A hundred thousand people filled Rabin Square to overflowing yesterday to mark the New Year of the Peace Camp.



I was considerably surprised. Logically, the more Rabin's path becomes revealed as a bloody fiasco, and as more and more Israelis lose their lives, livings, security, hopes and happiness as a result of the cursed Oslo Agreement, the number of oddballs coming to commemorate and identify with the man who symbolizes it more than anyone else should decrease.



But the contrary happened. And even if we say that they came to hear Aviv Gefen, or that they were bored youngsters, or that once again they made use of worn-out provocations - swastikas on the memorial (no Kahanist would draw a swastika), or a strange act of spitting at the memorial precisely when there was no guard around and precisely when an amateur photographer was passing - no explanation can be given for the phenomenon.



It seems that a kind of mental illness sometimes attacks whole populations. Stalin murdered 18 million of his own countrymen, and they bitterly mourned when the Sun of the Nations was extinguished. Was this only because they did not know? After all, 18 million people don't simply vanish. They knew, but they had been trained to reach a conclusion contrary to reality.



I have been invited several times to participate in confrontations in educational institutions of the most extremist Left. I was always amazed by the uniform thinking and the capability of training consciousness. I spoke there to robots. I always won the battle, but lost the war. I won because the facts were on my side, and I left the other participants incapable of providing an answer. But I lost strategically, because they came to the conclusion that I was a dangerous person. How can such a person be right? He must have employed some kind of trick.



It was then only a short step to a local campaign of demonization. I even remember one internal campaign of slander in the Green Page (the newspaper of the National Kibbutz Movement) in which the principal of a high school who invited me was attacked. The principal subsequently apologized for not knowing whom he was dealing with.



Obviously, members of the youth movements and educational institutions of the Left undergo this brain-washing in a very intensive form, but the average citizens of the country do not differ from them to any marked extent. The media in Israel are very effective. It is sufficient to recall that Channel 2 broadcast, in its entirety, the birthday party of the architect of the bloody agreement, Shimon Peres.



Man is a social creature who cannot rebel all the time. If parades are made for Stalin, birthday parties for Peres, anniversaries for Rabin, this means that the victims died for a different reason: perhaps because of the religious people, or the Kahanists, or Netanyahu, or perhaps they just died, and it's advisable not to think too much.



It apparently makes no difference what the reality in Israel indicates. They are trained to think in a specific way, and no facts facing the tens of thousands in the square will change their minds. Without doubt, Yigal Amir (whether or not he actually murdered Rabin) gave the Left the dearest gift of all - a focus and purpose for their entire existence, a myth to unite around, and an annual tribal bonfire to control themselves around.



I've stopped trying to convince the Left. The Left is not an ideology, but a mental illness. Those who are actually infected by it (and they are few in number) have little chance of recovery. It is reasonable to assume that if the total destruction of Germany and Japan had not been accompanied by Allied occupation, there would still be admirers in Germany and Japan of Hitler and Hirohito. That's how it is in societies managed in accordance with totalitarian codes. That's how it is in the Left in general, and in the Israeli Left in particular.



There's no point in trying to persuade them. We have to defeat them, and only those who present an alternative to their path are capable of doing so.