Israel Matzav

30% of the Israeli public wants to pardon Yigal Amir

YNet is reporting this morning that a survey of the Israeli public taken this week shows that some 30% of the Israeli public supports pardoning Yigal Amir, the convicted assassin of Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin, at some point in time.

According to YNet, five percent of the Israeli public supports pardoning Amir now, eleven years after the murder, while 25 percent of the public believes that he should be pardoned 25 years from now. Some 69 percent of respondents replied that they oppose a future pardoning. This marks a significant change compared to a similar poll conducted last year by YNet's Hebrew newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth. Figures in 2005 showed that 76 percent of Israelis opposed any pardoning, while 18 percent believed that Amir should be set free.

We get these surveys every year at this time - Rabin was assassinated on November 4, 1995, which corresponds with the 11th day of the Jewish month of Heshvan - next Thursday. And every year, the surveys go on to show how there is greater support on the right and among religious Jewish Israelis than there is on the left for pardoning Amir, and the left goes into a frenzy. If that's what you want to see, go follow the link above. If you want to know why 30% of the Israeli public thinks Amir should be pardoned, keep reading here. I will tell you the truth: 30% of the Israeli public thinks that Yigal Amir either did not murder Yitzchak Rabin or did not do so alone.

So long as the Israeli government doesn't come clean about the activities of General Security Service Agent Avishai Raviv (also known as Champagne), who pretended to be Amir's friend, and so long as the Israeli government doesn't come clean about the lapse of time that it took to get Rabin to the hospital after he was shot, and so long as the Israeli government doesn't come clean about the discrepancies among the autopsy report and the hospital admission record and what the public has been told, the percentage of Israelis who ostensibly favor pardoning Yigal Amir will only increase every year. So long as the Israeli government refuses to answer the questions in the three posts linked in this paragraph and in the next one, more and more Israelis will favor pardoning Yigal Amir each year.

The truth is that the Israeli public is answering a question that the surveys never ask: Do you believe that Yigal Amir murdered Yitzchak Rabin, and if so do you believe that he did so alone? The percentage of Israelis answering one or both of those two questions "no" increases every year and will continue to increase until the government tells the whole truth about what happened on the night of November 4, 1995, corresponding to the 11th day of the month of Heshvan 5756.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 2:01 PM