Rabin, The Last Day

Although its tone is more melancholy than frenetic, a good deal of Oliver Stone-like activism permeates Amos Gitai's film about the 1995 assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by Yigal Amir, a nationalist zealot who opposed the government's embrace of the peace initiative represented by the Oslo Accords. Gitai employs a combination of archival footage, dramatic recreations (some highly speculative), and interviews (including one with Rabin's close ally Shimon Peres) to capture the mood of the country at the time—essentially an atmosphere of shrill division in which Rabin's opponents accused him of treason, called him a Nazi, and even issued death threats. Gradually, the film turns its focus to the work of the Shamgar commission's investigation of the assassination. Into the re-creations of the commission's deliberations, Gitai inserts flashbacks—suggested by some secret testimony—showing conversations among right-wing religious leaders that would justify killing Rabin on the basis of din rodef, a supposedly biblical injunction that permits the execution of someone endangering the survival of the Jews, which Rabin was accused of due to surrendering land to the Palestinians. Here, The Last Day steers into the realm of conspiracy theory, not only implying that Amir might have acted in league with larger forces, but also that the commission might have suppressed—or chosen to overlook—evidence of this fact. Even if the viewer chooses to ignore the controversial implications, Gitai's film powerfully argues that the malignant political atmosphere of Israel, circa 1995, encouraged an act of violence that has colored the nation's policies ever since. Highly recommended. Aud: C, P. (F. Swietek)