Killing a King: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel (2 page)

Three weeks earlier, Israeli negotiators had clinched an agreement with the Palestine Liberation Organization after months of secret talks in the Norwegian capital of Oslo. Though only the outline of a peace accord, the twelve-page document had the audacity and ambition of a history-making deal. It ended the state of belligerency between Israel and the PLO, promised to upend a quarter century of Israeli policy toward Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and created an opening for resolving the broader Arab-Israeli conflict. President Clinton had invited the two sides to the White House for a signing ceremony on September 13.

And yet, though the agreement was his own doing, Rabin remained uneasy.

In part, it was the wavering of a man who had spent much of his early life shooting at the people he was now reconciling with, defending Israelis against their bloody attacks and thwarting their nationalist aspirations. Born in Jerusalem in 1922, Rabin joined one of Mandatory Palestine’s Jewish armed groups soon after high school—the storied Palmach strike force. He fought in some of the most critical battles of the war for Israel’s independence in 1948, in one notorious action overseeing the expulsion of thousands of Palestinians from their hometown Lydda. Then he signed on for more service, climbing the ranks of the officers corps until he commanded the entire army at age forty-two. It was Rabin who led Israel’s astonishing six-day assault against a coalition of Arab armies in 1967—the very war that brought the West Bank and Gaza under Israel’s control. It was also Rabin who, as defense minister in the late 1980s, ordered an aggressive crackdown against Palestinians agitating for independence in these territories, sometimes violently. Their rebellion would come to be known as the first intifada, meaning literally “shaking off” in Arabic.

The Oslo Accord promised Palestinians a measure of self-rule in
parts of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. It implied, at least, that they might one day make their own state there. It also provided a foothold in these territories for Yasser Arafat, the head of the PLO and the man Israelis reviled more than any other enemy for a string of dreadful attacks against civilians his group perpetrated mostly in the 1970s and ’80s. For Israelis who viewed the West Bank and Gaza as theirs by biblical promise—including religious and right-wing Jews who had settled there over the years—the deal amounted to an abomination. But Rabin had no religious sentiment at all (one US official would describe him as the most secular Israeli he had ever met) and little regard for the settlers. To him, the agreement mainly presented a security challenge, no small issue given that security marked the core of his identity as a politician. It also entailed direct interaction with Arafat—starting at the White House ceremony, if Rabin chose to go. Just the thought of it caused him to cringe.

There was also a political dimension to Rabin’s discomfort. The negotiations that led to the agreement had been the undertaking of people close to the foreign minister, Shimon Peres. For decades, the two men—Rabin and Peres—cultivated not just a political rivalry in their Labor Party but a personal enmity like no other in Israeli politics. With a fervor that often seemed incomprehensible to people around them, they simply detested each other. Rabin took control of the Oslo process at an early stage, appointing his own envoy to the talks and directing Peres, who supervised the process from his perch at the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem. It became the venture of both men together, with Rabin in the lead. And yet, its genesis as the unauthorized dialogue of Peres’s protégés with PLO representatives sometimes appeared to taint it for Rabin. Whenever American officials asked him about the secret talks—among the few who knew they existed—he would respond with a characteristic downward wave of the hand to indicate nothing would come of them.

Even after negotiators sealed the Oslo Accord in mid-August, Rabin allowed himself a dismissive aside from time to time. When a family friend, the journalist Aliza Wallach, asked him over Friday-night dinner some days later which PLO figure led the Palestinian negotiating team in Oslo, Rabin responded derisively. “Some Abu
Ali,” he said—a colloquialism in Hebrew meaning roughly “some nobody.” It was in fact Ahmed Korei, the PLO’s finance chief who went by the nickname Abu Ala.

With all these conflicting impulses on his mind, Rabin began his workday that Friday morning, September 10, by reading a letter he received from Arafat. During the length of his term, Rabin actually served simultaneously in two positions, as both prime minister and defense minister. He would begin his workweek in the capital, Jerusalem, in one of a row of gray office buildings that housed the government ministries. For three nights each week he and his wife, Leah, dwelled at the prime minister’s stately residence in the upscale Rehavia neighborhood. On Wednesdays, they would make the hour-long drive to Tel Aviv, where Rabin conducted the country’s affairs from the sprawling compound of the Defense Ministry. They slept in their own apartment for the remainder of the week.

But on this Friday, he drove to Jerusalem to receive the Norwegian foreign minister, Johan Jørgen Holst, who had arrived directly from Arafat’s headquarters in Tunis. The letter Holst delivered from Arafat would serve as an appendix to the Oslo Accord. Addressed to Rabin as Mr. Prime Minister, it ran seven paragraphs long and included flourishes about the “new era in the history of the Middle East” and a “new epoch of peaceful coexistence.” Its main point was to convey the PLO’s recognition of Israel’s right to exist “in peace and security” and its renunciation of the “use of terrorism and other violence.” For a group whose 1964 charter declared the existence of Israel as “illegal and null and void,” it was a remarkable text.

Rabin read it several times and then drafted his response. It contained just one paragraph and included neither the niceties nor the lofty language that Arafat had deployed. Israel had decided to “recognize the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people,” he wrote. At the bottom of the page, he withheld a valediction. Rabin signed the letter during a short news conference later in the morning, flanked by Holst and Peres and using a simple ballpoint pen. Then he convened a group of advisers to discuss the White House ceremony.

His chief of staff, Eitan Haber, had spent some part of the past week canvassing politicians and public figures, including the cele
brated writer Amos Oz, on whether Rabin should attend the ceremony himself or send Peres in his stead. He had also been reviewing opinion polls that showed strong support for the deal from the political center, where his boss felt most comfortable, and of course from the peace advocates on the left side of the divide. A former journalist who sported an ear-to-ear comb-over and often looked sleep-deprived, Haber oversaw the prime minister’s schedule and wrote his speeches—which meant he had the delicate job of trying to know Rabin’s thoughts almost as well as Rabin did. There, at the meeting, he stressed that the agreement carried huge risks and noted that right-wingers, rabbis, and West Bank settlers had been protesting outside the prime minister’s office for much of the week. Their chanting could be heard from the sidewalk below even as he spoke.

Sending Peres would work as a kind of hedge, Haber argued. If the deal succeeded, there would be other ceremonies for the prime minister to attend. And if it failed, Rabin could pin it on his daydreaming foreign minister. “We can blame Peres,” Haber said. Rabin sided with his chief of staff and adjourned the meeting.

But at home later, with his family, he had second thoughts. Friday-night dinners at the Rabin home followed a ritual. They began promptly at eight o’clock, usually involved some political talk, and ended in time for Rabin to watch the nine o’clock newscast. The regulars included Rabin’s daughter, Dalia; her husband, Avi; and her children, Noa and Jonathan. Rabin’s son, Yuval, had been living with his family in North Carolina, and made only occasional visits.

By Israeli standards, the apartment where they gathered on the top floor of the eight-story building on Rav Ashi suggested privilege but not extravagance. It had recently been renovated and included two bedrooms, a den, and a second, smaller kitchen on the roof, where the couple hosted dinner parties for up to thirty people. But when it was just family, they ate in the dining area on the main floor and skipped the formalities. So much so that Rabin, who liked to sleep on Friday afternoons, would sometimes come to the table in his robe and slippers. Still, punctuality was essential; if someone failed to show up by a few minutes after eight, he would check his watch and become restless.

For many months, Rabin had told no one in the family about the
talks with the PLO except Leah. The secrecy reminded Dalia of the outbreak of the Six-Day War twenty-six years earlier. Her parents had sent her to school that Monday without telling her that Israeli planes would be striking Egypt later in the morning, though Rabin had decided himself on the launch time for the offensive. It taught her not to expect privileges as the daughter of the chief of staff and later the prime minister.

But now that the agreement with the PLO had been disclosed, she inquired gently why Rabin had decided against traveling to Washington. Shouldn’t he be giving it the full weight of his position by representing Israel himself at the White House? Dalia had rarely questioned her father’s judgment. To her, he was a rarity in Israeli politics, methodical in every undertaking and honest through and through, but also woefully untalented at self-promotion—a liability that had cost him over the years. Her father was an introvert. He hated the political drudgery of cultivating journalists or charming donors. Rabin’s idea of small talk often involved his own analytical exegeses, brilliant in their insight, but delivered in a halting monotone.

Leah, who knew that Rabin felt ambivalent about shaking Arafat’s hand, had been withholding her own opinion all week. Now she added her voice. By staying home, wouldn’t he be letting Peres take all the credit?

The questions stirred the issue again for Rabin and at the end of dinner he left the table to phone Shimon Sheves, the director of his office and perhaps his closest adviser. At the meeting earlier in the day, Sheves had been the one man in the room to argue against Haber’s position. The two—the powerbrokers in Rabin’s office—held different titles but their spheres overlapped and they often competed for their boss’s attention. Sheves ran Rabin’s election campaign and handled many of the prime minister’s political dealings, often with a stridency that rankled other aides and cabinet ministers. He was younger than the other staff members and the only one to sport a beard, which he kept meticulously trimmed. “Where are you?” Rabin inquired. Sheves sensed that his boss needed company and said he would come right over.

But before he arrived, the phone rang in Rabin’s den and Clinton’s
secretary of state, Warren Christopher, was patched through. Rabin had managed in a conversation with Clinton earlier in the week to deflect pressure over the question of representation at the ceremony. Now, somehow, it felt more difficult to resist Christopher’s courteous prodding. The secretary pointed out that Arafat had overcome criticism the previous day and mustered a nine-to-three majority in his executive committee in favor of the deal—an act of real leadership. Washington stood ready to host Arafat at the White House, a complicated maneuver given the PLO’s status as a terrorist organization under US law. But only if Rabin came as well.

By the time he hung up the phone, Rabin had edged substantially closer to changing his mind. His conversation with Sheves carried him the rest of the way. The adviser pointed out that Rabin had staked his premiership on the Oslo Accord. Its failure would be his failure, even if he stayed away from the signing ceremony. To make the deal work, he would have to set aside his reluctance and genuinely own it. The two men spent the last hour of that Friday drinking whiskey and discussing sports—they were both compulsive soccer fans. When Rabin finally went to bed after midnight, he told Leah they would be flying to Washington on Sunday.

But first he would have to face down a major political crisis.

BY SEVEN THIRTY
the next morning, Rabin had convened Sheves and Haber at his apartment, along with two other advisers—his military secretary, Maj. Gen. Danny Yatom, and the director of the Mossad intelligence agency, Shabtai Shavit. Now that Rabin was traveling to Washington, Yatom and Shavit would have a long list of security arrangements to tend to quickly. And since the Israeli delegation would be larger than planned, Haber needed to book more rooms at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, coordinate scheduling with the White House, and look after many other aspects of the trip. Rabin’s advisers were accustomed to working on the Jewish Sabbath—few of them were religiously observant. But an excursion abroad for an
Israeli leader on such short notice was almost unprecedented. The prime minister’s plane was to depart the following afternoon, with the White House ceremony scheduled for Monday at eleven o’clock.

But the first order of business was to inform Peres that Rabin had changed his mind. The two leaders, Rabin and Peres, had forged a kind of armistice during the months of the Oslo process, both recognizing the political risk they had undertaken by conducting secret talks with Israel’s most loathed enemy. It included a commitment by each man to keep the other well informed. Still, the level of distrust and suspicion remained exceedingly high. One government spokesman had come to think of them in this period as two old sumo wrestlers locked in a perpetual grip, each trying to defeat the other but also propping each other up.

Haber delivered the notice by phone to Peres’s chief of staff shortly after eight in the morning. Then he called a reporter from Israel Radio, the country’s public broadcasting network, to give him the news—a move he would soon regret. The network ran a series of radio stations that together owned a huge share of the listenership across the country. At the top of every hour, the stations all sounded a series of beeps, the cue that a short news bulletin would follow, originally modeled on BBC broadcasts. Haber assumed the news item would go out at nine o’clock, giving Peres’s aide an hour to inform his boss.