Killing a King: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel (26 page)

Onstage, Rabin huddled with the other men in suits and waited for his turn to speak, trailed constantly by the bodyguards Rubin and Glaser. Leah looked out at the crowd and noticed a few dozen young people standing waist-deep in a fountain at the front of the plaza, shouting, “Rabin, King of Israel.” It was a pleasant alternative to the chants she’d been accustomed to hearing outside her window. While she scanned the square, the wife of an Israeli journalist approached and asked her if Rabin was wearing a bulletproof vest. Though Leah had certainly been aware of the growing threat to her husband, the question seemed somehow out of place to her.

Rabin’s turn came after Peres finished his speech and as the two men intersected at the podium, they lingered for a moment facing the plaza. In an unscripted and uncharacteristic display, Rabin threw an arm around Peres’s waist and Peres reciprocated, prompting cheers
from the crowd. The speech had been written to include references to the growing danger posed by right-wing extremists. Though Rabin lacked the theatrical impulse required to be a rousing orator, he now found his rhythm. “Violence is undermining the foundation of Israeli democracy,” he said into the microphone, a staccato echo bouncing off the low-slung apartment buildings around the square. “I was a military man for twenty-seven years. I fought as long as there was no chance for peace. I believe there is a chance now, a great chance, and we must take advantage of it.”

The rally would soon draw to a close. For a finale, one of the performers lined up the politicians for a rendition of “A Song for Peace,” a late-1960s anthem that echoed the American antiwar folk songs of the era. “
Sing a song for peace, don’t whisper a prayer. Better to sing a song for peace, shout it out loud
.” A microphone passed down the line picked up Rabin’s discordant baritone; the prime minister, it was now evident to 100,000 rally-goers, could not carry a tune. When it was over, he folded the page with the lyrics printed on it and placed it into the breast pocket of his jacket. The national anthem followed and by 9:30 p.m., the crowd began to disperse. From a phone on the stage, Chief Superintendent Naftali called his wife to say he’d be home soon. “Everything went smoothly,
Gott sei dank
[thank God],” he said, using the German he’d learned during a posting in Europe.

Rubin led Rabin toward the staircase but the prime minister kept getting stopped for another handshake, another photo. Partway down, Rabin realized he’d forgotten to thank Lahat for organizing the rally. He walked back to the stage and gave him an embrace. Now the prime minister headed once again toward the exit, with Glaser on his left, Rubin on his right, and two other Shabak men trailing. On the staircase, Rubin saw the crowd in the parking lot and a horde of people to his right, pressing up against the police barricade. He had been trained to look at hands and faces—what people were holding and what their expressions indicated. If danger lurked, it would come from the right, he thought, where bystanders were reaching over the barricade to shake Rabin’s hand. The parking area to his left, where Amir still waited, was supposed to be secure. Toward the bottom of the staircase, Rabin turned his head and asked about his wife.
“Where is Leah?” She had fallen behind but was there at the top of the stairs.

By this point, Rabin had entered Yigal Amir’s field of vision. From behind the planter, Amir watched Yoram Rubin place his left arm on the prime minister’s back to direct him toward the Cadillac. He waited one more moment until Rabin drew close to the car, then circled the bodyguards who trailed the prime minister and found a gap. Amir pulled the Beretta from his pants and lunged at Rabin in one fluid motion, firing three shots from a distance of about two feet. The first round sliced into Rabin’s upper back, causing him to fall forward. Amir had hit his target. The second shot struck Yoram Rubin’s left elbow, the one he’d draped over Rabin. It bore through the bodyguard’s arm and exited his shoulder. As Rabin tumbled to the ground, the third bullet entered his lower back, left of the spine.

The next few moments unspooled like a series of snapshots: The Beretta falling from Amir’s hands and bouncing off the pavement; policemen piling on top of him. The Dignitary Protection Unit had a rule that if someone managed to fire a shot at one of its VIPs, the second bullet must come from the gun of a bodyguard, directed at the assassin. Yet Amir had squeezed off three rounds and no one fired back. The head of the unit, who had followed Rabin down the stairs, watched the event with a sense of confusion that quickly gave way to horror. Behind him, or perhaps off to the side, someone else called out: “It’s not real, it’s not real.”

On the pavement, Rubin now crouched over Rabin and tried to lift him into the Cadillac. “Listen to me and no one else,” he said. But his arm ached badly and the prime minister’s body felt limp and heavy. Glaser, who had been a step ahead of Rabin when the shots rang out, spun around and dropped to the ground. Together the two bodyguards hoisted Rabin into the backseat of the car and Rubin dove in behind him. “Get going, now!” Rubin shouted to Damti. As the Cadillac sped away, the rear door still open, Glaser glimpsed an image that would stain his consciousness for years: Rabin, the man he was charged with protecting, lying on the backseat of the car, with Rubin sprawled out on top of him.

From the plaza, Ichilov Hospital was only minutes away. But the
hysteria of the shooting and the crowds that still lined the streets disoriented Damti. At the first stoplight, he turned north instead of south and then lost his bearing. In the back, Rabin was bleeding heavily but still conscious. He managed to tell Rubin he thought he’d been hurt but not too badly. Then he fell into a coma. With his left arm barely functioning, Rubin leaned down and blew short quick breaths into Rabin’s mouth.

Damti punched the gas pedal, running red lights and swerving to avoid pedestrians. But he was unsure about his direction. In his rearview mirror, he saw Rubin crouching over Rabin. “What’s his condition? How’s Rabin?” he asked several times. After turning east on a main artery, Damti spotted a policeman and pressed the brakes hard. He reached across the front seat, opened the passenger door and yelled for the policeman to get in. “Guide me to Ichilov,” he said. The policeman, Pinchas Terem, took control of the megaphone, calling cars out of the way. Two minutes later, at 9:52 p.m., the Cadillac pulled into the driveway of the hospital. Some ten minutes had elapsed since the shooting.

In the emergency room, Rabin was not breathing and had no pulse. The doctor on call, Nir Cohen, noted the bullet wounds in Rabin’s back and then turned him over to examine his chest. Only then, when he bent down to listen to his lungs with a stethoscope, did Cohen realize this elderly man in his elegant suit was the prime minister. Other doctors gathered around his bed while a nurse phoned the surgery department: send people now, she said. Forty-one-year-old Mordechai Gutman, the most senior surgeon in the building, came running. The emergency-room doctors had pulled off Rabin’s jacket and shirt by now and inserted an IV. Gutman, sensing that air had seeped into Rabin’s right chest cavity, plunged a tube into his rib cage to drain it. A gust of air and blood burst from the cylinder. Suddenly, a pulse appeared; the prime minister was alive.

Gutman wanted Rabin in the surgery room immediately, where he could cut him open and treat the internal wounds. He and several other doctors wheeled the gurney into a long, fluorescent corridor and began running. Gutman expected the waiting area they passed
through to be teeming with people—Rabin’s wife and children, his staff members and security team. It was strangely empty.

Leah at that moment was at Shabak headquarters across town, unsure of her husband’s condition. She’d witnessed the shooting from the staircase but by the time she reached the parking lot, Rabin was gone. Glaser, who had just watched the Cadillac speed off, took Leah by the arm and pushed her into the Caprice, to get her away from the danger zone. “What happened?” she kept asking. Glaser had felt Rabin’s limp body on the ground, but he had also heard the confusing words “It’s not real” spoken immediately after the shooting. Now his earpiece had gone quiet. Until he was told something definitive, he decided, it was better to reassure Leah. As the car raced north toward the imposing red building that served the agency, he echoed the words from the parking lot. “Don’t worry, it’s not real.”

Leah and Rabin had planned to attend a party in Zahala, north of Tel Aviv, after the rally in honor of the diplomat Avi Pazner, who’d been named Israel’s ambassador to France. For a moment, she thought Glaser might be taking her there. But the driver was tearing through the city, running red lights and cutting curbs. It made no sense. When they arrived at the Shabak office, the details began to emerge. Leah overheard one officer telling another that two people had been wounded in the parking lot, one lightly and the other seriously. Both were now at Ichilov. From a phone in one of the rooms, she called her daughter, Dalia. “Your father has been shot,” Leah said. Dalia heard the words but struggled to grasp their meaning. How could it have happened? And what was her mother doing at the Shabak building? “Why aren’t you at the hospital?”

Leah hung up and demanded to be taken to Ichilov.

By the time she got there, Israel Television had interrupted its scheduled program, the movie
Crocodile Dundee II
, to report that the prime minister had been shot and that his condition was unknown. The news brought hundreds of people to the street outside Ichilov, along with journalists and their broadcast vans. Inside, several of Rabin’s cabinet ministers and staff members had already arrived. The American ambassador, Martin Indyk, was on his way. Haber had been
at the party in Zahala at the moment of the shooting, along with Ichilov director Gabriel Barbash. At 9:59 p.m., Barbash’s beeper went off with an urgent message to call the hospital. The two men rushed out together.

Barbash met Leah at the entrance and walked her to a private room near the surgery theater. For the first time, she learned that her husband had been struck by two bullets, that his situation was dire, and that the shooter was not a Palestinian but a Jew. It was too much to absorb. She felt herself disconnecting from the events around her. Leah thought about the protesters who had gathered outside the building on Rav Ashi every Friday afternoon, the vile things they chanted. Slowly, the room filled with people, including Dalia and her family, Sheves, Yatom, Haber, and Peres.

In operating room number 9, other senior doctors had joined Gutman by now, having rushed from their homes, among them Joseph Klausner, the head of Ichilov’s surgery complex. With the anesthesiologists and nurses, as many as forty hospital staff circled the patient. The rounds that struck the prime minister—the first and third to emerge from Amir’s gun—were hollow points. They’d caused massive internal bleeding and remained lodged in his body. It occurred to one of the doctors that a protective vest would likely have stopped these particular bullets, with their scooped-out tips. Gutman had removed Rabin’s spleen and cracked open his chest. More than twenty units of blood had been pumped into the prime minister intravenously. When a dose of adrenaline was injected into his heart, Rabin’s vital signs seemed to stabilize. Barbash left the room to report to Leah that the doctors now had some hope.

In the hallway, Haber immediately swung into action. He spotted a high-ranking Defense Ministry official and told him to begin setting up a makeshift office at the hospital, with phones and fax lines. The prime minister would need to run the affairs of the country from Ichilov while he recuperated.

But Rabin quickly lapsed again. To keep him alive, Gutman reached into his chest cavity and pumped his heart manually, repeating the motion again and again, until he lost track of time. Around the room, the grim realization was setting in that the prime minister
could not be saved. Gutman sensed the futility as well but he couldn’t bring himself to pull away from Rabin’s heart. At 11:02 p.m., eighty minutes after the shooting, Klausner touched him on the back and said it was time to stop.

Rabin was dead.

THE OPERATING ROOM
fell silent. Then some of the surgeons, trauma specialists who had seen terrible ordeals, began to weep. Gutman stepped away from the table and let other doctors stitch up the body. He found a corner outside the room to smoke a cigarette. Someone brought him coffee.

Barbash took several doctors with him to break the news to Leah and the rest of the family. The hallway outside the private room now swarmed with people—members of Rabin’s cabinet, military officers, and security officials. For a moment, the crowd huddled around Leah. Then Barbash led a small group including Leah; Sheves; Peres; Yuval; Dalia; her husband, Avi Pelossof; and her two children, Noa and Yonatan, to a reception room where Rabin’s body had been wheeled. A white sheet covered everything but his head. To Noa, who was now eighteen and a private in the army, her grandfather seemed to be smiling slightly. His face had retained its color but he was cold to the touch. After taking turns standing at Rabin’s bedside, the group filed out.

By this point, masses of people had gathered outside the hospital, including rally-goers who’d made their way to Ichilov straight from the plaza. From media reports, Israelis had learned that the shooter was a twenty-five-year-old Jewish extremist from Herzliya who studied law at Bar-Ilan. But they still knew little about Rabin’s precise condition. Haber was about to stun the nation. At 11:15 p.m., he walked out of the hospital alone, looking pale and deeply shaken. He stood in front of television cameras and asked for quiet. Beyond the ring of journalists, the crowd pressed forward to hear him. “The government of Israel announces with shock, with great sorrow and grief, the death
of Prime Minister and Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who was murdered by an assassin this evening,” he said. At the word “death,” some people erupted in shouts of “No, no!” Others gasped loudly.

Haber continued: “The government will convene in an hour to mourn in Tel Aviv. May his memory be blessed.”