Former Israeli prime minister honored
By Daily Bruin Staff
Nov. 4, 2002 9:00 p.m.
Marking the seventh anniversary of the assassination of former
Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, about 50 people gathered in
Meyerhoff Park Monday, holding lighted white candles to honor his
memory.
UCLA students and guests made speeches and sang memorial songs
that included “A Song for Peace,” the song Rabin sang
before he was assassinated.
The commemoration also paid tribute to humanitarians Martin
Luther King Jr., Mahatma Gandhi and former Egyptian President Anwar
al-Sadat, who, like Rabin, were all murdered while seeking
peace.
On Nov. 4, 1995, Rabin ““ a Nobel Peace Prize winner
““ was shot and killed at an outdoor peace gathering in Tel
Aviv by Yigal Amir, an ultranationalist Israeli who strongly
opposed Rabin’s Middle Eastern diplomatic efforts.
Born in Jerusalem in 1922, Yitzak Rabin entered a 27-year-long
military career at age 18, and his subsequent political career in
the Labor Party led him to the position of Prime Minister in
1974.
Ross Neihaus, the vice president of Bruins for Israel and a
speaker at the event, remembered Rabin as being the man that
brought the Middle East “closer than it has ever been to
peace.” Such an event was epitomized by the historic
handshake between Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian leader Yassar
Arafat in 1993.
Yet in Israel today, in a land that Neihaus quoted Rabin having
said “where parents bury their children,” the prospect
of peace seems remote, after more than two years of intense
fighting in the region.
On the same day that Bruins were remembering an advocate of
peace for the region, a Palestinian suicide bomber killed two and
wounded 12 civilians in a shopping mall in the very city where
Rabin was killed seven years ago.
Yet even against such a violent backdrop, the speeches at the
memorial in UCLA by Bruin Walk were pervaded by a sense of
determined optimism.
“The flame of hope that Yitzhak Rabin gave to each of us
refuses to burn out,” Neihaus said.
“Each one of us can and must be an architect for
peace,” he continued.
Tami Reiss, the principal organizer of the event and a board
member of the UCLA Hillel Jewish Student Association, invited
speakers to talk in front of a banner for peace.
The banner, which has been available for signing in Westwood
Plaza, has messages from over 200 people in a number of languages
that include English, Hebrew, Arabic and Korean.
Reiss called upon such a vision for peace to be
“independent of race, sex, religion, and country of
origin.” The event itself was co-sponsored by the Indian
Student Union, Asian-Pacific Coalition, Jewish Student Union,
Bruins for Israel, and the Hillel Jewish Student Union.
