Dan Ephron - Killing a King: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel

KILLING
A KING

The Assassination of

Yitzhak Rabin

and the Remaking of Israel

Dan Ephron

W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

Independent Publishers Since 1923

NEW YORK LONDON

For my daughter and son,
Who make every moment better and more interesting
And for Nancy
My partner in this and all things

According to Judaism, killing a king is profoundly significant. It affects the entire nation and alters its destiny.

HAGAI AMIR,
in a letter from prison, days after
his brother assassinated Yitzhak Rabin

Contents

I n early 2012, during one of those YouTube click binges that can eat up an afternoon, I came across an old video showing Israeli investigators interrogating Yigal Amir, the young man who had assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. I was serving as the Israel bureau chief for Newsweek magazine and looking for subjects to write aboutnew ways to understand a country I had covered intermittently over two decades. The excerpt, from the night of the shooting in 1995, drew me in. Though the murder had been one of the most dramatic events in Israels history, Amir had largely faded from view in the years following his trial. Prison officials had barred journalists from interviewing him. The short clip, which had surfaced in the Israeli media on one of the anniversaries of the murder, seemed to have come from a mounted surveillance camera. It occurred to me that more existedthat somewhere in the country, there must be hours of interrogation tapes.

Eventually, I tracked down those tapes and, in several sittings, watched the long sessions that investigators conducted with Amir. Even by the standards of murder cases, of political murders, they seemed extraordinary. Yigal Amir shot Rabin in a Tel Aviv parking lot on the evening of November 4, 1995, plunging the country into a state of shock and grief. That a Jew had assassinated the leader of the Jewish state made it especially dreadful to Israelis. But at police headquarters in Tel Aviv that night and in the weeks that followed, Amir seemed impervious to the turmoil around himto the trauma he had caused. He leaned back much of the time, cocked his head, and recounted how he had stalked Rabin over two years, luxuriating in the details. He explained the religious doctrines that motivated him, the zealotry that could not abide Rabins peacemaking with the Palestinians. At one point he asked for a drink so that he could toast the prime ministers death.

The murder came at a critical juncture for Israel. Rabins diplomacy had already produced two accords with the Palestinians and a momentum that made a final peace agreement feel almost inevitable, however difficult and complicated. It had also triggered a violent backlash by both Palestinians and Israelis opposed to the conciliation process. For reporters based in Israel at the time, it wasnt unusual to cover a peace ceremony one week and a shooting or bombing attack the next. The assassination itself exemplified the bewildering zigzag: Amir had shot Rabin at the end of a huge peace rally, one of the largest Israeli gatherings on record. I attended that rally and later covered the murder trial. Though it wasnt clear at the time, Amir had set off a chain reaction that would shift the power in Israel from the pragmatists to the ideologues. Two decades later, the coveted peace remains elusive.

Killing a King is a detailed account of the murder and the two years leading up to ita narrative about a twentysomething law student, smart and exceedingly radical, who set out to alter the slope of history and succeeded. In a broader sense it is about Israel at a unique point in its existence, a moment when the isolation and hostility that had defined its position in the region for decades seemed to finally liftbut only temporarily. Through the lens of the murder, much can be gleaned about Israel today.

In my reporting for the book, a counterfactual history question came up again and again: would Rabin have succeeded? Theres no doubt that he faced huge obstacles: not just the obstructionists on both sides but a problematic partner in Yasser Arafat, a waning popularity at home, and his own misgivings about the concessions that peace required of Israel. Yet all those factors must be weighed against the circumstances that favored peacemaking in 1995. The opponents of compromise in both camps had nowhere near the power and influence they hold now. The process itself had yet to be contaminated by sustained waves of violence and settlement expansion. And the rapport between Rabin and Arafatthe deciders of their generationhad evolved into something workable.

For all those reasons, Rabin probably stood a better chance of forging a durable reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians than any leader before or since. That well never know how close he would have come is one of the exasperating consequences of the assassination.

KILLING A KING

Y itzhak Rabin woke up before seven the morning of November 4, 1995, with an eye infection. He had plans to play tennis, hold several work meetings at his north Tel Aviv apartment, and then attend a peace rally that night at Kings of Israel Square. But the infection, which made his eye swollen and bloodshot, gave him a chance to reassess. Rabin felt ambivalent about the rally; it seemed to him like the kind of event some Bolshevik regime might organize, busing in paid apparatchiks and having them wave banners approved by the Party. He agreed to it mostly because his political opponents, with a few large and rowdy protests, had managed to create the impression that most of the country opposed his now second peace deal with Yasser Arafat. The demonstrators had held up doctored images showing Rabin draped in a kaffiyehthe checkered black-and-white scarf worn by Arafatand worse, Rabin in a Nazi uniform. But the prime minister feared that few people would show up at the square. Instead of refuting the perception of his political weakness, the rally could end up reinforcing it. Rabin himself wasnt exactly sure whether it was just a perception or the hard reality now.

He moved to the den, picked up the phone, and called off his tennis match. At seventy-three, Rabin still played several sets every Saturday, walking to a country club in the neighborhood and puffing on Parliament Longs between the games. He planned to phone Shlomo Lahat next, the former mayor of Tel Aviv and the organizer of the rally that night. The two had served together in the army and overlapped as members of the general staffthe Israeli equivalent of the joint chiefs. But before he dialed, Leah, Rabins wife of forty-seven years, called to him from elsewhere in the apartment, saying shed tracked down an ophthalmologist who was now on the way. For the prime minister, of course he would make a house call on the Jewish Sabbath. And unless the doctor discovered something serious, Rabin would have no excuse but to attend the rally.

Around the same time, a few miles north, Yigal Amir was getting out of bed at his parents home in Herzliya. A twenty-five-year-old law student, short and handsome, Amir also had plans for that Saturday. He would pray at the Orthodox synagogue in the neighborhood, eat lunch with his parents and brothers and sisterseight children in alland head to Tel Aviv in the evening. Amir put on jeans and a dark-colored T-shirt. He lifted his 9mm Beretta from the nightstand next to his bed and tucked it in the back of his pantshe took the gun everywhere. His older brother, Hagai, with whom he shared a room, was a step behind him. Hagai palmed a velvet bag containing his tallitthe shawl with knotted fringes that religiously observant Jews wrap themselves in during prayers every dayand the two stepped out onto the pavement.