Yitzhak Rabin’s Son Warns Donald Trump To Stop ‘Incitement’
Image by Getty Images
— The son of slain Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin said Donald Trump’s “ugly” campaign rhetoric is threatening American democracy and creating an atmosphere similar to the one in Israel leading up to his father’s assassination.
In a USA Today op-ed on Sunday, Yuval Rabin wrote that the recent call by Trump to “Second Amendment people” is the same kind of “incitement” that “led to the murder” of his father in 1995.
“More than one commentator in Israel and the U.S. has pointed to the parallels between Israel in the 1990s and the U.S. today,” Rabin wrote, citing articles in Haaretz and The New York Times.
Trump’s comments last week — suggesting that gun-rights supporters could take action against Hillary Clinton if she “wants to abolish” the Second Amendment, or the right to bear arms — also prompted Connecticut Gov. Daniel Malloy to make the Rabin assassination comparison.
“I instantly thought about Rabin and Israel,” Malloy, a Democrat, said on MSNBC. “There were rallies going on in Israel where ‘Death to Rabin’ was shouted and politicians didn’t respond, so I’m going to respond.”
Rabin was shot and killed by a right-wing extremist, Yigal Amir, amid tensions over Rabin’s push to make peace with the Palestinians.
Yuval Rabin went on to argue in his piece that Trump’s words are “a threat to American democracy.”
“It is not my place to make this claim,” he wrote. “But I have been touched by political violence, and have witnessed the environment that led to at least one person to believe such violence was called for.”
It’s our birthday and we’re still celebrating!
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news.
This week we celebrate 129 years of the Forward. We’re proud of our origins as a Yiddish print publication serving Jewish immigrants. And we’re just as proud of what we’ve become today: A trusted source of Jewish news and opinion, available digitally to anyone in the world without paywalls or subscriptions.
We’ve helped five generations of American Jews make sense of the news and the world around them — and we aren’t slowing down any time soon.
As a nonprofit newsroom, reader donations make it possible for us to do this work. Support independent, agenda-free Jewish journalism and our board will match your gift in honor of our birthday!
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
