Killing a King: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel (25 page)

“Yes to peace, no to violence.”

With the event now two weeks away, Rabin cycled between the parts of his job he liked most and least—the closed-door security meetings and the big public events. In Tel Aviv, he deliberated for several days whether to allow a Mossad hit team to kill Fathi Shaqaqi, the Islamic Jihad leader who had boasted to a British newspaper about his role in the double suicide attack in Netanya back in January. The assassination in Malta days later would come off cleanly. At the UN General Assembly, where Israelis often received icy receptions, Rabin drew more attention than just about any other political figure. Haber struggled to make time on the prime minister’s schedule to accommodate all those world leaders who wanted their pictures taken with Rabin. Apparently, the memento had political value at home.

Amir spent the last days of October with the regulars from Bar-Ilan—though, as usual, not in class. He attended Skornik’s wedding in Tel Aviv, a glitzy affair held at the same banquet hall where Amir had first seen Rabin in person two years earlier. Skornik would notice in a video of the reception later that Amir seemed to be brooding and off to the side much of the time. Amir also organized a birthday party for Nili Kolman at a makeshift settlement that Bar-Ilan students had been visiting regularly since the summer. Among scattered trailers and an improvised synagogue, the students talked about starting their own settlement when the Likud Party eventually returned to power and ended the construction freeze. Kolman had distanced herself from Amir months earlier to avoid leading him on. Now the two were friendly again.

The day before the rally, Amir pondered whether to try to kill the prime minister at Kings of Israel Square. The start of the dreaded pullback in the West Bank was now only weeks away. Already, Israel was handing over government compounds to Palestinians in Jenin and elsewhere. But police had announced road closures around the plaza ahead of the event, which meant security would be tight. After three failed attempts to get close to Rabin, Amir had begun to think God did not intend for him to do the job. In the early afternoon, he returned home from Bar-Ilan and spotted Hagai in the front yard. Impulsively, he suggested they drive to Shavei Shomron to spend the weekend with their uncle. Had Hagai agreed, the two brothers would
have remained at the settlement until the end of the Sabbath and returned to Herzliya late Saturday, too late to get to the rally.

But Hagai felt drained from the long week at school. The sky had been gray since morning and the idea of driving back into the West Bank in what might be rainy weather seemed unappealing. Instead, Hagai tinkered in the shed and then lounged around the house. Amir spent the afternoon talking to people by phone, organizing another settlement weekend. To Kolman, one of the people he reached, Amir seemed irritable. They discussed the counter-rally that rightists planned to stage at the plaza the next day, but Amir did not say whether he intended to go.

At Rabin’s apartment, the family gathered for Friday night dinner at 8 p.m. sharp, as usual. Dalia had been hosting a group from abroad and could not attend, but Yuval, who had been living in North Carolina, was now back in Israel. He arrived with a new girlfriend, Tali Henkin, who seemed surprised to find so few bodyguards posted around the building. With extremists now openly threatening the prime minister, charging him at public events, and ransacking his car, she expected a small army at the entrance. “The security is a joke,” she remarked in the narrow elevator. Yuval put a finger to his lips to indicate the issue should not be raised at the dinner table.

“We don’t talk about things like that at home.”

AT AROUND NOON
the next day, Police Chief Superintendent Motti Naftali began directing preparations at the plaza. A twenty-year veteran of the force who smoked a pipe during most hours of the workday, Naftali had helped write the operational plan for the event—the document that outlined how police would maintain security at the rally. Lahat had told him to expect up to 100,000 people, a huge crowd in a square the size of several football fields. If a Hamas suicide bomber managed to blow himself up at the rally, the casualty toll would be enormous. Naftali had seen the effects of suicide attacks. A year earlier, he had surveyed the scene of the Tel Aviv bus bombing.
Among the fragments and body parts, he spotted the severed head of the bomber. The security plan now included blocking roads to traffic around Kings of Israel Square and ringing the plaza with police barricades. Rally-goers would have to approach on foot and get searched by policemen on their way in.

Shabak took charge of security in the inner circle—the stage where the politicians and performers would gather and the open-air parking area just north of it. Though police bore overall responsibility for the event, officers from Shabak’s Dignitary Protection Unit exercised a certain authority over police, at least as far as the security of Rabin and the rest of the dignitaries was concerned. With Shabak chief Carmi Gillon in Paris on a work visit for the weekend, the head of the Protection Department would be the agency’s senior officer at the event.

The officers now walked the length of the plaza with Naftali and other police officials, pointing out rooftops where snipers should be posted and areas around the stage where they wanted walk-through metal detectors. The Shabak operational plan called for the stage and the parking lot to be “sterile zones,” meaning only authorized personnel would be allowed entry, a group that included VIPs, accredited journalists, performers, and their roadies.

The parking lot demanded particular attention. The stage itself was on a raised platform, accessible by two separate staircases. Keeping crowds away was simply a matter of restricting admission at two points. But the parking lot, adjoining one of the staircases, was at street level, exposed from above and open at either end. In the language of dignitary protection, the parking lot was a “seam zone,” a potentially dangerous corridor the dignitary would need to traverse in order to get from one relatively safe area to another—in this case, the car and the stage. Shabak cadets were taught that most assassination attempts occurred in seam zones, including the one against President Reagan in Washington in 1981. It was a lesson they learned on day one of their training. To secure the lot, Shabak had policemen stand at both ends—along a police barricade at one side and a rising and falling barrier gate at the other.

Around the plaza in what was now early afternoon, Tel Aviv came
to life. A surge of Mediterranean sunshine had burned off the morning haze, drawing people to the sidewalk cafés that dotted the city. At one of the cafés across from Kings of Israel Square, Dror Mor, the Shabak officer who oversaw Rabin’s security detail, sat with a friend and sipped a cup of milky coffee,
kafeh hafuch
. Mor had no role in the security plan that day, but his subordinates would be working the event, including the two young bodyguards, Shai Glaser and Yoram Rubin. Though Glaser was just twenty-five and Rubin thirty, both had already protected Rabin at hundreds of events.

At one point the conversation turned to politics. Mor’s friend, a well-known sports analyst, probed whether the prime minister was taking seriously the threat posed to him by right-wing extremists. “Rabin is going to be assassinated,” the sports analyst said suddenly. “You guys need to be aware of it and if you want, I’ll explain it to him.” Mor had spent much of his time in the preceding months assessing the potential for right-wing violence, but his friend’s vehemence surprised him.

At Rav Ashi, some fifteen minutes north of the square, Rabin worked in the den of his apartment through the afternoon. Earlier in the day he had denied the army’s request to target a certain Lebanese militant whose location intelligence analysts had suddenly pinpointed. The potential retribution seemed to outweigh the benefits of the strike. Now he tried on the phone to defuse a crisis with Peres, who had been threatening to challenge Rabin in the upcoming Labor Party primaries if he didn’t get more say in future political appointments. The two men had come to accept their partnership in the preceding years as a kind of providence but the occasional argument still stirred up old resentments.

Throughout the day, Rabin worried whether people would show up at the rally. The night before, Lahat reassured him the square would be full. If not, he joked, the two of them would have the plaza to themselves. “You bring Leah, I’ll bring [my wife] Ziva. The performers will be there. . . . We can dance alone at the square.” Sure enough, by 7 p.m., the official start time, Israel Radio reported that thousands of people had arrived and thousands more were streaming toward the plaza. Lahat had asked Rabin to get there at 8:15 p.m.
for his address. At 7:45 p.m., Yoram Rubin, who commanded the five-member close-protection team that night, knocked on Rabin’s door to say the Cadillac was waiting downstairs.

In the car, Rubin sat up front, alongside Rabin’s alternate driver, Menachem Damti. The prime minister and his wife sat in the back, where dark curtains covered the windows. Three other bodyguards rode in the Caprice, which trailed the Cadillac. In his earpiece, Rubin could hear the communications between various Shabak officers. At one point, he turned toward Rabin to report what was being said: Intelligence gatherers had picked up something about a Palestinian suicide bomber intending to strike at the rally. Perhaps this was Islamic Jihad trying to avenge the assassination of its leader in Malta the week before. Within minutes, Danny Yatom phoned the car to deliver the same news. Then he called Shabak to ask that security around the prime minister be enhanced. Leah felt a wave of dread wash over her, but Rabin seemed unfazed. Intelligence warnings were often false alarms.

By 8:15 p.m., the crowd had swelled to more than 100,000. Lahat met Rabin at the car and walked him to the edge of the platform to take in the view: A stunning mass of people, bobbing and swaying to the music blaring from the stage. Rabin’s supporters had filled every inch of the plaza and its surrounding streets. On a side road, police had cordoned off an area for the counter-rally. Only a few dozen rightists showed up, including Avishai Raviv.

Amir was on his way. In Herzliya, he’d kept to himself throughout most of the day. After telling Hagai in the morning that he’d decided to try to kill Rabin at the rally, he made no further mention of it. He ate lunch with the family, then sat in the living room and read from one of the religious texts stacked tightly on the shelf. At synagogue in the evening, Amir quietly asked God to let him accomplish the thing he’d been endeavoring to do for two years now and he repeated the
vidui
—the prayer Jews say before death. Though Hagai didn’t know it, Amir had paid a quick trip to the
mikva
the day before, the ritual bath where observant Jews purify themselves. It was one more way he prepared himself for death.

When the Sabbath ended after nightfall, Amir took his Beretta
and several boxes of ammunition and closed himself off in the room next to the one he shared with Hagai. He had read about the Kahalani brothers a year earlier—how Shabak had secretly neutered their gun before they set out to kill a Palestinian. To make sure no one had replaced his rounds with blanks, Amir emptied his magazine and reloaded it with new ammunition. He started with three of his brother’s modified shells, then alternated between regular rounds and hollow points. Then he pressed the magazine back into the handle and fit the gun in his pants.

Amir slipped out of the house at 7:45 p.m. without saying goodbye, and made his way to the bus stop. If Shabak had somehow been on to him, he thought, better to avoid traveling by car, which agents could tail. He took the 247 line and got off two blocks from the plaza. To blend in, Amir took off his black skullcap and stuffed it into his pocket. In dark jeans and a T-shirt, he looked like every other demonstrator.

Amir had no real plan. But as he drew closer to the stage, he spotted the prime minister’s two cars parked in the lot, the Cadillac and the Caprice. The lot teemed with people, including policemen and security guards but also roadies and drivers, and just bystanders hoping to catch a glimpse of some famous person. The police barricade blocked the entrance only partially and the men who guarded it seemed to come and go. Amir was about to make his way in when he spotted a fellow law student from Bar-Ilan, the careful note-taker Amit Hampel, and quickly retreated. Hampel would wonder what he was doing at a peace rally and why he was not wearing his skullcap, Amir thought. He might become suspicious.

Instead, Amir pressed into the crowd. Onstage, the performers and politicians alternated at the microphone, grating on him equally. In the square, he bristled at these Hellenizers, the peaceniks. To Amir, this was the other Israel, the one with no regard for biblical warrant, no reverence for Jewish heritage. He walked the length of the plaza and then turned back toward the parking lot, approaching it this time from the west. At the electric gate, he had no trouble getting past policemen. Once inside, Amir walked to within fifteen feet of the Cadillac, leaned on one of the equipment vans, and waited. From
there, he had a clear view to the staircase where Rabin would likely descend from the stage.

Now Amir gave himself over to God. If a policeman approached, he told himself, he would walk away. But if no one questioned his presence there, it would be a divine signal.
If God wants a person to commit an act, He lets him commit the act.

For forty minutes, Amir lingered, either leaning against the van or sitting on a planter at the base of the stairs. The policemen around him seemed to mistake him for a roadie or a driver. To allay possible suspicions, he chatted casually with one of the cops about the musician Aviv Geffen, a rocker in white face makeup. “What a weirdo,” Amir remarked when Geffen came down from the stage. Twice, he noticed another policeman coming toward him but veering away at the last moment. The Shabak officer charged with maintaining a sterile environment in the parking lot stood less than two car lengths from Amir, leaning on the Caprice. He’d been privy to the intelligence about a “short Yemeni guy with curly hair” wanting to kill the prime minister. And yet he paid no attention to Amir. At a moment when the threat to Israel’s leader loomed larger than ever, Shabak’s seam zone—the very place where assassination attempts were known to occur—was unsecured.