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Rabin killing 'written on wall', filmmaker Gitai says
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[September 08, 2015]
By Michael Roddy
VENICE (Reuters) - Israeli
filmmaker Amos Gitai says his film "Rabin: The Last
Day", screened at the Venice Film Festival on Monday,
won't end conspiracy theories about the assassination of
Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995
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But it does show, he says, that there was a right-wing hate
campaign against the late war hero and former general.
Rabin was excoriated by critics on the right for signing the
1993 Oslo Peace Accords that recognized the Palestine Liberation
Organisation (PLO) and ceded limited control of parts of the
West Bank and Gaza.
He and Shimon Peres - his then foreign minister and later
Israel's president - knew they were targets, Gitai told Reuters
at the festival, where his film is in competition for the top
Lion d'Or prize to be awarded on Saturday.
"I think that we have to go back 20 years and see this political
figure Rabin, just being elected, who from Day One of his
re-election puts as his main issue to try to reconcile the
conflict," Gitai said.
"He's obviously risking his life, because we know the end."
The film uses archival footage of a campaign rally by Benjamin
Netanyahu, the current prime minister who at that time was
leader of the opposition Likud party, speaking from a balcony
draped with a huge banner saying "Death to Arabs".
Rally participants hold up posters showing Rabin dressed like
PLO leader Yasser Arafat in a traditional Arab keffiyeh
headdress, or caricatured as a member of the Nazi Gestapo.
Gitai's film also recreates secret meetings by
ultra-nationalists who say Rabin deserves to die under a
provision of Judaism's Talmudic law called "din rodef", which is
analogous to the Islamic fatwa edict.
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Gitai said his film will not set to rest persistent theories in
Israel that the right arranged Rabin's assassination, or that the
left did it to discredit the right.
"Obviously I don't have any hidden information," Gitai said,
suggesting the vicious atmosphere at the time was more to blame.
"For me there is no conspiracy, it was actually written on the
wall."
He said the death of Rabin, whom he knew personally, was a blow to
Middle East peace. The prime minister was gunned down by
ultra-nationalist law student Yigal Amir as he left a peace rally in
Tel Aviv on Nov 4, 1995.
"In this Rabin government, there is a profound understanding that if
you want to make peace ... a real reconciliation, to construct
something different, you have to be aware that the other (side)
exists, that he has another vision of the conflict.
"I think that Rabin was really the first and until now the only
Israeli political figure who understood," Gitai said.
(Editing by Tom Heneghan)
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