Killing a King: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel (12 page)

The consultations in Rabin’s office ate up several hours of each day, including his birthday, March 1. He turned seventy-two in the thick of the crisis. Lawyers told Rabin that the settlers would surely challenge any evacuation order with a petition to Israel’s High Court of Justice. Though the government would cite its security needs to justify the measure, some lawyers thought the case might be difficult to win. Goldstein, after all, had lived in Kiryat Arba, not Tel Rumeida. And if the government was arguing that it could no longer protect Jews living in the heart of a hostile Palestinian city, that the military’s resources were being drained, why was it focusing on Tel Rumeida and not all the enclaves? Even Rabin’s attorney general, Michael Ben-Yair, who supported the evacuation idea, had bad news. He told Rabin the measure should rightly be submitted to parliament for approval and not just to the cabinet, a significant challenge given that Rabin controlled only a minority of the seats in the plenum.

The extended deliberation gave settler leaders and right-wing rabbis a chance to fight back. In the days after the massacre, they mounted a campaign against any change to the status quo in Hebron. The group now had no illusions about being able to sway the government. But
it could certainly influence individual soldiers and officers who might be called on to evacuate settlers from their homes. Elyakim Haetzni, a lawyer and political activist who lived in Kiryat Arba, favored an approach that included both persuasion and intimidation.

A former member of parliament with the right-wing Tehiya Party, Haetzni founded the Action Center for Canceling the Autonomy Agreement soon after the signing in Washington and proceeded to issue vitriolic attacks against Rabin and the agreement. It was Haetzni who had first likened Rabin to Philippe Pétain. His slogans appeared on signs and bumper stickers throughout the country. Weeks before Goldstein mowed down Palestinians in Hebron, Haetzni published an article in the settler journal
Nekuda
calling for nothing short of an insurrection against the Rabin government. “A people whose government committed an act of national treason, collaborated with a terrorist enemy to steal the heart of his homeland . . . must be ready to fight. And in this war as in every other war, there are risks and casualties,” he wrote. His article also included a warning to Israeli soldiers. “An IDF soldier, though Jewish, who would pull us, our wives, our children and grandchildren from our houses and make us refugees—will, in our view, be conducting a pogrom. We shall look upon him as a violent thug acting like a Cossack.”

Two weeks after the massacre, Haetzni held a news conference to push the message further. In a hall teeming with journalists, he screened a half-hour film his Action Center had produced about a fictional battalion commander named Ron Segev struggling with the dilemma of evicting settlers from their homes. In the film, Segev consults with legal scholars and reads texts on conscientious objection. By the end, he decides to disobey the evacuation order, citing—among other things—the Oslo Accord’s provision for an armed Palestinian police force to operate in Gaza and Jericho. “If a soldier steals a few weapons and sells them to Arabs, he’s indicted,” he concludes. “But if the government does the same thing on a much larger scale, people applaud.” Haetzni announced that he was distributing several thousand copies of the film to soldiers.

Authorities paid little attention to Haetzni and his Action Center. Though inciting soldiers to revolt amounted to sedition and might
well have been grounds for an indictment, it was not clear whether he had much of a following. Even in the settler milieu, he was an outlier—deeply ideological and politically extreme but not religious. His pronouncements lacked the weight of ecclesiastic authority.

But three rabbis whose opinions did matter to settlers quickly followed up with a religious ruling—one that troubled Rabin deeply. Their edict, framed as an answer to a question from a soldier, declared that it was “forbidden for a Jew to take part in any activity which aids in the evacuation [of Judea, Samaria, Gaza and the Golan].” The rabbis, Moshe-Zvi Neria, Shaul Yisraeli, and Avraham Shapira, cited the writings of the twelfth-century Torah scholar Maimonides, who said: “Even if the King orders you to violate the laws of the Torah, it is forbidden to obey.”

The ruling, posted in religious neighborhoods across the country, had no precedent. In the contest between religious and secular authorities, the army, an almost sacred institution for Israelis, had generally been spared. Now, respected rabbis were telling soldiers to ignore their chain of command and obey a different authority, a nightmare scenario for any military. The three rabbis were easily the most influential figures of the national religious camp—the term that took in not just settlers but a broad swath of observant Israelis. Shapira had been Israel’s chief Ashkenazi rabbi for a decade. If only a fraction of religious soldiers heeded the call, the army faced deep trouble. Though Israel’s combat units (which would be called on to evacuate settlers) and officer corps were traditionally filled by secular Israelis, the demographics of the army had been changing for some years. By the early 1990s, the so-called knitted skullcap soldiers were ascending in these units—a trend that would accelerate in the years to come.

By now, Rabin’s determination to confront the settlers was eroding. An expert on political extremism in Israel, Ehud Sprinzak, drafted a memorandum for the government that predicted a “high likelihood of violent confrontations with the settlers and possible Jewish fatalities” if any attempt were made to remove Jews from Hebron. Bin-Nun, the settler who corresponded with Rabin, suggested a compromise of sorts in a letter dated March 25. He asked Rabin to allocate more territory to the settlers in order to create contiguity among the Jewish
enclaves of Hebron—alongside a decision to dismantle Tel Rumeida. But Bin-Nun conceded that even with that far-reaching gesture, other members of the YESHA Council would likely reject any evacuation order. “Because these ideas are unacceptable to my colleagues, I would ask that you keep them between us,” he wrote. To Rabin it was a non-starter. He had concluded long ago that allowing Jews to settle in Hebron had been a terrible mistake. Entrenching the community further—in the aftermath of a massacre a settler perpetrated against Palestinians, no less—struck him as downright perverse.

And yet, he could not bring himself to order an evacuation. In late March, Rabin dispatched Gur to Israel’s chief rabbis with the message that the Hebron settlers would not be removed. It was an admission of defeat. A month earlier the public had been outraged by Goldstein’s brutality, but the prospect of internecine violence seemed to work in the settlers’ favor. Polls now showed most Israelis opposed an evacuation. In one conducted by
Yedioth Ahronoth
, 18 percent of respondents—nearly one in five Israelis—thought soldiers should put the rulings of their rabbis ahead of the orders of their commanders. Fifty-two percent rejected the notion that legal measures should be taken against the three rabbis who issued the insubordination decree. Ben-Yair, the attorney general, would come to regret not ordering a police investigation against the rabbis. But at the time, he worried that religious Israelis would find the sight of three octogenarian rabbis in the dock just too upsetting. Two of the rabbis would die within eighteen months of the decree.

The Council of the Chief Rabbinate “registered with great satisfaction” the fact that the settlers would stay put. In a letter to the prime minister, the council wrote: “It is therefore clear that the question of military orders to evacuate settlers or settlements—which are against Jewish law—is not on the agenda and the army must be taken out of the political debate.”

Rabin saw the episode as a temporary retreat. A full peace agreement with the Palestinians would require the evacuation of settlers in huge numbers—not dozens but tens of thousands. In the weeks after the massacre, he concluded that it would be better to wage one big battle than several small ones. With the legal challenges and the
political ordeal it entailed, evicting twenty people from Hebron could well have taken months. Rabin thought it would ultimately distract the government from more important things—like completing the Gaza-Jericho agreement and striking a peace deal with Jordan, which now seemed within reach.

For the extremists, the victory felt significant. It confirmed that the entire settler leadership would mobilize to block even the tiniest withdrawal. Rabbis could disrupt the army’s chain of command by invoking Jewish law as an authority that stood above the decisions of the elected government. If those things weren’t troubling enough, it also underscored how a lone gunman could bring the peace process to a crashing halt with just an automatic rifle and a few magazines. There was a lesson here for opponents of the process on both sides.

AT THE START
of April, the crisis finally seemed to ebb. The cabinet ministers and advisers to Rabin who opposed confronting the settlers, including Haber, breathed a sigh of relief. Even the advocates of eviction were happy to forget the ordeal and move on. Arafat, who had prevented his negotiators from meeting Israelis for more than a month, finally relented, dispatching them to Cairo to make what both sides now felt were the final security arrangements ahead of Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza and Jericho and their transfer to Palestinian hands. If the teams could lock up an agreement within weeks, Arafat would relocate his headquarters to Gaza by summer. The months of violence had dimmed the enthusiasm on both sides, but the long-awaited commencement of Palestinian self-rule would be so momentous, perhaps it could erase some of the ill will.

Getting Arafat to resume the talks had involved a combination of gestures—condolences and reassurances from Rabin conveyed repeatedly by emissaries in person; Israel’s agreement to a temporary international force in Hebron—unarmed and essentially devoid of any real powers but the first introduction of foreign forces to the West Bank nonetheless; and a visit to Tunis by Dennis Ross, the White
House Middle East envoy. Still eager to bond himself to the United States, Arafat viewed every meeting with senior American officials as a windfall.

Ross had been working in government on Arab-Israeli issues since the mid-1980s, but because the United States had no relations with the PLO until the Oslo Accord, American officials engaged solely with Palestinian figures in the West Bank and Gaza, not with Arafat himself. When Ross landed in Tunis, where the PLO had made its headquarters since Israel ousted Arafat from Lebanon more than a decade earlier, he was struck by the disparity between the group’s revolutionary beginnings and its staid, comfortable existence. Arafat’s aides all wore expensive suits and watches. They lived in villas in an upscale part of the city. In the waiting room outside Arafat’s office, apparatchiks sat around watching an episode of
The Golden Girls
, an American sitcom about four elderly women sharing a home in Miami, Florida. Ross thought of the show’s humor as typically Jewish, not what he expected PLO men to find amusing.

As signs of an early spring appeared in Israel, Rabin’s government wrapped up other matters as well. Treasury officials struck a new wage deal with university lecturers, whose strike had disrupted classes for two months. With Israel’s labor federation still wielding enormous power, strikes periodically paralyzed everything from state-run hospitals to the country’s only international airport. Police finally nabbed Baruch Marzel, the Kach leader wanted since the day of the massacre. He had been hiding at the home of another settler, Yoram Skolnick, who faced trial for shooting a Palestinian militant after he’d been subdued and tied up. For weeks, the actions of others had lunged Rabin from crisis to crisis. Now he felt himself regaining control.

But the sensation was short-lived. On April 6, exactly forty days after Goldstein’s killing spree, a nineteen-year-old Palestinian drove a car full of explosives from his town in the West Bank to Afula, a few miles across the border, and blew it up, killing eight people. Hamas, which trained and equipped the bomber, had waited until the end of the Muslim mourning period to take vengeance on Israel.

The bomber had stopped his light-blue Opel Ascona near a public bus and waited a few moments until a group of high school students
drew near before detonating his load. With the blast, the front of the bus burst into flames and thousands of razor-sharp metal fragments sliced at the crowd. Though the event pre-dated camera phones, a bystander who happened to be carrying a camcorder captured much of the carnage on video. In quick, jerky pans, it showed a man whose head had been severed and survivors whose skin was charred and clothes burned off. One of the bodies at the scene belonged to the assailant; he had killed himself in the act of killing others.

The Afula bombing would come to be remembered as Hamas’s foray into suicide attacks—as the moment the group embraced the tactic in response to Goldstein’s mass murder. In truth, Hamas had launched several suicide bombers at Israeli targets over the preceding year. But while the group had confined itself mostly to assaults against soldiers and settlers in the West Bank and Gaza—attacks that usually left two or three people dead—from now on it would strike at the heart of Israel, aiming for as many civilian casualties as possible. The car bombing marked the deadliest attack by any group since 1989. Goldstein hadn’t spawned the suicide phenomenon in Hamas, but his massacre motivated the group to take it to new heights.

The bombing preceded the official start of Holocaust Memorial Day in Israel by just hours. The twenty-four-hour mourning period begins with a piercing siren heard throughout Israel and a ceremony at Yad Vashem, Jerusalem’s museum and memorial for the 6 million victims of Nazi genocide. In its early years, Israel struggled to find a fitting way to mark the Holocaust. The idea of commemorating the persecution of Jews ran against the ethos that Israel had fostered for itself as a country of citizen-warriors who would not be victimized under any circumstances. Only eight years after the end of World War II did Ben-Gurion’s government get around to establishing an official day for marking the genocide, calling it, poignantly, Yom Hashoah Ve’hagvura, “Holocaust and the Heroism Day.” It would coincide with the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, one of the war’s few instances of large-scale Jewish resistance.