Killing a King: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel (10 page)

Goldstein had been a thirty-eight-year-old reserve army captain and the doctor of Kiryat Arba, which by 1994 had several thousand residents. Raised in an Orthodox home in New York, he’d been active in Meir Kahane’s Jewish Defense League, a far-right group whose members engaged in both activism and vigilantism against perceived enemies of Jews or Israel. The FBI would eventually outlaw it as a terrorist organization.

He immigrated to Israel after finishing medical school in 1981, changed his name from Benjamin to Baruch, and soon came to the attention of Shabak, the internal security service that focused mostly on Palestinian insurgents but had a separate department to deal with Jewish radicals. During his military service, and later as a doctor in Kiryat Arba, Goldstein refused to treat Arabs, a position that almost got him court-martialed. While running for Kiryat Arba’s local council in 1992 as a representative of Kahane’s Kach Party, he advocated “transferring these hostile Arabs across the border.” He told a journalist that Palestinians strove to inflict a second holocaust on the Jews of
Israel and that “treasonous politicians were preventing the army from operating effectively against them.”

The police had detained Goldstein several times over the years for minor offenses—knocking over a bookcase full of Korans at the Cave of the Patriarchs and circulating leaflets calling for attacks against Palestinians after Kahane was assassinated in New York (by an Egyptian American). But in the months after the signing of the Oslo deal he seemed to have come unhinged. Several of the Hamas attacks that followed the signing in Washington occurred in the Hebron area, triggering angry and sometimes violent outbursts by settlers against Palestinian bystanders. Goldstein, as the resident doctor, would often rush to the scene of these attacks to treat the wounded. The army valued his efforts so highly that a regional commander recommended promoting him to the rank of reserve major. “If there’s any officer worthy of being promoted in the Judea, Samaria and Gaza area, it is without a doubt, Dr. Baruch Goldstein,” the commander wrote just five weeks before the massacre.

Two shooting incidents in particular might have pushed him over the edge. In early November, Palestinians sprayed the car of an Orthodox rabbi much revered by the settlers, Haim Druckman, in a drive-by shooting near Hebron. A bullet struck Druckman in the arm, wounding him moderately. But his driver, Efraim Ayoubi, was hit in the chest and by the time Goldstein arrived, was barely breathing. Another Kiryat Arba settler who rushed to the scene, Eliezer Waldman, recalled years later watching Goldstein try for long minutes to resuscitate Ayoubi and then grow angry when he realized the man would not survive. “He just threw his medical bag to the ground and stormed off.”

A month later, Palestinians shot dead a father and son outside Kiryat Arba, Mordechai and Shalom Lapid. The Lapid family, with fourteen children, had been a pillar of the settler community. The funeral procession the following day drew thousands of people, including Goldstein, who joined others in a menacing chant for vengeance against Palestinians.

Rabin summoned his cabinet ministers to Tel Aviv for an emergency meeting, hoping to prevent events from cycling out of control
. Already, Palestinians across the West Bank were protesting the massacre, throwing stones at soldiers and drawing fire. The day’s casualty toll would steadily climb. Arab citizens of Israel were also venting their anger, protesting around Jaffa and in a part of northern Israel where Arab towns are clustered, known as the Triangle. As the hours passed, the pressure on Arafat to respond firmly against Israel mounted. In Tunis, he announced he was suspending the Gaza-Jericho negotiations. Rabin’s realization back in September that a lone extremist could subvert the entire process with a single act of sensational carnage was materializing even before the agreement could be implemented.

At the cabinet meeting, security officials described to the attendees—some twenty of them, seated around a large wooden table—what they knew about Goldstein. Shabak had worked hard to cultivate informants in the settlements after it exposed the plot by Jewish extremists in the 1980s to blow up the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. They had been running several in Kiryat Arba. But nothing in the file the agency had on Goldstein suggested he was capable of something this extreme. Jacob Perry, who had headed Shabak since 1988, told the cabinet ministers Goldstein appeared to have plotted the massacre alone. But others in the agency, including the man in charge of tracking Jewish extremists, Hezi Kalo, suspected that he received at least tacit approval from rabbis before setting out to kill Palestinians. Though most religious settlers were law-abiding, a running concern for Shabak was that certain rabbis held more sway with the ideological core of the community than the state itself with its laws and institutions—that their theological rulings stood above the decisions of the democratically elected government. The Rabin government’s willingness to cede land to the Palestinians had put these two competing authorities, the state and the rabbis (at least a segment of them), on a collision course.

The massacre presented an opportunity to address this Kulturkampf, though it wasn’t clear to people around the table whether Rabin recognized the extent of the challenge it posed to the country’s civilian authority. His Labor Party and the people it represented—secular, largely Ashkenazi liberals—had been hegemonic through
most of his lifetime. Rabin, the scion of Palmach and the army’s chief of staff during the 1967 war, was the very embodiment of Israeliness. That the settlement movement, with its redemption fixations and its rabbinical authorities, was anything more than a fringe phenomenon seemed difficult for Rabin to grasp. And yet, for years now, the tide had been shifting in their favor.

With the hours ticking down until the start of the Sabbath, the ministers made two decisions. The first was to initiate the legal procedure for outlawing Kach and its offshoot, Kahane Chai. Both groups espoused racist ideologies and preached violence against the Palestinians. Banning them would make it easier to go after their top activists, several of whom lived in Hebron and Kiryat Arba. They also decided to form a commission of inquiry to probe the circumstances of the massacre, including how Goldstein managed to get past the soldiers at the entrance to the Cave of the Patriarchs and whether new arrangements for sharing the shrine were necessary. Rabin opposed a commission. He felt its very formation would imply that the government shared the blame for the massacre. But around the table, he was outnumbered.

At some point the cabinet ministers took up a more ambitious idea: evacuating the settlers from Hebron. Some five hundred Jews lived in several enclaves of Hebron’s city center—the radical fringe of the settler population. They tangled regularly with Palestinians in the city and with Israeli soldiers as well. The army regularly stationed three battalions in Hebron to safeguard the Jews—meaning soldiers outnumbered settlers by at least two to one—a huge toll on the military. How they had come to live in the city was the story of the settler enterprise itself: They squatted there illegally and eventually won retroactive approval from authorities. Even dovish governments had a habit of yielding to the settlers, often on the heels of a Palestinian terrorist attack.

The Oslo Accord did not require Rabin to evacuate a single settlement. The fate of the 140 or so Jewish communities scattered across the West Bank and Gaza would be determined in the final negotiations between the two sides, which were set to begin in 1996. But Rabin did commit to handing Arafat control of all Palestinian cities in the
West Bank in the second stage of the agreement, including Hebron. The fact that Jews lived in the heart of the city would complicate the endeavor. The massacre, which revealed to Israelis more starkly than ever the fanatic undergrowth of the settlement enterprise, seemed to offer an opportunity to dismantle the Hebron communities.

The ministers debated the idea for much of the afternoon without arriving at a decision. Hours later, Rabin raised the issue with a smaller group he convened at the Defense Ministry—Perry, Yatom, and the army’s chief of staff, Ehud Barak. But all three worried that a large-scale eviction would prompt violent confrontations with the settlers of Hebron. Perry, the Shabak chief, offered an alternative: evacuating Tel Rumeida, a single enclave isolated from the rest of the Jewish clusters in the city and home to some twenty settlers. The eviction would signal to Jewish radicals that violence, far from halting the handover of territory to Palestinians, would actually accelerate it. And it would be a message to Palestinians that Rabin intended to deal harshly with the extremists—just as he expected Arafat to do with Hamas.

Rabin seemed to like the idea. In the earlier meeting he referred to Goldstein as “Jewish Hamas.” Now he left participants with the impression that he would order the evacuation the next day.

BY SATURDAY MORNING,
February 26, the full scope of the previous day’s bloodshed became clear. In addition to the slaughter at the shrine, Israeli troops had opened fire on protesters across the West Bank and Gaza, killing fourteen people and bringing the death toll to forty-three. It was the worst single-day carnage in years. The army imposed its usual closure on the territories to prevent revenge attacks and also added a curfew to the mix, confining more than 2 million Palestinians to their homes for most hours of the day and night. With anger running high in the West Bank and Gaza, Israeli authorities felt the restrictions were the only way to prevent an explosion. But to Palestinians, they compounded the injustice. The victims of the massacre were now being punished for the massacre. The curfew did
not apply to settlers in the territories, including Hebron, where Jews walked around the city center freely, armed with Uzis and other automatic weapons. Palestinians could only watch from their windows and seethe.

More about Goldstein had also come to light. In the months leading up the shooting, Palestinians had complained to Israeli authorities several times about a tall bearded man named Baruch harassing worshippers at the Cave of the Patriarchs. On one occasion he poured acid on the carpets of the Ibrahimi Mosque. Police buried the complaints. Though Israeli authorities responded aggressively to any suspicion against Palestinians, they were notably slow about investigating settlers. The phenomenon had been criticized repeatedly in Israel’s own government reports. One written by Deputy Attorney General Yehudit Karp and published in 1984 cited the “ambivalence” of Israeli police officers who did not view settler violence against Palestinians as criminal in the “common definition” of the term. Karp examined seventy Palestinian complaints of attacks by settlers for the report. In fifty-three of the cases, the government took no action.

Two days before the shooting, Goldstein called his insurance agent and asked to double his life insurance policy. The night before, he penned a letter to his family—he had an Israeli-born wife and four children—saying in part that he prayed God would grant him “full redemption.” American journalists writing about Goldstein emphasized the role Americans played in the settlement enterprise, not only in Hebron but throughout the West Bank and Gaza. Though settlers made up fewer than 3 percent of Israelis, 10 percent of the settlers were American-born. The Long Island daily,
Newsday
, captured the phenomenon with a mordant headline: “America’s ‘Gift’ to Israel.”

Rabin read the reports about Goldstein with a sense of revulsion. He had been nursing a toothache for some days, taking antibiotics but avoiding the dentist. The pain now fused his anger at the settlers. As if the massacre weren’t appalling enough, some residents of Hebron and Kiryat Arba were now defending Goldstein, claiming his actions somehow thwarted an imminent attack on the Jews of Hebron. They based the assertion on rumors that Palestinians had been storing armaments at the shrine. Even the local council of Kiryat Arba, which
included both religious and nonreligious Jews, refused to condemn the shooting. Many other right-wingers did speak out against it. But few if any entertained the possibility that Goldstein reflected a broader trend toward violence in the radical settlements. He was a lone fanatic, what Israelis referred to as an
esev shoteh
, a stray weed.

Rabin had an icy relationship with the settlers going back decades. The conquests of the Six-Day War had inspired a kind of rapture even among members of the Labor Party, a secular version of the messianism that infected religious Israelis. Officially, the Labor-led government stood ready to trade the territories for peace treaties with the Arab states. But some prominent Laborites, including Rabin’s former Palmach commander, Yigal Allon, quietly encouraged Israelis to settle beyond the “green line” that marked the border before the war—and not just in areas they deemed vital for Israel’s security. Eliezer Waldman, a prominent rabbi, recalled approaching Allon for help when the latter was a cabinet minister in 1968 and getting what could only be interpreted as implied consent. “He said, ‘You’re waiting for permission from the government? That’s not how Zionism works.’ ” Waldman and his wife checked into a Palestinian-owned hotel in Hebron, along with two other families, and refused to leave until the government promised to create a settlement just outside the city. Allon helped get the measure passed, giving birth to Kiryat Arba—where Baruch Goldstein would eventually make his home.

Rabin seemed to be immune to this territorial fixation (except with regards to Jerusalem’s Old City, with the Jewish shrine in its heart, the Western Wall). He had no trouble arguing that Israel needed parts of the West Bank for security, but Rabin regarded the notion that every inch of the territory was sacred as obnoxious and reckless. It threatened to turn Israel into a second Lebanon, where competing religious groups fought one another relentlessly, nearly destroying the country. In the memoir he published in 1979, Rabin wrote that the settlers had undermined Israel’s long-term well-being by deliberately planting themselves in Palestinian-populated areas. He described them as a “cancer in the body of Israeli democracy.”