It's hard to talk about peace after the last two years, but I want you to know that people in Israel do. And one of the clearest voices out there in Israel right now is that of hostage survivor Gadi Moses.
He said, “We can at least try to reach an agreement with the Palestinians, with Syria and with Lebanon. It is good to live for our country, and we must spare no effort so that our children, grandchildren, will no longer know war. Yitzhak Rabin, who was a soldier and a commander for a long time before he was Prime Minister, also believed in these things and he paid for it with his life.”
Thirty years ago, Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated. Rabin was Israel's prime minister, a military commander turned crusader for peace. He knew that you make peace with your enemies and he fought hard for his and Shimon Peres' vision of a new Middle East.
He tried to implement the two-state solution to create a Palestinian state which will live peacefully side-by-side with Israel. The Palestinian resistance movement, which calls for no Israel from the river to the sea, did not like it, and extremist Jews did not like it either. And on November 4th, 1994, thirty years ago, he was assassinated.
I was young at the time, and idealistic, and I also believed their dreams of peace and I was devastated when that dream was shattered. And after 30 years of blood and extremism and of the Palestinians consistently refusing peace offers again and again, I, at times, also lost hope. But we can never lose hope, and people like Gadi Moses should be our north star.
If a man who was kidnapped by Hamas saw members of his community and family murdered, spent two years at the hands of the Islamic Jihad in captivity in underground tunnels, tortured, abused, starved, if he can still talk about peace and still strive for peace and dream of peace, so can I, and so can you.
We remember Yitzhak Rabin, and we keep our focus on peace. Am Yisrael Chai