Killing a King: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel (20 page)

Rabin had been irritated about having to share the prize with Peres. To Shimon Sheves, he said he needed no help “carrying the envelope.” But offstage and later at the reception, Sheves noticed something surprising: an easy, almost demonstrative rapport between Peres and Rabin. The antagonism from more than two decades of quarreling had not quite dissipated—but it had been receding for some time now. Peres had several cuts on his face, having tripped the night before during a walk to an Oslo synagogue. When Norwegian security men watched him tumble, one of them thought someone had taken a shot at the Israeli foreign minister.

From Oslo, Rabin made a stop in South Korea for a meeting with President Kim Young-sam and then headed back to Israel. On a Saturday following his return, the red phone rang in his apartment on Rav Ashi. Rabin braced himself for bad news but the voice on the other end of the line sounded decidedly calm. It was Peres calling to inquire whether somehow the Nobel Prize medals had been switched. The one he was holding had the letters Y.R. engraved on the back—clearly it belonged to Rabin. Did Rabin have Peres’s medal? Or was there a three-way switch with Arafat?

When Rabin explained the mix-up to the family over lunch, Noa, his teenage granddaughter, let out a derisive giggle. Did Peres have nothing better to do on a Saturday than admire his Nobel medal? But Rabin silenced her with a hand gesture. Peres had worked hard for the achievement and it was his right to revel in it, he said. Noa felt her jaw slacken. How strange it was to hear her grandfather defending the man he had loathed for so many years, not just his political rival but the antagonist-in-chief for the entire Rabin family. She made a mental note to hold her tongue from now on when it came to Peres.

CHAPTER 6

Under-the-Window Tales

“There was a lot of intelligence noise. This was one more item.”

—
HEZI KALO

T
he Nobel ceremony gave Yigal Amir one more reason to brood. If he thought the international community would conclude from the suicide bombings that Oslo had been a mistake, it had done the opposite: honored the dealmakers with one of the world’s most prestigious prizes. In his own mind, Amir was doing everything he could to educate people about the evils of the so-called peace process. Yet he’d racked up nothing but failures: the failure to draw millions to the streets; the failure to form a serious militia; and the failure to stop Rabin.

On the Bar-Ilan campus, the first weeks of 1995 frothed with political activity. Some students had joined a hunger strike outside Rabin’s office in Jerusalem. Others took part in a campaign to heckle Rabin wherever he appeared around the country. On January 22, the prime minister was scheduled to speak at Yad Vashem to mark fifty years since the liberation of Auschwitz. Shmuel Rosenbloom, the law student who had taken up with Nava Holtzman after she severed ties
with Amir, organized a bus from Bar-Ilan to the memorial in Jerusalem. Amir decided to go along.

The students intended to protest Rabin’s continuing partnership with Arafat in the face of Hamas violence. But they were also seething about something else: the government’s decision to exempt most visiting foreign officials from touring Yad Vashem. The visits had been an unvarying ritual for decades. But by the 1990s, many Israelis felt the emphasis on Jews as victims had come to seem trite and manipulative.

To the students, the decision marked one more way the government was trying to dim Israel’s Jewish heritage. A petition they circulated on campus featured a cartoon of Deputy Foreign Minister Yossi Beilin, the architect of the new policy (and of the Oslo talks), dressed as a traffic cop, directing people to Palestinian landmarks instead of Israeli ones. “How can the foreign ministry showcase Israel without showcasing the moral underpinnings of its very existence?” the petition asked. “People who don’t go
there
won’t understand why we are
here
.”

On the morning of the rally, Amir woke up early at the house in Herzliya and walked to the neighborhood synagogue as usual. But during the service he did something out of the ordinary: quietly and alone, he recited the
vidui
, a confessional prayer that Jews say when they are preparing to die. Without much fanfare, Amir had decided he would try to kill Rabin at Yad Vashem, even if it got him killed. The prayer had different versions, usually beginning with an acknowledgment that God alone had dominion over life and death: “May it be Your will that You heal me with total recovery, but, if I die, may my death be an atonement for all the errors, iniquities, and willful sins that I have erred, sinned and transgressed before You, and may You grant my share in the Garden of Eden, and grant me the merit to abide in the World to Come which is vouchsafed for the righteous.”

At home, Amir slipped the Beretta into his pants, then left for campus. Along the highway, from Herzliya south to Bar-Ilan, the bright bloom of the almond trees stood out against the gray of winter.

By now, sixteen months after the start of the deal with the Palestinians, Shabak had a file on Amir. It wasn’t long—just a few sentences
on a single page. It included references to the student weekends he’d been organizing in the settlements and also something about his idea of recruiting people for attacks against Palestinians. The agency had compiled a list of several dozen extremists overheard talking about the need to kill Rabin. From time to time, a Shabak officer would summon one of them for a meeting, warn him that he was being watched, and perhaps revoke his gun license, if he had one. In internal documents, the agency referred to these potential assailants as
b’dukaim
—literally, people who warranted scrutiny. But Amir’s name was absent from the list. On campus and at the settlement weekends, Amir had been saying openly for some months now that
din rodef
applied to Rabin and that the prime minister needed to die. Smaller groups of people had heard him talk explicitly about killing Rabin with his Beretta. But somehow, Shabak knew only about his incipient plan to form an anti-Arab militia.

The Shabak officer in charge of thwarting Jewish extremism was a wiry man in his mid-forties, Hezi Kalo, who had spent most of his two-decade career in the Arab Affairs Department, battling Palestinian terrorism. In the agency hierarchy, Arab Affairs stood above everything else. The big budgets went to fighting terrorism, and the prestige lay with recruiting and running Palestinian agents in the West Bank and Gaza. The Jewish Affairs Department, by contrast, was the place where careers often stalled. Investigating settlers or rabbis meant tangling with their powerful patrons in government—and suffering the consequences.

Kalo took a sabbatical in 1992 to polish his Arabic and study Arab literature. He intended to return to the Arab Affairs Department. But by the end of his year away, the Oslo deal had transformed Israel’s security landscape and shifted priorities in the agency. A withdrawal from parts of the West Bank and Gaza would rouse Jewish radicals and Shabak now wanted its most experienced officers to work the Jewish side as well. Kalo began his term as head of the Jewish Affairs Department in September 1993, the month Rabin and Arafat signed their deal in Washington. “We understood we were facing a major escalation,” he recalled.

In his new role, Kalo found himself trying to infiltrate the very
communities he’d spent years protecting—settlements where extremists were now plotting against Palestinians. In December, just three months after the start of Oslo, masked gunmen pulled three Palestinians from a car near Tarkumiya and shot them to death. Shabak suspected settlers but never solved the crime. Two months later, Goldstein committed his massacre in Hebron. Kalo quickly realized that Jewish extremists had advantages over Palestinian militants when it came to planning and perpetrating attacks. Most had military training and easy access to weapons. As Israeli citizens, they could travel anywhere without arousing suspicion. Around the time of the Hebron killing spree, Kalo drafted an internal memo outlining some worst-case scenarios. One was an attack on Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock, an event that would undoubtedly ignite the entire Muslim world. The other was an assassination attempt against Israeli political figures—chiefly, Rabin and Peres.

The memo coincided with some disturbing trends in the national religious community, including the rabbis’ call on soldiers to defy their commanders should they be ordered to dismantle settlements. But it received little attention in the agency. Right-wing extremists tended to point their guns at Arabs, not Jews. The last time a Jewish leader had been assassinated was in 1933, murdered on a Tel Aviv beach in a crime that remained unsolved six decades later.

Still, Kalo and a few others in his department believed the rising radicalism among settlers made it conceivable at least that someone might take a shot at Rabin. Support for the theory came from the informants Shabak ran in the settlements. Several of them reported to their handlers starting around the summer of ’94 that Jewish radicals were discussing openly whether it was permissible under Jewish law to kill a political figure in order to stop the peace process. One of the officers serving under Kalo, Yitzhak Fantik, relayed the information directly to Rabin in a meeting in July. Fantik had begun to regard all the ideological settlers—or many of them, anyway—as potential subversives. “At the moment of crisis, when there’s a clash between the laws of the state and the laws of the Torah, they’ll side with the Torah and turn against democracy,” he would say.

To cope with the rising Jewish vigilantism, Kalo ordered his
officers to recruit more informants in the settlements, a particularly complicated endeavor in close-knit communities. Their information had become critical. In the fall of ’94, one of them informed Shabak that two brothers in Kiryat Arba, Eitan and Yehoyada Kahalani, were planning to murder a Palestinian randomly. In a clever bit of undercover work, the agency managed to neuter the guns the Kahalani brothers intended to use by removing the firing pins. On the appointed day, Shabak men followed them to an isolated road in the West Bank and watched them point their weapons at a Palestinian on a bicycle and then pull the trigger. When the guns misfired, they swooped in and arrested the brothers.

Weeks later, Shabak picked up on what it thought was an emerging plot to murder Peres. The details came from another informant but they were vague and circumstantial, not nearly enough to substantiate an indictment. Instead, authorities jailed the suspect without trial for several months under a procedure known in Israel as administrative detention.

The information Shabak had on Amir had also come from an informant—the blue-eyed Bar-Ilan student Avishai Raviv. The agency had recruited him eight years earlier from the ranks of the Kach movement and kept him on the payroll while he rose to prominence as a far-right agitator. His handlers found him difficult to control—he’d accumulated arrests for incitement, rioting, and assault. But Raviv was a prolific source. Though only in his late twenties, he’d already delivered thousands of tips about the radical milieu in which he’d ensconced himself. The agency had given him the code name Champagne for his bubbly energy: Somehow, Raviv managed to show up at just about every right-wing event—at the university and around the country.

Now, on the bus to Yad Vashem, in the frigid February of 1995, the firebrands from Bar-Ilan bantered across the aisle.

Jerusalem winds along the slopes of several hills, a tattered mesh of Jewish and Arab, spiritual and secular. Thanks in part to a long-standing ordinance requiring all buildings to be faced with chiseled limestone, the new neighborhoods of the city have the look of something consciously old and solemn—the architectural equivalent of
distressed furniture. Amir sat near Har-Shefi and Skornik but said little. He envisioned himself standing outside the memorial, waiting for Rabin to approach, then lunging at him and firing his Beretta. Throughout the ride, he reminded himself that he had tried other approaches and was now spiritually ready. After a long stretch of highway, the bus heaved toward Mount Herzl, where Yad Vashem shares the crest with Israel’s national cemetery.

But before it reached the top, a news bulletin announced a double suicide bombing at the Beit Lid junction north of Tel Aviv. A Palestinian bomber blew himself up at a bus stop teeming with soldiers near the town of Netanya. Moments later, a second bomber set off his explosives, killing people who rushed in to help the wounded. The attacks would be claimed by Islamic Jihad—Hamas’s smaller and more radical stepsister. But Israeli investigators would discover that the bombs used at Beit Lid were built by the same Hamas operator involved in earlier attacks, Yahya Ayyash.

Amir listened to the descriptions of the carnage on the radio and began making calculations. Rabin would surely cancel his appearance at Yad Vashem. He might well decide to tour the bombing site, something officials often did in the aftermath of a major attack. If Amir could embed himself in the crowd pressing in on the Israeli leader, he might be able to take a shot at Rabin. He contemplated getting off the bus and finding his way to Beit Lid. But then he reconsidered. The assassination needed to be perpetrated in cold blood. “It occurred to me that I didn’t want it to be an emotional response to something,” he would say later. “If I’m going to act, it’s only from a cerebral place. I won’t do it in the aftermath of an attack.” Amir remained with the group.

On the way back to campus, the radio delivered constant updates from the bomb scene. Rabin had indeed rushed to Beit Lid and was met by crowds chanting, “Death to Arabs.” Now, Amir let loose. Once again, he announced openly that
din rodef
applied to Rabin and that the prime minister must die. An argument ensued, with students shouting across the aisle, debating whether the Halakhic decree had any relevance at all and, if it did, whether it allowed for the killing of the prime minister. Rosenbloom, who organized the protest, would
say later that he was seated too far from Amir to hear his remarks. By now he and Holtzman had been dating for several months and were planning to marry in May.