About the Archive



December 1, 1995, Page 00032Buy Reprints The New York Times Archives

To the Editor:

Arthur Hertzberg (letter, Nov. 15) regrettably dregs up the new big lie of the Israeli left: that the Likud leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, ignored chants that termed the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin a traitor and ignored a placard showing Rabin in an SS uniform during an Oct. 5 demonstration in Jerusalem.

As Ha'aretz reported the next day: "The crowd chanted 'Rabin Traitor' and Mr. Netanyahu silenced them, saying such calls do not belong here. 'We will not replace the government through fire and blood but through the ballot box, and through it alone,' Mr. Netanyahu declared."

Further, Mr. Netanyahu did not see the SS leaflet that was handed out to a few television correspondents in a rally of 50,000 people. Nitzan Chen, an Israel Television correspondent, says he was given the leaflet by Avishai Raviv, a government agent, and observed that Mr. Netanyahu could not have seen it from hundreds of feet away. Indeed, Mr. Netanyahu first saw the leaflet in a television broadcast later in the Knesset, and he promptly condemned it from the floor. That the vilification continues despite these well-known facts reinforces the saying that the bigger the lie, the faster it spreads.

ZALMAN SHOVAL Jerusalem, Nov. 29, 1995

The writer, former Israeli Ambassador to the United States, is a foreign policy adviser to Mr. Netanyahu.

Continue reading the main story