a part in in what happened.”
Gitai sees hope with Netanyahu out of the picture. “For Israelis who did not share his point of view of it was really becoming very oppressive. Filmmakers were asked by the previous minister of culture to sign allegiance to the state, the kind of thing which was asked in the old Soviet Union or even worse regimes.”
As for Rabin, he thinks his spirit might yet return. “Let’s believe in Shakespeare,” says Gitai invoking Hamlet in which a murdered King unleashes a kind of justice on those who unfairly inherited his throne. “I think the phantom of Rabin will be back.”