ceremony with both the Interior Minister and the Prime Minister present. The

ceremony with both the Interior Minister and the Prime Minister present. The first was in Ofakim, near where I’d worked in the fields with Yigal Garber in the 1950s. Shortly after we arrived, a group of protestors started shouting at Rabin. Manyac, they yelled, “maniac”. Boged: traitor. At the second event, near Haifa, busloads of protestors from right-wing religious schools shouted abuse at Rabin when he rose to speak. As the Knesset vote on Oslo II approached, the hatred reached new levels. The day before, thousands of protesters packed into Jerusalem’s Zion Square. Some shouted “Death to Rabin!” Others burned pictures of him, or passed out photos of him dressed in an Arab keffityeh, or even a Nazi uniform. Bibi had publicly declared that opposition to the agreement must remain within the bounds of the law. Yet as he addressed the baying mob from a hotel balcony, he uttered not a single word of reproach. In fact, he called Rabin’s government “illegitimate”, because it relied in part on the votes of Israeli Arab Knesset members. The day of the vote, the mob descended on the Knesset. Rabin had called a government meeting beforehand. When I got there, the crowd was so large that I was taken in through a special security entrance away from the front of the building. But the Housing Minister, Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, arrived late and tried to drive through the main gate. Protestors pounded furiously on his car and tried to break the windows. Our meeting had already begun when he arrived. He had spent nearly as long as I had in the army, but he was shaken. Interrupting Rabin, he banged his fist on the table. “I’ve been on battlefields,” he said. “I’ve been shot at. I know how to read a situation. I saw their faces. It’s insane! It is beyond anything rational, this kind of hatred.” Pounding the table again, he shouted: “I warn you. It will end with a murder! It will end with a murder!” Rabin motioned for calm. He, too, was concerned by the rhetorical violence, even more so now that it was becoming physical violence. But as he would tell an interviewer a few weeks later, he simply didn’t believe that “a Jew will kill a Jew.” Nor, at that point, did I. After the Knesset vote, which passed by a margin of 61 to 59, plans got underway for a rally in defense of the peace process, and against the tide of hatred on the right. It was the idea of two people: Shlomo Lahat, a Likud mayor of Tel Aviv who now backed Oslo, and a French Jewish businessman named Jean Frydman, a friend of Shimon Peres whom I had got to know and like. But in several of the early planning discussions in which I was involved, Rabin was against the rally, which was to be held in the huge Kings of Israel Square in the 2/7 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_011748