Rabbis preaching it's okay to murder Arabs, in the name of revenge, subjective personal safety, to protect your house or to protect your God, worked rampant in the last 25 years, and turned into rabbis preaching it's okay to murder Jews. The more than 650 IDF soldiers who died in the 1967 War would be surprised to know that as far as a large segment of the Jewish public is concerned, God won that war.

So, we can blame all those who turned a military victory into another mythological moment in which, by claiming God on their side, the claimants to Judaism refused to acknowledge the Other, in this case the Palestinians. So often religions is used most badly by the most religious.

So many ironies in this moment -- Yitzhak Rabin, who remained chief of staff into '68, after he led the army to victory in the Six Day War, spoke for the generals in December 1967, on the eve of Levi Eshkol's trip to meet LBJ. He said then that the most reasonable solution for the territories was a political Palestinian entity, a state or autonomy.

It was in America that he saw a wider picture, and falling under Kissinger and Nixon's influence, he embraced the Jordanian Option, which successfully prevented the inevitable until the Palestinians finally did become "a nation" through an essentially non-violent civil uprising (and imitation of yishuv-style self-help organizations) known as the intifada.

For there can't be any mistake, the democrats, left or right, have to agree on Palestinin self-determination, if they want to keep their own Jewish self-determination.

That is the division in this country, and it comes down to an Us versus those like Miriam Lapid, a sweet, soft-spoken, beautiful woman who lost her husband and one of her children to a Palestinin molotov cocktail, and is now number three on a political party list planning to run in the coming election campagin: Their platform says "we want a democractic state for the Jews." Their plan to achieve this goal is to evict the Arabs, because they believe in the sanctity of land.

So, yes, she is beyond the fringe. And so is anyone in the Israeli body politic who claims to be a democrat, yet is trying to prevent the Palestinians from achieving their own self-rule.

I met Yitzhak Rabin several times, both as a journalist and on purely social occasions, but I'll never forget my first encounter, a question I could only throw at him as I trailed in his wake of advisors a few months before he lost the premiership because of Leah's checking account.

"When will you recognize the PLO?" I asked, like all the foreign correspondents at the time. No Israeli reporter was yet asking the question, though by the early '80s it became clearly inevitable, and with the outbreak of the infiada became impossible not to ask.

His always sad eyes flashed angrily: "Only on the battlefield." This was early 1977, and he had just given a speech about how we would be facing seven rough years of rebuilding the army (a job Peres undertook), and turning the economy into a modern one, to reach real independence. Twenty-nine years in office Labor was blind to the inevitable eroding popularity of a party too long in office, still believing the machine would win. At worst, a coalition would be made with the Democractic Movement for Change.

Instead, Begin came to power. And for fifteen years the Likud stayed in power, until they too became blind to their own eroding popularity, believing that their tribalist rhetoric would serve them better than Labor's machine.

They didn't know then that the rhetoric of ideology is irrelevant, something Rabin knew every day of his life. What matters, Rabin believed, is what can be done to change the situation for the better. That is the essential impulse in the liberal spirit -- the belief in the mutability of reality.

Irony of ironies in this trail to democracy we are now travailing: Rabin learned his politics under Richard Nixon, possibly the most hated American president since Roosevelt and the man who coined the phrase "silent majority" to incite the American nation against youth, against change, against "peace-niks."