Killing a King: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel (24 page)

At a reception hosted by Clinton at the Corcoran Gallery across from the White House that evening, Rabin spoke unambiguously about the Palestinian right to self-determination. His unscripted comment drew applause. When Arafat remarked warmly that Jews and Arabs had always been cousins but were now peace partners, Rabin responded with a tease. He explained that Jews were not famous for their athletic abilities but had a gift for speechmaking. Then he turned to Arafat and said playfully: “It seems to me, Mr. Chairman, that you might be a little Jewish.” Indyk would write later: “At that moment many thought the Arab-Israeli peace process had reached a tipping point. It seemed only a matter of time before a Palestinian state would be established in most of the West Bank and Gaza.”

In Israel, Rabin’s opponents sensed the tipping point as well. Rowdy street protesters now clashed with policemen almost every day somewhere around the country. In the settlements, rabbis and YESHA Council leaders talked openly about sabotaging the deal,
whether by seizing military bases the army would evacuate or urging soldiers yet again to disobey withdrawal orders. By signing the Oslo II agreement, Rabin had defied biblical injunctions and undermined the redemption process that messianists believed had been under way since 1967. That alone made it an abomination for religious rightists—even as they framed their opposition to the handover of more land as largely a security issue.

Amir headed to Hebron the day after the Washington signing, taking more than 500 students with him from Bar-Ilan. The large turnout should have pleased him—the school year hadn’t even begun yet. The students, including Margalit Har-Shefi and Avishai Raviv, jammed the sidewalk at the entrance to the university, waiting to board the eight buses he and the other organizers had leased. But Amir bristled at the mingling and the banter. Where was the outrage? He’d been organizing protests since the first Oslo Accord, hoping they would help foment a rebellion. Instead, the events allowed these recreants to feel they were doing something significant while mainly shopping for spouses. He looked forward to interacting with the ideologues and the hotheads of Hebron.

They were all there. Though it would take months to implement Oslo II, activists had been heading to Hebron for days to try to block the agreement or at least vent their anger. By the time the buses from Bar-Ilan arrived, the scene outside the Cave of the Patriarchs resembled a Hasidic block party: music blaring from speakers, settler spokesmen leading tours of the area, men shouldering assault rifles, and women carrying babies. Along Shuhada Street, settlers had been waging a constant battle to displace Palestinian street merchants. Now Israelis who had only just set foot in Hebron scowled at the vendors. Amir instructed the students to set up their sleeping bags in the seminaries or prayer halls scattered around the enclaves—wherever they found room. He and Hagai, who came straight from a stint in reserve duty still clad in his military fatigues, climbed the roof of a building intending to sleep under the stars.

The weekend offered a little of everything. In a Saturday-morning sermon, Rabbi Eliezer Waldman excoriated Rabin for handing Jews over to the enemy. “We have total and absolute right to this place,” he
intoned from a podium. “The government is against us, collaborating with the Arabs.” Later, Amir and other students joined settlers on a rampage through Arab areas of Hebron. The group smashed a windshield and broke the camera of a Palestinian photographer. At meals, Amir would stand up and announce upcoming events, sounding surly and impatient. At one point, he led a group to Baruch Goldstein’s grave in Kiryat Arba.

On the way back to Bar-Ilan, Amir and the other organizers handed out forms asking people to check off what they could do to help the settlers of Hebron. The options included moving to one of the enclaves and, at a lesser level of commitment, joining settler patrols. Many of the papers ended up on the floor. For the two-hour ride, Amir sat with his friends at the front of one of the buses and said little. For all the spiritedness these weekends inspired, the rightists had been dealt a stinging defeat with the signing of Oslo II, he thought. If this was Israel’s civil war, Rabin was winning.

Israelis marked Yom Kippur the following week, the holiest day of the year. Religious Jews fasted and prayed while secular Israelis, many of them anyway, spent the day on their bicycles. With a virtual ban on motorized travel, cyclists of all ages own the roads for twenty-four hours every year, swarming main arteries, riding even on highways. And yet, for all the reverence (and recreation), the political spasms continued. Rabin still had to win the endorsement of parliament for the Oslo II agreement, and the vote was sure to be close. As the debate got under way in Jerusalem on October 6, protests around the city grew steadily more sinister and frenzied, with the aggression directed mainly at Rabin.

In the afternoon, a group of extremists led by the former Kach activist Avigdor Eskin gathered outside Rabin’s official residence to pronounce a kind of Kabalistic death curse against the prime minister. Known by its Aramaic name Pulsa diNura (blaze of fire), the curse involved a complicated series of procedures and carried certain risks for its invokers: it would rebound against them if the target of the malediction turned out to be innocent. But if guilty, he would die within thirty days. One of the participants would say later that the ritual in Jerusalem had been preceded by a more official ceremony in
Safed with some twenty rabbis and scholars, a sizeable gathering of extremists that Shabak somehow failed to detect. Eskin and the other participants recited the curse from photocopied pages: “Angels of destruction will hit him. He is damned where he goes. His soul will instantly leave his body . . . and he will not survive the month. Dark will be his path and God’s angel will chase him. A disaster he has never experienced will beget him and all curses known in the Torah will apply to him.”

Later in the evening, tens of thousands of people gathered at Zion Square for the largest anti-government protest in years. The square at one of Jerusalem’s main intersections had long been a venue for right-wing demonstrations—and also tourist gatherings and the occasional terrorist attack. For some two hours, Benjamin Netanyahu and a phalanx of other right-wing leaders stood on the balcony of the Ron Hotel above the square and watched as protesters came unhinged, burning pictures of the prime minister, chanting “Death to Rabin” in a pulsating frenzy, then “Rabin the Nazi,” and “In blood and fire, we’ll drive out Rabin.” One of the demonstrators had brought a stack of photocopied pages with distorted images of the prime minister, including one showing his head superimposed on the body of a dog and another of Rabin dressed in a Nazi uniform. Raviv, who drove from Kiryat Arba to attend the rally, spotted a youngster handing them out and saw an opportunity for more of the publicity he craved. He grabbed one of the Nazi images and delivered it to the hands of an Israeli television reporter, who promptly displayed it to viewers in a live broadcast.

On the balcony, Netanyahu seemed unfazed by the mayhem—even as protesters threw burning torches at the line of policemen. Any effort to call the crowd to order could well have turned the extremists against him, a risk Netanyahu evidently did not wish to take. Instead, he castigated Rabin for relying on the backing of Arab-Israeli parliament members to get his agreement through parliament. Lawmakers had yet to vote on Oslo II, but it was clear by now that Rabin would need the representatives of Israel’s Arab minority to support it in order for the deal to pass. Though Arab-Israelis were full-fledged citizens and made up one-sixth of the population, Netanyahu and many other
rightists were now arguing, unblushingly, that an endorsement that rested on the support of non-Jews would lack legitimacy. “The Jewish majority of the state of Israel has not approved the agreement,” he said. “We will fight and we will bring down the government.”

The protest ended around ten p.m., but instead of dispersing, thousands of demonstrators marched on the Knesset, where legislators would debate the accord into the night. All 120 parliament members had signed up to address the plenum before the vote; each was entitled to five minutes at the microphone. As the crowd outside swelled, hundreds of policemen rushed from other parts of the city to the parliament building and formed a human cordon. For the first time in Israel’s history, it seemed the Knesset might be overrun.

Menachem Damti, who served as Rabin’s alternate driver, happened to be making his way to the Knesset in the Cadillac. A block from the building, protesters swarmed the car, rocking it back and forth, climbing the hood and pounding on the roof. Fearing a lynching, Damti locked the doors and inched his way forward until policemen arrived and pulled people off the car. But in the melee, one of the protesters managed to rip the hood ornament from the Cadillac. A nineteen-year-old Kach activist, Itamar Ben-Gvir, held up the ornament during a television interview later and made what could only be interpreted as a death threat. “This is the ornament. People managed to remove the ornament from the car. And just as we got to the ornament, we can get to Rabin,” he said.

One of Rabin’s cabinet ministers, Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, got caught up in the mob as well. A retired general who had served in an elite commando unit and suffered war wounds, Ben-Eliezer told friends later that he felt more threatened in the car than in his toughest moments on the battlefield. When he reached the Knesset building, Ben-Eliezer tracked down Netanyahu in one of the corridors and launched at him. “You better restrain your people, otherwise it will end in murder. They tried to kill me just now. . . . If someone is murdered, the blood will be on your hands.”

By the time lawmakers voted on the Oslo II Accord sometime after three in the morning, most of the protesters had gone home. Rabin managed to rally sixty-one votes to the opposition’s fifty-nine—a
narrow margin but a majority nonetheless. Yoel Bin-Nun, the settler rabbi who had been corresponding with Rabin for more than three years, now crafted his harshest letter yet to the prime minister. “Your success at passing the agreement . . . is formal and legal but cannot be binding on the entire nation of Israel, either morally or historically. It certainly cannot obligate Jewish history,” he wrote. Still, he vowed to fight those members of the right-wing camp calling for an insurrection. “I will continue opposing any attempt to go against the law and against the democratic foundation, which remains the one thing that stands between us and a civil war.”

From both sides of the political divide, the civil-war scenario now seemed at least plausible. Israel had reached a crossroads on a matter that would define its very character, with implications for territory, rights, and religion, and with two roughly equal camps pulling in opposite directions. What would Israel be and what would it do? Would it surrender land some regarded as a Jewish birthright or maintain a system of rule in the West Bank and Gaza that privileged Jews and disenfranchised Palestinians?

Amir, who had attended the rally at Zion Square and then made his way to the Knesset, somehow missed the ransacking of Rabin’s car. When he spotted Har-Shefi on the street later, he told her he was mad at himself for having been elsewhere. But a certain line had been crossed in Jerusalem and Amir felt it. A few days later, he watched another right-wing outburst on television. At an annual gathering of American immigrants at the Wingate Institute north of Tel Aviv, a protester charged at Rabin, getting to within a few feet of him before being intercepted by a bodyguard. The assailant didn’t exactly fit the profile of the right-wing hothead. He was later identified as Natan Ofir, a middle-aged rabbi employed by the Hebrew University. But the mayhem at Zion Square had set a new standard for protesters; Ofir kicked and spat at policemen who tried to arrest him. To Amir, the details were less important than the lesson the event offered: Had Ofir been armed, he could have killed Rabin.

The spiraling protests posed a dilemma for Rabin, who hoped to get reelected in a year’s time. The demonstrations created the perception that Israelis overwhelmingly opposed his policies. But Rabin
hated the idea of initiating a pro-government rally—it smacked of authoritarianism. Still, while his own polls gave him a small lead over Netanyahu, he worried that perceptions could shape political reality.

Haber shared his boss’s reluctance. When two figures from outside the Labor Party—the former Tel Aviv mayor Shlomo Lahat and the French businessman Jean Friedman—approached the prime minister’s office in early October with their own plans for a peace rally, his response was tepid. Haber felt that a small turnout, either due to bad weather or because people were more inclined to rally
against
policies than in favor—would create the impression that the public lacked confidence in Rabin. And if large numbers of people did show up, the government would be accused of using its influence with the labor unions to bolster attendance. It was a lose-lose.

Lahat, who had served alongside Rabin in the military decades earlier, came back with a new plan: a rally against violence—to address one of Haber’s points—and in favor of peace. The theme would reference the right’s rising hooliganism and its threat to Israeli democracy. It would also gesture at Hamas and its suicide attacks, recasting the regional conflict as a dispute between moderates and extremists, whether Palestinian or Israeli. As the idea circulated, Peres began pressing for the rally as well.

Sometime after the Wingate incident, Rabin relented. With the calendar out, Haber suggested November 4, a Saturday night following the prime minister’s return from the United Nations General Assembly meeting in New York. Rabin would deliver the main address. The plan quickly gained momentum, with peace groups offering their help and popular musicians agreeing to perform. Lahat chose the Kings of Israel Square as the venue, a huge plaza adjacent to Tel Aviv’s city hall building that could accommodate more than 100,000 people. The square had been the scene of the largest protest in Israel’s history—against the Lebanon War in 1982. Friedman, a contributor to Israeli political campaigns over the years, paid for several large newspaper advertisements to promote the rally, including one in
Yedioth Ahronoth
that read: “You don’t make peace by sitting in your living room. Show up and make a difference.