(AFP) – Nov 3, 2007

TEL AVIV (AFP) — Tens of thousands of people flocked to a Tel Aviv square late Saturday to honour Israeli premier Yitzhak Rabin who was gunned down 12 years ago for his efforts to make peace with the Palestinians.

Many of the protestors were high school students too young to remember the November night the prime minister was shot, or the sunny summer day on the White House lawn when he shook hands with Yasser Arafat and made history.

But they were reminded of those headstrong days at the opening of the rally, when demonstrators were played the words Rabin spoke at an open-air peace rally in the square that now bears his name, minutes before he was shot.

"I know there is a chance for peace and we must seize it," he said on November 4, 1995, just minutes before Yigal Amir, a right-wing Jewish extremist, fired three bullets into his back.

The young people that gathered on Saturday seemed determined to prove that the peace process Rabin launched did not perish along with him.

"The situation is really bad, but if we want peace it can work and it can help," said Noi Levor, 17, a student with long blonde dreadlocks and a sign reading 'It is time to choose peace'.

"I'm very hopeful our government can see that we are not just any gathering, that this is important to us," he said.

For another young demonstrator at the rally, disgust at the killing was still fresh. "It's horrible that a Jew could commit such an act against such a great leader just because he was against his beliefs," said Shapir Nisani, 16.

President Shimon Peres, who was with Rabin when he was shot, called on the crowd to carry on Rabin's legacy. "You are the heirs of Rabin. Do not flinch -- continue on the path which he traced, that of peace and security."

But it was not just a desire for peace that brought people into the square, but outrage that Rabin's assassin has married and fathered a son while in prison, and that a fringe movement has emerged to demand his release.

"Nothing has changed. The lessons have not been learnt. Today like yesterday, we still hear voices inciting violence" inside Israel, warned Yuval Rabin, the son of the slain prime minister.

This year's events come as a group of extreme right-wingers campaigns for clemency for Amir, who has spent 12 years in solitary confinement.

"If Rabin was alive today we would have peace with Syria, we would have peace with all our neighbours," said David Kandioti, a pensioner in his 70s with a sign reading 'One hundred years in jail is not enough for such a crime'.

This year the anniversary of the killing of Rabin, who won a Nobel peace prize for signing the Oslo autonomy accords, comes amid talk of reviving an Israeli-Palestinian peace process that has been comatose for seven years.

But the sunny pictures of Rabin, former US president Bill Clinton, and the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat shown at the beginning of the rally seemed to many to be a relic of a more hopeful era.

It's perhaps a measure of Rabin's complex legacy, and the brutalities of the seven years since the outbreak of the latest Palestinian uprising, that many fear today's talks will be nothing more than "photo ops" now bereft of meaning.

"When he was killed the peace process as it was died. The one coming now is a total waste of time," said one older Israeli man, who asked not to be named.

Peres said earlier this week that Rabin's assassin had failed to sabotage efforts to achieve peace, and as he spoke on Saturday US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice arrived in Tel Aviv for talks with leaders from both sides.

Rabin is revered as a national hero, both for his legendary military career as chief of staff and for his peace efforts in the 1990s that earned him a Nobel prize, shared with Peres and the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.

Organisers said the rally drew a crowd of 150,000 people. The formal commemoration of the 12th anniversary began before sundown on October 23 in keeping with the Hebrew calendar.

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