Young Israelis Debate Lesson of Tragedy : Rabin: Students try to cope with uncertainty, pain of assassination through social exchange.

Was it a crime to call Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin a murderer? Or was that freedom of speech? What is the appropriate language of a democracy, and where are the limits?

Like little Platos before their Socrates, hundreds of 10th-grade Israelis in blue jeans and thick-soled boots, in flannel shirts and black leather jackets, crowded into classrooms normally reserved for geometry and biology lessons to discuss the nature of democracy with their educators.

“I don’t agree with all of those people who said Rabin was a murderer, but that is free speech,” insisted a short-haired girl at the back of a class in Jerusalem’s Rene Cassin High School. “As soon as you limit them, they are going to do other things that are worse.”

Yehezkel Gabay, director of northern Jerusalem’s public high schools, shook his head. “In a democratic society, you are allowed to do everything until you limit the rights of other people. . . . If you say Rabin is a murderer, that you don’t agree with him and he deserves to die, someone is going to take you seriously. . . .

“Today, one person’s freedom of speech led to the fact that another person is dead,” he said.

The room erupted in a fury of questions and irate responses. “What if you call him a traitor?” asked one student.

“Just because you say murderer doesn’t mean someone will kill him,” shouted another. “You’re not telling them to kill him.”

A week after the assassination of Rabin by a Jewish student who opposed the prime minister’s peace policy, Israeli students across the country are trying to move beyond the shock and raw pain of his murder to examine some of the legal and social questions it raises for Israel.

They are asking the same hard questions the rest of society wishes it could answer: Did the name-calling and drawings of Rabin in a Nazi uniform at opposition rallies create a climate of hatred that contributed to his death, as widow Leah Rabin claims? Does Israel need new laws to restrict freedom of speech? Just where is the line between legitimate protest and incitement to violence or rebellion?

These mostly secular children of the late 1970s and early 1980s are no newcomers to national tragedy. Many are descendants of Holocaust survivors, and all wore gas masks as missiles fell on Israel during the 1991 Persian Gulf War. They lost classmates to fighting in Israeli-occupied southern Lebanon and mourned friends killed aboard buses bombed by Islamic extremists opposed to Rabin’s 1993 peace accord with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. Buses these students ride to school every day.

But nothing, they say, prepared them for the murder of Rabin, a 73-year-old leader who had made much of this generation feel as if he were their own grandfather. Many--like their parents--opposed the way he was making peace with Arab neighbors. But it also gave them hope that, when they went into the army for obligatory service after high school, they might not have to go to war.

Some Israelis had begun to see these youths as soft, Israel’s Me Generation, cocky and individualistic, wrapped up in music and cigarette smoke and enjoying the country’s new economic wealth without having had to fight for it.

The emerging peace had brought comforts, sure, but it also raised uncomfortable questions for these teen-agers trying to sort out their politics in a polarized country. Once upon a time, it was clear to them that Arabs were the enemy, that Arabs killed Jews.

Then, Rabin’s peace accords with the Palestinians and Jordan suggested there were good Arabs and bad Arabs. And now the murder of Rabin shakes the very foundation of their beliefs: It teaches them that there are bad Jews, too.

“When I walk around here, I am not so secure about things anymore,” said 16-year-old Rahamim Levi. “The enemy is not just Arabs but people around here.”

How confusing it is to see that, in the aftermath of the killing, it is the old enemy Arafat who is welcomed into widow Leah Rabin’s home to offer his condolences, while opposition Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu--whose party Leah Rabin blamed for fomenting hatred--would not think of coming near.

Now in their mourning, the students are being told that they were racists for having bought their society’s widely held beliefs about the specialness of Jews. In one lecture at the high school, renowned Israeli civil rights lawyer Moshe Hanegbi asked Levi and the other students to consider this:

“What does it say that it was assumed that a Jew wouldn’t murder a Jew?” Hanegbi asked. “There is double racism in this. The Jews are some special race that won’t murder another Jew over a political issue like everyone else? And if they only attack Arabs, then it’s OK?”

Reeling from their grief, many students say they don’t know what to think about the issue of racism or the scores of other basic questions the killing has brought up. All they really know is that this could be the formative experience of their lives.

Gabay, the school director, hopes so. A strong believer in Rabin’s peace and in secular education, he insists that teachers should state their political views to students, who then should form their views from the marketplace of ideas.

In the classroom at Rene Cassin, he rails against those religious schools that present their truth as the only truth, and speaks of the need for students to be rational, to overcome emotions in politics and make decisions for themselves.

“In 1933, the people were down after World War I, and Hitler promised to restore German pride, to improve the economy. People made an emotional choice,” he said.

“A lot of politicians think we need a totalitarian state now,” said a boy in the front.

“Many totalitarian regimes seem to start out sort of nicely, but a totalitarian state has never led to success,” Gabay said. “A totalitarian state is not democratic. I don’t want anyone to dictate to you or me how to think.”

“Well,” said the boy somewhat more timidly, “the fact is, there are people here saying we need a totalitarian state that will also rule the Arabs.”

“We have to allow all opinions except opinions that say mine is the only one,” Gabay answered quickly.

Worrying about the separation between emotion and logic in the highly charged peace process, another boy raised his hand. “If the government wants to give away the house of someone who lives over the Green Line [Israel’s pre-1967 border with Jordan] and give it away to the Arabs--a house that you built and live in--how can you be rational?” he asked.

“It’s very hard to be rational. Everyone at some time thinks with emotions and not rationally. The question is, what price does one pay for that?” Gabay said.

In another classroom, constitutional lawyer Mike Blass turned the discussion to the letter of Israeli law. Some politicians have called for a strengthening of laws on incitement. Other people have balked at the arrest and firing of several rightists who openly cheered Rabin’s death. They say that the precedents the center-left government sets today could be turned against them by a right-wing government tomorrow.

Blass told the students that the law specifically states that a person who says or publishes words encouraging acts of violence or words that may cause acts of violence breaks the law and may expect up to three years in prison.

“In Israel, it is not allowed to say, ‘I am in favor of killing people and in favor of the ones who did this,’ ” Blass said.

Hanegbi agreed that the laws on the books are just fine. Go any further and democracy is endangered, he told the students. But the laws must be enforced. Israeli police were turning a deaf ear to Jewish agitators while arresting Palestinian boys throwing rocks, he said.

In urging his students to speak their minds, Gabay also encouraged them to participate in political rallies and, eventually, to vote.

Fine, the students said. They thought they would. But right now they were struggling with the limits between free speech and incitement. They wanted to know where to draw the line. Murderer? Traitor?

“The line is where it hurts people,” tried Moshe Cohen, 17. “Not so much when they called him a murderer, maybe, but they slipped over the boundary when they put a Nazi uniform on him.”

Efrat Acker, 15, was not so sure. “It is very, very confusing,” she said shaking her head.

Acker thought it was wrong for the opposition to call Rabin a murderer before, and that it is still wrong when the epithet is used on the Likud’s Netanyahu, to blame him for Rabin’s death. “I can’t understand how anyone can talk so violently after what has happened.”