Killing a King: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel (17 page)

All these factors hampered the relationship between Rabin and Arafat. But there was something else as well—a palpable lack of chemistry and trust that deepened in the first year of their partnership over a series of difficult interactions. “At the beginning, it was such a hatred that you can’t even imagine,” Eitan Haber, Rabin’s chief of staff, recalled.

The most damaging of these occurred in May, at the ceremony in Cairo for the Gaza-Jericho agreement. Onstage, flanked by the US secretary of state and the Russian foreign minister, Arafat balked at signing one of the maps appended to the accord, suspecting Israeli negotiators had somehow tricked him into accepting less than what the sides had decided. The standoff on live television lasted nearly an hour and turned the event into a fiasco. Arafat’s own advisers eventually brought him around, but the drama left Rabin feeling embarrassed and angry.

A few days later, during a speech at a Johannesburg mosque, Arafat urged an audience to join the “jihad to liberate Jerusalem.” The
Palestinian leader was attending the inauguration of South African president Nelson Mandela, another former revolutionary who had reconciled with his enemies. But unlike Mandela, Arafat seemed to have a tough time shedding the persona of his old guerrilla days. When a recording of Arafat’s speech reached Israel, Rabin threatened to pull out of the peace process. Arafat explained later that he meant a jihad for peace.

Even Arafat’s festive arrival in Gaza in July, an event that marked the official start of Palestinian self-rule, was marred by discord. Hours after he and his men crossed from Sinai in a convoy of Mercedes cars, Rabin discovered that his entourage included former militants Israel had expressly barred from the territory. After a night of heated exchanges between Israeli and Palestinian negotiators by phone, Arafat was forced to send them back to Egypt. “Rabin was very angry that his trust was breached. . . . It was a very difficult evening,” recalled Nabil Shaath, one of the Palestinian officials involved in the conversations back and forth.

The animosity between the two leaders was apparent to everyone involved in the peace process. It became even more glaring as Rabin edged closer to a peace agreement with Jordan’s King Hussein in the late summer. To Israelis, Hussein had some deeply appealing qualities that Arafat lacked—a regal gentility, a gift for eloquent speechmaking, and a willingness to embrace the emotive side of reconciliation. Though Jordan had fought in two wars against Israel, the relationship between the countries lacked the toxic legacy of either occupation or terrorism. In their months of negotiations, Hussein and Rabin developed a rapport that seemed exceptional by any standard of diplomacy. Haber, who often participated in their meetings, thought that the two leaders had come to trust each other more than they trusted their own staff members and confidants. “No doubt about it, Rabin and Hussein fell in love.”

In mid-September, Rabin sat in his office and reviewed the data on Palestinian attacks over the preceding twelve months. The first year of peacemaking had been more violent than any of the intifada years. Sixty Israelis were killed, compared to forty-one in the preceding period. Most were civilians. In every category, from bombings and
stabbings to hand-grenade and Molotov-cocktail attacks, the numbers had spiked. Rabin could hardly blame Arafat. Most of the casualties preceded his arrival in Gaza. And even Israel’s pervasive and proficient security agencies had never been able to shut down the violence altogether. At a meeting with the Palestinian leader at the Erez border crossing between Israel and Gaza in late September, Rabin conveyed how critical it was to stop the cascade. The attacks were turning Israelis against the peace process and vindicating the hardliners. When Rabin left the meeting, he felt he’d gotten through to Arafat. The two leaders were finally understanding each other.

And then Wachsman went missing—touching off the most wrenching two-week period of Rabin’s term.

The nineteen-year-old soldier had been serving in the army for about a year, having followed his two brothers to the Golani Brigade. Short and slight, Wachsman got through the rigorous infantry training by sheer force of will. His unit had just completed a rotation in southern Lebanon, where Israel maintained a security zone to protect itself from rocket attacks. On Sunday, October 9, Wachsman got a ride with a friend from a base in northern Israel to a junction near Ben-Gurion Airport. When he climbed out of the Subaru, he told his army pal he would travel by bus the rest of the way to a friend’s house in Ramle or else hitchhike, whichever was quicker. In the late-afternoon traffic rush, someone was sure to pick him up. Wachsman was holding an M16 assault rifle and a plastic bag full of clothes. He had a weeklong leave coming to him, which he intended to spend with his parents in Jerusalem.

As soon as he raised his hand to hitch a ride, a red van pulled over with four men inside. Wachsman bent over and peered through the open window on the passenger’s side. He noticed the driver was wearing a crocheted skullcap much like his own, and so were the others. A Jewish prayer book lay on the dashboard and Hasidic music chimed from the speakers. Wachsman squeezed into the backseat and balanced his rifle between his legs.

The men in the van belonged to a Hamas cell from the Jerusalem area. They’d purchased the skullcaps the week before and rented the vehicle that morning. Hamas militants had abducted four other sol
diers in the preceding year in a similar manner but in those incidents, they killed their captives soon after grabbing them. Wachsman actually knew two of the victims—they’d grown up in Ramot, the same Jerusalem neighborhood where he lived. One of them was his upstairs neighbor. Now the group had a new strategy. Israel had been releasing members of Arafat’s Fatah movement from prison as part of the Oslo deal. Hamas wanted its own men freed as well.

On the road, the men overpowered Wachsman quickly. One passenger grabbed him by the neck and pushed his head toward his knees while another lunged for his gun. Wachsman fumbled for the charging handle trying to load a round in the chamber, but one of the militants swung at his hand with a hammer. Once he lost his gun, he stopped resisting altogether. As the van sped toward Jerusalem, the men tied up their captive and lowered a hood over his head. From the darkness, he heard one of the Palestinians say in accented Hebrew: “Don’t worry. . . . We just want to trade you for our people in prison.”

The cell had prepared a safe house in Bir Nabala, a Palestinian town just north of Jerusalem and well into the West Bank—which Israel continued to control. Inside the two-story home, surrounded by fruit trees and a low wall, the Hamas men went straight to work. In a room on the second floor they filmed two videotapes, one showing a masked man holding Wachsman’s ID card and offering to exchange the soldier for 200 Palestinian prisoners, including the wheelchair-bound spiritual leader of the group, Ahmed Yassin. The second one featured Wachsman himself, looking into the camera nervously and pleading for his life. “If my parents are watching, I’m fine for now. I hope to return to you if Rabin decides to free their prisoners.”

From Bir Nabala, the Wachsman home was less than two miles to the south. When her son didn’t get home Sunday night, Esther Wachsman, an English teacher who had grown up in New York and moved to Israel in her twenties, feared the worst. It was unlike him to change plans without calling. Esther had somehow endured the military service of her two older sons. Both volunteered for combat roles, following a trend among religious youngsters. She had a pact with the boys: if they were posted someplace remote and couldn’t call home, she would try not to worry. But if she knew they had access to
a phone and weren’t calling, then the anxiety would set in. Late in the evening, Esther dialed a number she had for the army and reported that her son was missing. The woman on the other end of the line seemed unconcerned. Soldiers were always heading off to Eilat during leave without telling their parents, she said. The beach town on the Red Sea was swarming with tourists in bikinis.

The following morning, one of the captors took the two videotapes and headed to the Gaza Strip. Israel had been restricting Palestinian travel between the West Bank and Gaza, which involved crossing through Israeli territory. But the twenty-eight-year-old Hamas man, Jihad Yarmur, lived in East Jerusalem and, as such, carried an Israeli identity card that allowed him to move around freely. At the Erez crossing, he showed the Israeli soldiers his blue ID and entered Gaza.

The transition was dramatic. The sparsely populated area on the Israeli side included communities with single-family homes and lush fields. Across the border, most people lived in squalor, with nearly a million Palestinians crammed into a five-mile-wide strip along the shoreline. Many were descendants of refugees who had fled their homes in 1948. They now resided in tightly arranged tenements made of exposed cinder block and administered by the United Nations.

And yet Gaza was changing. The peace deal had drawn investors from around the Arab world and Arafat’s new administration was handing out jobs—hiring civil servants and policemen. During the intifada years, the cultural scene went dormant. Now, suddenly, it had come to life. Arab performers put Gaza on their destination list, including the Lebanese singer Fawzi Yazbek, who did two shows at the Palestine Hotel in September 1994. A seventeen-member Egyptian circus came to town around the same time. On the anniversary of the Oslo deal, the Nasser movie theater in Gaza City opened its doors for the first film screening in seven years. Eight hundred people showed up, each paying about a dollar to see
Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story
. The owner of the theater, Mohammed Saleh, apologized to the crowd for selecting a movie that was already a year old but said newer ones were too expensive.

Yarmur spent Monday night in Gaza City and delivered the videotapes to the Reuters office there the next day. The Hamas men had
chosen to get the material out through Reuters because one of them had a brother who worked as a photographer for the agency. More important, the venue served their ruse. With the abduction videos emerging from Gaza, Israeli security agencies would assume Wachsman was being held there and not in the West Bank. So would Rabin.

BY TUESDAY AFTERNOON
Israel Television obtained a copy of the tapes from Reuters. The news division sent a duplicate to the Wachsman home, along with a cameraman who filmed the family watching their son’s abduction video on the television set in their basement. It was now two days since Wachsman went missing. Esther had been assuming he was dead. For all the dreadfulness of watching her son speak to her from his captivity, she felt immense relief at the evidence that he was, in fact, alive. A few hours later, Israel Television broadcast the video on its nightly newscast—along with footage of the family at home. From that moment on, the fate of Cpl. Nachshon Wachsman riveted the country.

With the ultimatum three days away, Rabin convened top security officials again Tuesday evening, including Army Chief Ehud Barak and members of the general staff. Rabin puffed on Parliaments throughout the meeting, turning his end of the large conference table into a smoky haze. The participants included people who had played a role in some of Israel’s most daring antiterrorism raids. Barak had helped plan the rescue of hijacking victims at Entebbe in 1976. Three years before that, he wandered the streets of Beirut dressed as a woman in an operation against top PLO guerrillas. But without intelligence on Wachsman’s whereabouts, none of the men at the table had ideas to offer. Haber looked around in disbelief. A few loathsome kidnappers had reduced the smartest military brains in the country to a helpless heap, he thought.

Once again, the vulnerability of the peace deal vexed Rabin. The preceding year had changed the country incontrovertibly. Israelis and Palestinians had forged relationships and partnerships previously
unthinkable. Israel and Jordan would be signing a full-fledged peace accord later in the month, an agreement made possible by the reconciliation with the Palestinians. Rabin and Arafat were candidates for the Nobel Peace Prize, with an announcement expected in the coming days. Yet the Wachsman ordeal showed once more how easy it was for opponents of peacemaking to push the process to a breaking point. If the soldier proved to be in Gaza and Arafat failed to find him, the pressure on Rabin to suspend negotiations would be enormous. What was the point of partnering with Arafat if he could not exert authority over the territory he now controlled?

Rabin pressed the men around the table for options. At one point the conversation turned to the question of negotiating with Hamas. The slow-motion drama of hostage ordeals often made them more excruciating than shooting or bombing attacks. In a country with mandatory conscription, many Israelis were at that very moment envisioning their brothers or sons in Wachsman’s predicament. But Rabin also had to look beyond Wachsman. Yassin, the Hamas spiritual leader, was serving a life sentence for ordering attacks on Israelis. Allowing the group to force his release would invite more abductions. Rabin listened to the arguments for and against but took no position himself.

By the following morning, Shabak operatives had picked up a clue that Hamas might be holding Wachsman in the city of Khan Yunis in southern Gaza. Shabak prided itself on having informers in almost every town in the West Bank and Gaza. Its analysts had spent years compiling lists of the most influential people in each area and identifying their vulnerabilities. Since Israel controlled virtually every aspect of daily life for Palestinians, any request to military authorities, for a driver’s license, perhaps, or permission to be hospitalized in Israel, might be used as leverage in the recruiting process. Early on Wednesday, an informer had pointed Shabak to a specific house in Khan Yunis where the cell might be holding Wachsman.

But Khan Yunis was the hometown of Mohammed Dahlan, who ran the emerging Palestinian intelligence service known as Preventive Security. Dahlan had his own network of agents and informers, many of them fellow Fatah activists he knew from the years he organized
resistance against Israel’s occupation in Gaza. Dahlan could be a tough negotiator and already had a reputation for financial corruption. But Israelis had grown comfortable with him as a partner on security matters, in part thanks to the Hebrew he taught himself while imprisoned by Israel. Now, in phone calls back and forth between Gaza and Jerusalem, Dahlan reported that Wachsman was definitely not in Khan Yunis. By midmorning Shabak’s own information confirmed it.