Killing a King: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel (21 page)

Raviv filed reports to Shabak about many of the events he attended with Amir. But he never mentioned his threats against Rabin. Like many of the people who surrounded Amir, he simply did not give them credence. Raviv was a complicated character. He took seriously his work with Shabak and felt devoted to his handlers. The secrecy and intrigue of his life as an informant appealed to him deeply, so much so that he dreaded the prospect of being cut loose one day. But the world of far-right politics, the ideological certainty, the ethnic chauvinism and the bullying, tapped into something central in his character. Compulsively, Raviv needed to be the most provocative figure in any setting, the biggest attention hound. In Amir, he saw something similar—a young man who liked to talk big, liked the attention, and liked women. Not a guy who would murder the prime minister. Raviv himself blustered about the need to kill Rabin. Why should he have taken Amir’s bombast seriously?

Shabak had two kinds of informants. There were those who joined the agency on a career track, received training in undercover work, and then got planted in target groups. As homegrown agents, there was rarely a question of their motives or loyalty to the agency. But their training and infiltration could take years. And as newcomers to the target group, they were often looked on with suspicion. As a rule, the more radical the group, the harder it was to infiltrate a homegrown agent. Then there were the “purchased” informants, people recruited from within particular communities or political groups whose credibility as activists was already established. These insiders would often deliver much better information but they could be difficult to control.

Raviv was a purchased informant. He had been active in Kach already as a teenager, hanging posters for the group in the Tel Aviv suburb where he grew up and showing up at rowdy protests and rallies. In high school, Raviv met Meir Kahane, the rabble-rousing leader of Kach, whose racist tropes included vulgar references to Arabs defiling Jewish women. To friends at the time, Raviv seemed spellbound. Among the messages he picked up from Kahane, Raviv liked to talk
about the traitorous
smolanim
—leftists who cared more about the Arabs than their fellow Jews. Already then, he craved media attention.

Sometime after the army released Raviv on a disability, Shabak made the approach. By then he’d racked up several arrests and perhaps the agency enticed him with an offer to expunge his record. Once on the Shabak payroll, Raviv began branching out, operating with several groups at once. Dani Dayan, who encountered him while working for the right-wing Tehiya Party in the late 1980s, recalled something pleasant about Raviv, not exactly charisma but a kind of boyish enthusiasm and a stutter that made him seem vulnerable. But he could also be thuggish and breathtakingly reckless. Raviv dated a teenage girl the Dayans had informally adopted, often visiting her at their home in the settlement Ma’ale Shomron. One day he took her to the Palestinian town of Qalqilya in the West Bank to throw stones at passing cars. “We got very angry at him,” he said.

Dayan, who would eventually become the chairman of the YESHA Council, heard rumors that Raviv worked for Shabak but dismissed them. Other friends had their suspicions. Raviv was constantly initiating hate crimes—running amok in Palestinian produce markets, organizing a militia summer camp, assaulting a leftist parliament member. But while his accomplices ended up in court, he seemed to have a knack for dodging indictments.

That knack was actually the deft maneuvering of his handlers, who repeatedly extracted their agent from trouble. If a policeman arrested Raviv, he might get a call from a Shabak officer asking him cryptically to release the suspect without raising too many questions. If somehow an investigation ensued, the state attorney herself—the one official in the Justice Department who knew Raviv worked for Shabak—would quietly quash the indictment.

By late ’94, Shabak had grown tired of its informant’s excesses. Raviv had formed his own group, Eyal, that was drawing media attention. With the help of a deputy, Benzion Gopstein, Eyal would circulate regular beeper messages to journalists announcing its latest provocation. In undercover work, agencies prefer for their informants to be observers, not initiators. Otherwise, it can look like authorities have planted a provocateur to deliberately smear the group. As the
hooliganism mounted, Raviv’s handlers summoned him repeatedly for rebukes and suspended him at least once.

But Raviv was delivering so much information that the agency, coping with spiraling radicalism in the settlements, felt it could not afford to sever the relationship. He was also making personal sacrifices to improve his intelligence gathering. Raviv had married a religious woman and started wearing a skullcap—though in reality he remained secular. For nearly a year now, he was living in Kiryat Arba, on the same block where Baruch Goldstein had lived, and reporting on the settlers of Hebron—extremists who fit the agency’s profile of the Jewish terrorist or assassin.

Amir, who had begun actively stalking Rabin, did not fit this profile. He lived in Herzliya instead of a settlement and had no record of violence against Palestinians. The agency had an informant watching him but wasn’t getting the picture.

IN THE WEEKS
that followed the protest at Yad Vashem, Amir couldn’t help himself: He bragged separately to Har-Shefi and Skornik about having gone there to kill Rabin. Later, he confided it to Adani. Though nothing had actually happened at Yad Vashem, the event marked a psychological leap for Amir and a shift in his own self-perception. Until then, his discussions with Hagai focused on ways to kill Rabin and flee. The escape plan held as much importance as the killing itself. Now, Amir had begun thinking of himself as a living dead man, a martyr like the Palestinian bombers. From a tactical point of view, the shift offered tremendous advantages. If there was no need to hatch a getaway, the options for killing Rabin multiplied.

The awareness colored Amir’s winter. He continued organizing protests and student weekends—mostly at far-flung settlements. But his parents noticed their son had become more pensive and withdrawn. Geulah thought Amir was still brooding over the breakup with Holtzman months earlier, or struggling with some other relationship.

At the settlement retreats, Amir would sometimes deliver the sermon
after prayers Friday night or Saturday morning. One weekend, he told the biblical story of Pinchas, a Jew who witnesses another Jew transgress by lying with a Midianite. In a fit of rage, Pinchas kills them both—Zimri, the Jew, and his non-Jewish mistress. But instead of punishing him for his zealotry, God rewards the killer by declaring that the lineage of the High Priest will come from his descendants. Amir offered the story as evidence that murder can sometimes be justified. “If God wants a person to commit an act, He lets him commit the act.” Then, he made a connection between Zimri and Rabin. Both men had turned their backs on their own nation for personal pleasure or gain, he asserted. To at least some of the students, it sounded as if Amir was saying God would reward the person who killed Rabin.

At home, Amir was now scouring the papers for information on Rabin’s upcoming appearances. Rabin’s government had been pressing ahead with negotiations over a wider pullback in the West Bank, one that would allow Palestinians control over six of the seven cities and many of the towns and villages. In a summit meeting, the two sides set a target date of July 1 for the start of the redeployment. Oslo II, as it had come to be called, would still leave the Jewish settlements untouched. But for Rabin’s critics, the fact that he intended to cede more West Bank land to Arafat even as Hamas persisted with its bombing campaign amounted to folly or, worse, treason. Now Amir had a deadline. He told himself he must track Rabin before July 1 and kill him.

At school, Amir continued coasting on the hard work of others, skipping classes and borrowing notes from friends before the exam period. During the semester break, he threw himself into a new book about Rabin, a contemptuous assault on the Israeli leader that bracketed Amir’s religious critique of Rabin with a quasi-scholarly one. Written by the philosopher Uri Milstein, the book focused on Rabin’s early career in the military, highlighting certain episodes and depicting him as a serial bumbler on the battlefield. “It turns out . . . that Rabin amassed a string of failures and oversights that could well have prevented the establishment of the state of Israel,” he wrote hyperbolically on the back cover. Israeli academics ordinarily pay publishing houses to print their books—the market is too small for profits.
In Milstein’s case, some two hundred of Rabin’s opponents donated the money.

But the book sold reasonably well and it added a veneer of academic legitimacy to what was now a street campaign of blistering agitation against Rabin. The settler journal
Nekuda
excerpted the book and allowed Milstein space to launch a broader attack on the Israeli left. “Rabin’s character exemplifies the left in its entirety, which exerted its hegemony . . . through brainwashing and fraud. This approach eroded the social fabric of Israel and destroyed the Israeli spirit,” he wrote.

As the street protests grew more aggressive, Shabak became increasingly concerned for Rabin’s safety. It was now standard to hear protesters chant, “Rabin is a murderer,” over and over, in pulsating fury; to compare Rabin to Hitler or his government to the Judenrat, the Jewish administrative bodies that enforced Nazi rule during World War II. The ugly invective came not just from the political margins but from the top echelons of the Likud Party. Ariel Sharon, who had founded Likud and now served as one of its senior deputies in parliament, favored the World War II comparisons. “What’s the difference between the Jewish leadership in the ghetto and this government?” he said in a typical remark, months after the Oslo signing. “There, they were forced to collaborate. Here they do it willingly.” Netanyahu generally stuck to calling Rabin a liar and accusing him of enabling violence against the settlers. “They [Hamas] receive signals from both the government and the PLO to kill Jews in Judea and Samaria.”

Others said much worse. Politicians regularly likened Rabin’s administration to the collaborating Vichy government in France during the Second World War, to the Quisling government in Norway, and to the Nazi regime itself. Settler leaders portrayed Rabin’s peace deals as acts of treason for which the prime minister and his cabinet would one day stand trial.

Certainly, this wasn’t the first time Israeli politicians reached for inflammatory rhetoric or made heinous Nazi-era comparisons. Left-wing activists depicted Sharon as a murderer for his role in Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon and the Phalangist massacre of Palestinians at Sabra and Shatila. But the invective on the right was being matched by a rising tendency toward violence on the right. In Shabak’s Jewish
Affairs Department, Kalo was now wondering how long it would take before some hothead interpreted the verbal assaults on Rabin as a green light for a physical assault.

In early March 1995, Rabin named Carmi Gillon to head Shabak, an appointment that symbolized more than anything the new priorities in the agency. Gillon had never served in the Arab Affairs Department. He started his career with the Dignitary Protection Unit—the equivalent of the American Secret Service—and made his reputation in the Jewish Affairs Department, having broken up the Jewish Underground in the 1980s. No one in Shabak knew more about right-wing extremism than Gillon. On his sabbatical in 1990, he wrote a master’s thesis about the radicalization process under way on the right, which he said “pushes the extremists even further towards the margins, both ideologically and in terms of their willingness to take dangerous action.”

Almost immediately, Gillon took steps to protect Rabin. But he met resistance from an unexpected source—Rabin himself. In March, Gillon decided to order an armored car. Astonishingly, Israeli prime ministers to date had been chauffeured in regular American-made vehicles, usually a Chevrolet Caprice. The agency appointed a team to pick the right model. The most secure cars in the world were made by Mercedes, but because of the sensitivities involved—still, fifty years after the Holocaust—ordering a German car for Rabin was out of the question. Instead, Shabak purchased an armored Cadillac, similar to the model the Secret Service used to ferry President Clinton around at the time.

Rabin hated it. Luxury cars were uncommon in Israel and Cadillacs, especially, with their wreath-and-crest hood ornaments, had the air of American excess. When it arrived at the port in Haifa, an Israeli television crew filmed it being wheeled into the parking lot. The report aired on Channel One highlighted the car’s lavishness, prompting opposition figures to criticize Rabin for wasting government money. From that point on, the car became a source of friction between the prime minister and his security chief. Rabin complained that the silver Cadillac, with its thick, cloudy windows and its excessive weight, made him claustrophobic. Often he instructed his driver
to bring the Caprice instead—over the objections of the agency. Yechezkel Sharabi, who served as Rabin’s driver for three decades, said later that his boss felt uncomfortable traveling in an armored car when ordinary Israelis risked being blown up on buses.

Rabin and Gillon also clashed over the issue of a bulletproof vest, which the agency had been trying for more than a year to get Rabin to wear. Gillon made the case that the threats against the prime minister were now specific enough to warrant wearing one at all public appearances. He argued that modern vests were light and flexible, not the bulky things Rabin knew from his military days. And he explained why they were so effective. Most assassins shot from the hip—raising the gun to eye level made them too conspicuous. From that low-down position, even a skilled shooter would have a hard time hitting a person in the head. The back, in contrast, formed a broad target. A good bulletproof vest would cover it entirely.

Rabin responded with a typical wave of the hand. “Are you out of your mind? I’ll never wear a bulletproof vest in my own country, no matter what it’s made of.” In early spring, Rabin and Gillon both attended Israel’s annual memorial service for fallen soldiers at Mount Herzl in Jerusalem. Right-wing protesters waited for the prime minister, chanting, “Rabin is a traitor.” Gillon gestured at the crowd and raised the issue once again, only to be rebuffed. “I could understand his position,” Gillon would write in his memoir later. “He was this Palmach soldier who fought in Israel’s wars for thirty years, who commanded the army in the victorious Six-Day War . . . and he’s supposed to suffer this humiliation?”