JERUSALEM — For the second time in six years, thousands of Israelis filed slowly past a flag-draped coffin outside Israel's parliament on Thursday. Once again, they came to honor a slain political leader, a member of the generation that fought for independence in 1948, a general who had survived all the nation's wars only to fall to an assassin's bullets.
Some of the same people who paid last respects to fallen Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin here in November 1995 returned Thursday to say goodbye to Tourism Minister Rehavam Zeevi. The two started out as comrades in arms in the Palmach, the strike force of the pre-state Jewish underground. They ended their lives on opposite sides of the political spectrum, Rabin gunned down by a right-wing Jew who regarded him as a traitor for trading land for peace with the Palestinians, Zeevi slain by Palestinian militants avenging their leader's death.
The grim, vengeful mood here is drastically different from the wild grief that gripped the nation after Rabin's assassination. Then, there was widespread fear that Rabin's killer, Yigal Amir, might succeed in his goal of burying the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
Today, most believe that the process is dead, that Zeevi's killing was the final blow to Rabin's partnership with Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat. Within hours of Zeevi's killing, the Israeli government issued an ultimatum to Arafat to hand over the assassins or face a severe Israeli military response.
Eulogizing his father, whom he called by his nickname, "Gandhi," Yiftah-Palmach Zeevi, named for Zeevi's Palmach unit, made a blunt request of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
"To you, Arik, such a close friend of father's at the beginning of the road: avenge, just as Gandhi would have avenged after you, and return to lead as we know you," the son said.
The demand resonated with a nation thoroughly disillusioned by the Palestinian Authority and its leader.
"The experiment is over," said Meir Meshulam, 49, a Likud supporter. Meshulam never voted for Zeevi's ultranationalist Moledet party, but drove for three hours with friends from the southern town of Eilat to mourn him. He made the same trip to pay respects to the fallen Rabin.
Even then, he said, he knew that Rabin's gamble on the Palestine Liberation Organization as a partner was mistaken. Zeevi's death, Meshulam hopes, has convinced the rest of the nation that "Arafat must be deported. He's bad for himself, for his people, for us."
