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

278 Pages·2015·2.12 MB·English

by  Dan Ephron

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
Introduction
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER 1 • Flight of a Skeptic
CHAPTER 2 • To Fathom God’s Will
CHAPTER 3 • A Stray Weed
CHAPTER 4 • Din Rodef
CHAPTER 5 • He Told Us the Truth
CHAPTER 6 • Under-the-Window Tales
CHAPTER 7 • Seam Zone
CHAPTER 8 • Killing a King
CHAPTER 9 • The Man Who Voted Twice
EPILOGUE
Acknowledgments
Notes
Illustrations
Index
Introduction
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 about—new 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 Israel’s 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 existed—that 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 him—to 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 Rabin’s
peacemaking with the Palestinians. At one point he asked for a drink so that he
could toast the prime minister’s death.
The murder came at a critical juncture for Israel. Rabin’s 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 wasn’t 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 wasn’t 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 it—a 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 lift—but 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? There’s 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 Arafat—
the deciders of their generation—had 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 we’ll never know how close he would have come is one of the
exasperating consequences of the assassination.
KILLING A KING
Prologue
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 kaffiyeh—the checkered black-and-white
scarf worn by Arafat—and 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 wasn’t 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 staff—the Israeli equivalent of the
joint chiefs. But before he dialed, Leah, Rabin’s wife of forty-seven years, called
to him from elsewhere in the apartment, saying she’d 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
sisters—eight children in all—and 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 pants—he 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 tallit—the shawl with
knotted fringes that religiously observant Jews wrap themselves in during
prayers every day—and the two stepped out onto the pavement.
Somewhere between the house and the synagogue, on one of the leafy streets
of middle-class Herzliya, Amir told his brother he would try to kill Rabin at the
rally that night. It didn’t come as a surprise, and Hagai did not recoil. The two
had been talking about ways to assassinate the prime minister for more than two
years, since Rabin’s first peace deal with Arafat. With the bedroom door closed
on the second floor of the house on Borochov Street, the brothers would toss out
ideas, including an especially outlandish one: to inject nitroglycerin into the
water pipes of Rabin’s apartment building. The elaborate schemes belonged to
Hagai. Two years older than Amir and a physics student at the Jewish settlement
of Ariel, Hagai was a tinkerer. In the shed behind the house, he liked taking apart
old appliances and reassembling them. But Amir kept coming back to the one
simple plan that felt right: stalking Rabin and shooting him with his Beretta.
Now, on the street, Hagai revived an idea he had raised in an earlier
conversation: acquiring a rifle and shooting Rabin from a safe distance. Hagai
had trained as an infantry sniper during his army service and won first place in a
competition at one of his stints in the reserves. He told Amir that even if he
could close in on Rabin and fire his handgun, the prime minister’s bodyguards
were well trained and would shoot back. It would be a suicide mission. Though
the two brothers were determined to kill Rabin, Hagai was unwilling to sacrifice
himself doing it. Amir had his own misgivings, even on that Saturday morning.
But he told himself he would get as close as he could to Rabin—and then let
God guide him.
At the synagogue, Amir paged to the Torah portion of the week, Lech-Lecha,
which recounts God’s command to Abraham to leave his home and go to
Canaan, where he would become the father of a great nation. In effect, it is the
biblical moment when God promises the real estate that is now Israel (and the