Killing a King: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel (19 page)

The action now proceeded on three fronts: Matkal members drilling for the operation in a staging area near Jerusalem, other soldiers keeping a constant watch on the house in Bir Nabala, and Rabin holding long meetings with his security team in his Tel Aviv office. As head of Shabak, Gillon sat in on the meetings with Rabin. He would recall later pondering whether the captors would make good on their threat to kill Wachsman—and concluding that indeed they would. Holding a hostage was an exhausting ordeal, difficult to sustain for more than a few days. The Hamas men would have had little sleep
since Sunday and might well be running out of food and supplies. And Hamas had a track record: it had abducted and killed four soldiers in the preceding year.

At the Wachsman home in Ramot, the setting sun just after five brought matters to a standstill. Journalists still lingered at the front door, waiting for the ultimatum to expire. But inside, the Wachsmans shifted to their Sabbath routine, shutting off radio and television and—even now, with their son in captivity—unplugging the phone. “We have a rule that when the Sabbath begins, you enter a different stratosphere. You let the Almighty run the affairs,” Yehuda Wachsman would say later. Rabin had not informed the family about Yarmur’s arrest or the pending operation. Instead, he appointed a major general to wait in his car not far from the house in Ramot, ready to notify the Wachsmans about the outcome of the raid one way or another.

After dark, a surveillance team in Bir Nabala spotted a Mercedes approaching the house and a man entering. When he left twenty minutes later, soldiers let him get some distance from the neighborhood and then pulled him over. In a quick interrogation at the scene, the man admitted serving as an assistant to the cell. He had brought a tray of
knafeh
—a Middle Eastern cheese pastry—and other food for the captors and the hostage. The man confirmed seeing Wachsman on the second floor of the house, in a room with blankets draped over the windows—valuable information. The soldiers radioed the details to members of the Matkal team, who by this time had quietly taken up positions around the house. With the confirmation that Wachsman was alive, the operation was a go.

THE FORCE, NOW
divided in two, stormed the house at 7:45 p.m., an hour and fifteen minutes before the deadline. The plan called for the two teams to blast their way in through separate entrances, with one group engaging the Hamas men inside while the other raced upstairs to free Wachsman. But the operation went badly from the outset. One team headed by Capt. Nir Poraz came under fire immediately
on entering the house. Poraz died instantly, and several of his men sustained bullet wounds.

The second team, meanwhile, had trouble forcing its way in. By the time Capt. Lior Lotan and his fighters entered the house and sprinted upstairs, the two remaining Hamas men had barricaded themselves in the room with Wachsman. Lotan tried to shoot his way into the room but the heavy door would not open. From the other side, he heard one of the Hamas men threatening to kill Wachsman if the soldiers didn’t leave. He also heard gunfire. Minutes passed while Lotan tried to blast the door off its hinges. The Matkal fighters had counted on their ability to surprise and overwhelm the cell. Now, as the setbacks multiplied, Lotan heard the man inside saying he’d killed Wachsman and was not afraid to die. Finally, Lotan’s force charged through the door and killed the two Hamas men. But Wachsman was already dead. The operation to save one soldier had cost the lives of two.

Barak, who followed the events from a staging area near Bir Nabala, phoned Rabin to report that the raid had failed. Yatom had been with the Israeli leader all evening. In the hour leading up to the operation, he watched his boss pace back and forth in his office. Now, as the phone conversation dragged on, Yatom could read the news on Rabin’s face. “I understood from his expression that something went wrong.” That Wachsman died was bad enough. Poraz, the twenty-three-year-old captain who commanded the raid and died in its initial moments, was just a few weeks from completing his military service. Poraz’s father had also been killed in action, his plane shot down over Sinai during the 1973 war.

The rest of the ordeal unspooled over a grueling weekend. Late in the evening, Rabin held a press conference to explain his decision to order the raid. “It is our obligation not to surrender to a terrorist ultimatum but to fight against terrorism with all of the attendant pain and suffering,”
he said. The following day, he paid a visit to the Poraz family. As army chief and later defense minister, Rabin had made plenty of condolence calls over the years but this one felt especially excruciating. Poraz’s mother had tried to prevent her son from serving in a combat unit but eventually relented. Now, she lashed out at Rabin for sending him on a mission that was doomed to fail. “They
had a very traumatic visit,” Rabin’s daughter, Dalia, recalled years later. “She was very, very bitter.” The family buried Poraz alongside his father in Tel Aviv.

Rabin also called on the Wachsman home, where journalists still lingered outside. Inside, Esther was preparing for her son’s funeral. She had managed to get through the night only with the help of sedatives. Rabin arrived with several military officers, but Yehuda asked to speak to the prime minister alone. In the basement of the home, where the family had watched the abduction video four days earlier, Yehuda said he understood the decision not to negotiate with terrorists and didn’t fault Rabin for ordering the raid. But he couldn’t comprehend why Rabin didn’t stall in order to give the unit more time to prepare. In the final hours, Hamas had seemed ready to extend the deadline. Rabin said he hadn’t trusted the group to keep Wachsman alive and repeated a line from his press conference—that the decision and the failure were his own. When Rabin emerged from the basement, Esther noticed his eyes had welled up.

At meetings throughout Sunday, Rabin’s security team reviewed the events of the preceding week. The one redeeming aspect of the affair had been Arafat. The Palestinian leader had combed Gaza to find Wachsman. He detained some two hundred Hamas men for questioning. When he reported to Rabin that the missing soldier was not in his territory, he was telling the truth. “Yasser Arafat earned many points from Yitzhak Rabin, deservedly. He ordered all his men to assist in the search [and] did everything we asked of him,” Carmi Gillon would write later in a memoir.

Haber came to view the ordeal as a defining moment in the interaction between the two leaders. Each Hamas attack on Israel had prompted a debate among Rabin’s security advisers: had Arafat been unable to stop it or simply unwilling? In the Wachsman case, when Rabin brought pressure to bear, Arafat responded. “Rabin even said, ‘Hey, he told us the truth,’ ” Haber recalled two decades later. And yet, the most he could muster for now was a slow thaw. When Haber proposed that his boss phone Arafat and acknowledge his efforts, the Israeli leader recoiled. “He said, ‘That’s my red line. I’m not going to apologize.’ ”

The contours of the relationship were forming. Arafat seemed to revere Rabin’s military bearing and fear his temper. At meetings he addressed him as “Your Excellency.” Rabin was coming to terms with the fact that Arafat could not shut down Hamas violence—certainly not from areas that remained under Israel’s control. If the Palestinian leader was making a genuine effort, the peace process could continue. To his own advisers, Rabin said repeatedly that Arafat needed to have his
Altalena
moment, to take on those rivals who threatened his sovereignty. But he also understood the complexity of domestic politics. Rabin had his own extremists to deal with—and he often chose to avoid confrontation.

In an interview with the reporters Nahum Barnea and Shimon Shiffer soon after Wachsman died, Rabin mounted a defense of his agreement with Arafat, something Israelis had been accustomed to reading. But he also defended Arafat himself. “Making a deal with Arafat was difficult, given the history of terrorism. But I came to the conclusion that it’s Arafat or Hamas,” he said. “I certainly don’t regret coming to an agreement that included reciprocal recognition with the PLO. Arafat is a strategic partner of this government.” Pressed on the ways the Oslo process had come up short, Rabin said: “Arafat is disappointed that he didn’t get certain things from this agreement, just as I am.”

Yossi Beilin, who accompanied Rabin on some of his subsequent meetings with Arafat, noticed the improvement. But he also began to think that the strategy he himself had devised in the Oslo talks—an incremental advance toward peace between the two sides—was misguided. The approach aimed to build confidence between Israelis and Palestinians, enough to allow each side to make difficult concessions in the final agreement. No doubt it had altered the landscape. Israeli and Palestinian troops now patrolled together in Gaza, an astonishing sight for anyone familiar with the history of enmity between the two sides. Academics were meeting across the region in what came to be known as track-two talks—freewheeling discussions on ways to solve the conflict for good. Dialogue groups had sprung up in all the big Palestinian cities, often led by former political prisoners. Youth groups, artists, businessmen, parents who had lost children in the
conflict—all were looking for counterparts to engage with. Oslo had started as a process between leaders and quickly filtered down.

But the slow, staged approach of the political process had also allowed opponents to mobilize against it. Their campaign of violence had been so effective that, thirteen months after the signing in Washington, it was not clear whether the peace process was enhancing confidence or eroding it.

Under the terms of their deal, the two sides had until May 1999 to complete a final peace agreement. But Beilin now worried that another five years of shootings and bombings, closures and crackdowns would drain Oslo of public support on both sides. As the process moved into its second year, Beilin approached Arafat’s deputy, Mahmoud Abbas, about launching another secret channel, this one in Stockholm. He envisioned replicating the Oslo talks but instead of negotiating another interim deal, hashing out all the complicated details of a final peace accord, including where the border would run between Israel and Palestine. When the official final-status negotiations got under way, the two sides could work from the paper drafted in Stockholm instead of starting from scratch. Beilin appointed the two academics who had negotiated the Oslo deal, Ron Pundak and Yair Hirschfeld, to lead the talks. He informed neither Peres nor Rabin about the channel.

In the weeks that followed the Wachsman ordeal, the pendulum kept swinging between bad news and good news, trauma and euphoria. On October 19, just five days after the raid in Bir Nabala, a Hamas suicide bomber blew himself up on a Tel Aviv bus, killing twenty-two people. It was the deadliest attack yet by the group and a shock to residents of Israel’s busiest city—who seemed to feel largely removed from the rising brutality of the conflict. The bomber had struck on Dizengoff Street, a main artery of the city lined with cafés and boutiques.

Rabin once again pressed Arafat to tighten his grip on Gaza. But the bomber turned out to be a resident of Qalqilya, a West Bank city under Israel’s control. Israeli authorities had detained him six times in the preceding years. After cutting short a trip to London, Rabin told reporters in Tel Aviv that Israel must finally come to terms with separating
itself from the Palestinians and the land—much of it anyway—it conquered in 1967. “I am prepared to fight them [Hamas] to the finish because they are the enemies of Israel and the enemies of peace. But I must also consider, what next? What is the solution? Should it be separation between the Palestinians and Israel, or a continued blurring of the line—continuing to create the conditions that led to fanaticism among the Palestinians [in the first place].” He admitted there was little Israel’s security agencies could do against a lone suicide bomber bent on destruction.

Rabin also said Israel was hunting for a certain engineer who made bombs for all of Hamas’s attacks. In meetings with the security team, Shabak identified him as Yahya Ayyash.

Just one week later, Israel and Jordan signed a formal peace accord in a stretch of desert on the border between the two countries. Israeli troops had been clearing land mines in the area for weeks, preparing it for what would now be a transit point. Though Israel and Jordan had not fought a war in twenty-seven years, the agreement carried huge symbolic weight. For the first time since its founding, Israel now had more allies than enemies on its perimeter. Some five thousand people attended in one-hundred-degree heat, including President Clinton, whose face turned bright red under the desert sun. When it was over, Israel and Jordan threw switches connecting their electric grids in Eilat and Aqaba, twin cities on the Red Sea. Even Rabin’s sharpest critics praised the deal; the Knesset ratified it by a vote of 105 to 3.

Rabin had now been in office for twenty-eight months. Questions surrounded his agreement with the Palestinians. Arafat had yet to assert himself with Hamas and Rabin had still made no public commitment to a Palestinian state. Whether the two men could muster a final treaty was by no means certain. But the messy accord with Arafat had led to a comprehensive agreement with Jordan. And Rabin still hoped to lock up a deal with Syria, the one bordering state that posed a genuine threat. The Israeli leader had set out to change the country’s corrosive status quo and made good on that promise, unquestionably. Israel looked nothing like it had when his term began.

The Nobel Prize ceremony took place in mid-December. In Tel Aviv, it was still warm enough for dedicated beachgoers to swim in
the Mediterranean. At Oslo’s Fornebu Airport, just five hours away by plane, technicians were de-icing the runway. Days before the event, Arafat’s wife announced she was several weeks pregnant. Suha Tawil had been Arafat’s secretary, more than thirty years younger than he was, when they married secretly in 1991. Now, she described the timing of the pregnancy as a harbinger of good things for the Palestinians. “It’s a double blessing for Abu Ammar—the Nobel Prize and a baby,” she said, using Arafat’s nom de guerre.