YAHRZEIT FOR RABIN

Itzhak Rabin was murdered exactly 10 years ago today in Tel Aviv. I still remember waking up to the news back in the San Fernando Valley, where I used to live. The shock, the tears, the sense of loss. Hard to describe.

Israel is a country of cousins, aunts, uncles, nieces... Everyone is related somehow, and even if not, there is a sense of real connection. Or better yet, there was. The Israel of my early 20s is no more. It vanished, it evolved, it recoiled; it's changed, and a lot. Something happened to it. Rabin's peace politics - albeit hesitant and elusive at times - and his brutal murder during that fateful peace rally are no doubt big factors in the change.

Under Rabin, Israelis dared to hope. Hope for peace, for closure, for life. The fact that Rabin was killed by one of their own is all the more upsetting, and it revealed a rift in Israeli society that many outsiders thought impossible.

The years since then have been very difficult for Israel and for the Middle East in general. But still, Rabin's killer didn't succeed in turning back time. Israelis want peace; they need it, they understand peace is the only long-term solution. They also understand, for the most part, that peace will not be achieved without a series of concessions. All the same, Palestinians have themselves began a new chapter after Arafat died.

It is unfortunate Rabin is not among us today. However, a portion of his legacy still lives on - in the most unlikely of heirs, Ariel Sharon. Given the fact that before that Sharon spent the most part of his political career virulently opposing land concessions of any kind, his current commitment - and here in the tradition of his mentor, also elusive - to the peace process signals that Israelis are, in truth, exhausted.