Killing a King: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel (16 page)

But Amir couldn’t resist divulging the secret to Har-Shefi and inviting her to join. Har-Shefi had not even served in the army but Amir thought she could be an asset nonetheless. She was, after all, the one real settler in the bunch, young and reasonably pretty. Like many other settlements, Beit El had an armory where automatic rifles were stored. Amir asked her, perhaps playfully, whether she’d be willing to flirt with the guards and then steal several rifles. Hagai liked the idea because stolen guns would be difficult to trace back to the militia. Sometime later and on a more serious note, Amir talked to Har-Shefi about buying digital timers at an electronics shop near Tel Aviv’s central bus station. Hagai had already purchased several of these timers for his bomb-making experiments and wanted more. But as the militia plan grew serious, he became more cautious. Har-Shefi initially refused, then thought it over and agreed. But Amir backtracked, saying she’d be bad at haggling and would likely be overcharged.

The two, Amir and Har-Shefi, spent many hours together over the semester, alone or with others, often sitting on the floor of the student union, preparing signs for an upcoming protest. Amir was losing any inhibitions he might have had about telling people Rabin needed to die. Raviv heard him say so repeatedly and so did Skornik. On subsequent student weekends in the settlements, Amir declared it even with crowds of people gathered around. Har-Shefi seemed to find the bluster exhilarating—and Amir clearly liked the reaction it provoked. At one point, he told her outright that he intended to shoot Rabin with his Beretta.

But Har-Shefi wasn’t sure whether to take him seriously. And she challenged him at times—once while visiting Rachel Adani, the astrologist in Tel Aviv. In her apartment, Amir pushed Har-Shefi to talk to Rachel about her zodiac sign and her astrological chart. At a certain moment, the conversation turned to
din rodef
, with Amir launching into a sermon about how the edict applied to Rabin and he needed to be killed. Rachel shot Amir a look and asked him if he’d lost his mind. Har-Shefi seemed skeptical as well. She said she
wanted to consult the rabbi of Beit El, Shlomo Aviner, a respected figure among the settlers, and proposed that they both accept Aviner’s response, no matter what it was. But Amir made no commitments.

At the settlement, Har-Shefi knocked on the door of Aviner’s home one day. Beit El sat on a hill overlooking Ramallah, one of seven Palestinian cities in the West Bank. Much of the settlement was built on land Israeli authorities confiscated from individual Palestinians in the 1970s, citing security needs. Inside, Aviner led Har-Shefi to his study, where religious texts lined the shelves from floor to ceiling.

For an hour, they discussed the minutiae of
din rodef
and
din moser
. Har-Shefi told the rabbi that a certain student at Bar-Ilan was saying a death sentence hovered over Rabin because of the edicts. Was it true? Aviner said he was being approached regularly about the issue and that his response was unequivocal: Rabin was a fellow Jew and an elected leader and should not be killed for his policies. Aviner opposed the peace process vehemently but said it made Rabin neither a
rodef
nor a
moser
. Still, when Har-Shefi asked whether she should report this student to the authorities, the rabbi advised against it. He, too, was a fellow Jew and might be harmed if she involved the police.

The rumblings over
din rodef
and
din moser
were still confined to the rarefied world of Orthodox rabbis and religious seminaries. In the year since Rabin shook hands with Arafat, these terms hardly appeared in the Israeli and foreign press. But in the clerical world, where anger was constantly rising over the shrinking Jewish homeland and the attacks by Palestinians, the discourse had become ubiquitous.

Around the time Aviner explained to Har-Shefi that
din rodef
did not apply to Rabin, three prominent settler rabbis were making the most explicit case yet that it did. In a long letter full of references to the government’s “collusion” with terrorists, the three asked some forty Haredi sages around the world, the “wise men of their generation,” to rule on the matter, one way or another. The letter’s authors included Dov Lior, the rabbi of Hebron who praised Baruch Goldstein as a holy martyr at his funeral. They framed their text as an inquiry, one they were making at the behest of “men and women from the settlements of Judea, Samaria and Gaza and the rest of the country.” But it read more like an ecclesiastical putsch attempt: three religious
figures trying to have the elected government of Israel repudiated and its members condemned to death, no less.

Much of the letter concerned the rise in terrorist attacks against Israelis and specifically against the settlers since the signing of the of the Oslo deal. No mention was made of the Goldstein massacre or its role in escalating the violence. Rabin and his cabinet ministers were depicted as reckless leaders who put Israelis in danger by reaching an agreement with the PLO. “What is the rule about this bad government? Can they be regarded as accomplices to acts of murder committed by terrorists, since in their plans they are responsible for the strengthening and arming of these terrorists?” the rabbis wrote.

They addressed the matter of
din moser
in another series of questions toward the end of the letter. “Should they be tried according to Jewish law? And, if proven guilty as accomplices to murder, what should their sentence be? If they are, indeed . . . punishable in court, is it the obligation of every individual to bring them to trial in a court of justice, or, for lack of an alternative, in an ordinary secular court? Is it not the obligation of the community’s leaders to warn the head of the government and his ministers that if they keep pursuing the agreement . . . they will be subject . . . to the Halakhic [Jewish legal] ruling of
din moser
, as ones who surrender the life and property of Jews to the gentiles?”

All three rabbis signed the letter—Eliezer Melamed, Daniel Shilo, and Dov Lior. They included a phone and fax number the sages could use to reply. How or even whether the sages responded is not clear. But to people who regarded the three as spiritual authorities, the letter itself affirmed the Rabin government’s apostate status and the importance of toppling it by whatever means necessary. Shilo would confirm years later that the questions were largely rhetorical and that the rabbis were hoping with the letter to draw the Haredi community into the circle of resistance against Rabin.

Amir was already entrenched in that circle. But the ongoing rabbinical fixation with
din rodef
and
din moser
emboldened him. “If I did not get the backing and I had not been representing many more people, I would not have acted,” he would say.

When a copy of the letter reached the hands of Yoel Bin-Nun, the
relatively moderate settler rabbi who had maintained a regular correspondence with Rabin, it filled him with dread. Later he warned Rabin in one of his handwritten letters that reasonable right-wingers had lost control of the struggle. “The extremists are mocking us. They gave up long ago on the army and the government and all the institutions and built their own spiritual path outside the state institutions. Now it’s happening to the moderates and the tide is strong,” he wrote.

“More and more people are liable to operate out of desperation and it could endanger all of us.”

CHAPTER 5

He Told Us the Truth

“At the beginning, it was such a hatred that you can’t even imagine.”

—
EITAN HABER

F
rom his desk at the prime minister’s office in Jerusalem, Rabin called out to his military secretary in the next room. “Get Arafat on the line.” Danny Yatom, who had been operating in crisis mode since that morning, October 11, 1994, recognized the agitation in his boss’s voice. This would not be an amicable call.

Earlier in the day, Hamas had released an abduction video showing a shackled Israeli soldier seated in front of an armed man in a ski mask. The group had grabbed Cpl. Nachshon Wachsman from a hitchhiking station midway between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv and was threatening to kill him unless Israel released some two hundred Palestinian prisoners. Rabin, who in crises could burn through a pack of cigarettes in the course of a long meeting, watched the video in a conference room adjoining his office, along with his military and intelligence chiefs. The security establishment had a drill for these situations: Analysts would begin studying the video for clues while intelligence operatives probed their Palestinian informants—of which Israel was rumored to
have thousands. But Rabin also wanted to lean on Arafat. Hamas had delivered the videotape to the Gaza office of the Reuters news agency. Gaza was Arafat’s domain.

Rabin had been holding regular conversations with Arafat for more than a year now, but the calls usually required some cumbersome arranging. Aides from both sides would discuss the talking points in advance and set a time for the call. Someone had to track down an interpreter, who would listen in on the line. The two leaders communicated in English but Arafat’s comprehension sometimes faltered.

With the Hamas ultimatum ticking down, the call this time went through quickly. The captors had given Israeli authorities until Friday at nine p.m. to meet their demands. It was now Tuesday. Rabin opened by asking Arafat what he knew about the event. For months, the Israeli leader had been pressing him to crack down on Hamas and Islamic Jihad, strip the militants of their weapons, and jail their political leaders. Arafat always gave the same response: he had his own way of dealing with the groups, a Levantine blend of coercing and co-opting that would bring the Islamists to heel without setting off a civil war. Certainly, he knew something about asserting power. The torchbearer of the Palestinian liberation movement had been outmaneuvering political opponents for three decades.

But Hamas kept killing Israelis. Just two days earlier, a gunman from the group fired into a crowd at a Jerusalem promenade, wounding dozens of people, two of them fatally. Much of the time, Rabin suspected that Arafat lacked the necessary leadership or resolve or worse—that he quietly condoned the violence. Now on the phone, he demanded a sweeping operation to find Wachsman’s captors. But Arafat had inquired with his security chiefs and was sure the Israeli soldier was being held in the West Bank, where Israel still maintained full control. “I checked and he’s not in Gaza,” he said. Arafat repeated the line several times until Rabin lost his temper. “I will burn Gaza to the ground if you don’t find him. I will destroy every home,” he hollered into the receiver.

From the awkward handshake at the White House thirteen months earlier, the sediment of the relationship had never quite settled. Rabin embraced the idea that Israel’s rule over the Palestinians needed to end
and that Arafat should wield genuine authority, at least until Palestinians could muster an election. But he also viewed Arafat as Israel’s auxiliary in the fight against Islamic militancy—a subcontractor who could operate with fewer constraints. In a television interview a few months after signing the Oslo deal, Rabin reassured viewers that Arafat would be able to fight terrorism without being hampered by B’Tselem and Bagatz. B’Tselem was an Israeli human-rights group that reported regularly on Israeli abuses in the West Bank and Gaza. Bagatz, an acronym for the Israeli High Court of Justice, had occasionally set curbs on the government’s antiterrorism policies, including its jailing of Palestinians without trial. To Rabin, each Palestinian attack after Oslo felt like an infringement of the agreement’s core transaction.

Arafat saw it differently. He and Rabin had a common enemy in Hamas, that much was clear. The Islamic group had been in existence for just seven years and already it had its own power base in the West Bank and Gaza, a charity network that catered to many thousands of Palestinians, and the backing of religious authorities. Hamas projected discipline and political integrity compared to Arafat’s PLO, which had grown fat on the patronage of Arab regimes. The Hamas military wing, Izz ad-Din al-Qassam, had accumulated weapons and bomb-making know-how and posed a challenge to the sovereignty of the new Palestinian Authority. And yet Arafat refused to see himself as Israel’s enforcer against the Islamists.

And Arafat had his own grievances against Rabin—chiefly around what he saw as Israel’s creeping entrenchment in the West Bank and Gaza. Rabin had imposed a freeze on most housing construction but allowed some settlements to grow, including those in and around East Jerusalem. For Arafat, any expansion came at the expense of the state he expected to get at the end of the Oslo process. In places where the freeze
was
imposed, the settlers sometimes found ways to cheat. At Elon Moreh, for example, settlers hired several hundred Palestinian laborers to pour dozens of new foundations over the course of a weekend before Rabin’s moratorium went into effect. Though observant Jews are not allowed to ask non-Jews to work on the Sabbath, settler rabbis granted special dispensation for the campaign. The result was a new neighborhood at Elon Moreh.

Arafat’s administration tracked the data on housing starts in the settlements. In Rabin’s first two years in office, the figure dropped by 79 percent, an encouraging sign. But Palestinian leaders also noted the network of roads Rabin was building from Israel to the settlements, a huge and expensive undertaking that seemed to suggest Israel was digging in. In Rabin’s thinking, the roads were a stopgap. Until the final status of the territory was determined, they would allow settlers to bypass Palestinian towns that would come under Arafat’s rule and get to their homes more safely. Rabin conceded to his advisers that many of the roads would end up on the Palestinian side of the border when a permanent agreement was reached. But the sight of so many Israeli bulldozers grinding up the territory just didn’t square with a process that was supposed to lead to Palestinian sovereignty.

Only much later would the unintended consequence of these roads become evident. They would transform many settlements from isolated colonies to bedroom communities easily accessible from Israel’s main cities. The roads and the cheap housing at the settlements would make them appealing to everyday Israelis and not just ideologues, powering their expansion for years to come.