Rabin’s granddaughter and far-right protester face off

Extreme right-wing activist Itamar Ben Gvir confronted Noa Rothman, granddaughter of assassinated prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, on Tuesday at the Rabin Center in Ramat Aviv as she left an event commemorating 20 years since the swearing-in of the second Rabin government.

It was the second Rabin government that signed the Oslo Accords with the PLO.

Ben Gvir and other activists gathered at the event — where members of that government had held a reunion ceremony — holding Hebrew signs reading, “Oslo criminals must be put on trial.”

A back-and-forth ensued, with the two exchanging accusations.

Rothman, speaking from her car, asked Ben Gvir about his participation in protests against Rabin and the Oslo process in the mid-1990s, and said to Ben Gvir that the assassination of Rabin was a crime.

Ben Gvir responded that the “arming of terrorists” under the Oslo Accords, and the subsequent killings of “more than a thousand” Israelis during the second intifada, was a crime.

She asked him whether he had done any soul-searching over his role in the rise of extremism prior to the assassination. He asked her whether she had done any soul-searching over Rabin’s policies.

Furious by this point, Rothman began to get out of her, and shouted, “My grandfather was murdered, and you’re asking me to do soul-searching? How dare you?”

He’s dead, “murdered,” she went on. “Have you no shame?”

“I’m glad this is a democratic state and you’re in the minority,” she said.

“No, you’re the minority,” he said.

According to Maariv, Rothman called Ben Gvir a disgrace and told him that he and the other protesters needed to go to the Rabin Center museum to see what her grandfather had done in his life.

“That he’s your grandfather is one thing,” Ben Gvir said, “but that he gave weapons to terrorists is something else.”