This week’s Memorial Day commemorating the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin showed that large swaths of the right deny that there was any incitement campaign against Rabin in the days and weeks leading up to his assassination. Their denial is part of a larger pushback against any criticism of the right’s dangerous policies under the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

This effort culminated with Knesset member Bezalel Smotrich (HaBayit HaYehudi) launching a campaign to ban the Rabin family from speaking at the official memorial service for the assassinated prime minister. It came in response to a scathing speech by Rabin’s granddaughter Noa Rotman, in which she charged Netanyahu and his ministers with learning nothing from what happened, so that calls of “traitor” have been extended to anyone who criticizes the policies of Netanyahu and the right. “Don’t keep repeating here that Rabin wasn’t a traitor,” she said. “In Israel, criticism is considered treason. If you don’t stop the incitement path of division, partisanship and attacks, blood will be again spilled here.”

Earlier, Rabin’s grandson Yonatan Ben Artzi attacked the prime minister directly. At the lighting of a memorial candle at the president’s house, he echoed the disparaging statements used by Netanyahu to attack his critics, warning, “A leadership … that defines and catalogs anyone who thinks differently as a ‘sourpuss’ or a ‘leftist’ is breaking us apart and will bring about the next destruction.”

Smotrich then tweeted, “Unfortunately, there are plenty of people who are murdered in Israel, yet none of them gets an official memorial day. … On a personal level, the Rabin family is no different from the family of any other victim. They have no relevance whatsoever to the official memorial day or ceremonies.” He added that if the family feels a need to make verbal attacks, he would have no problem with them organizing alternative ceremonies of their own, where they can say whatever they want — to themselves.