Killing a King: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel (28 page)

The morning brought a raft of questions for the new Israel: Would the peace process survive Rabin’s death? Could Peres step into the shoes of a man whose military background had underpinned his
role as a peacemaker? And could the country ever bridge the chasm between its pragmatists and messianists—between the people who viewed Israel as a secular nation-state and those who saw it as the realization of biblical prophecy? In the American embassy building overlooking the Mediterranean, Martin Indyk typed a cable to Washington that referenced some of these issues. “The . . . assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin has no precedent in Israel’s forty-seven year history,” he wrote, addressing his memorandum to the secretary of state and the White House and designating it “classified.” While the loss of Rabin marked a devastating blow to the peace camp, Indyk reported that rightists stood to suffer a broad backlash. “Opposition leader Binyamin Netanyahu told us last night that Likud and the right will be directly blamed for the violence leading to the assassination of Rabin. He called the death of Rabin a ‘disaster for the Jewish people, a disaster for Israel and a disaster for the right which will be decimated if elections are called soon.’ ”

A second cable, written by the American consul general in Jerusalem, Edward Abington, summed up the Palestinian reaction. Abington wrote that Arafat seemed severely shaken and distraught, according to his advisers. The Palestinian leader had ordered his security forces to prevent Hamas and Islamic Jihad from celebrating Rabin’s death in the areas under his control. Many ordinary Palestinians felt relief that the perpetrator was a Jew and not an Arab, Abington added.

To the two diplomats, the uncertainties seemed overwhelming. But Israel had more immediate matters to address—starting with how to stage Rabin’s funeral. More than a quarter century had passed since a prime minister died in office. The government had no protocol for the ceremonial observance and, with the assassination, no precedent to follow. According to tradition, Jews bury their loved ones as soon as possible, usually within twenty-four hours of death. But by Sunday morning, more than one hundred foreign dignitaries and heads of state had expressed interest in attending the funeral. Washington alone had sent Israel a list with thirty-eight names, including those of two ex-presidents, three former secretaries of state, and nineteen senators and congressmen—in addition to President Clinton and members of his administration. All wanted to pay Rabin their respects.

To accommodate the requests, Israel pushed the funeral to Monday and announced that Rabin would lie in state at the plaza of the Knesset in Jerusalem until then. Safeguarding the events would fall on Shabak at an excruciatingly difficult moment for the agency. Shabak had just committed the worst security lapse in Israel’s history, allowing a lone gunman to kill the prime minister in what should have been a secured area. Its Dignitary Protection Unit, whose members would be tasked with guarding the foreign statesmen, was in turmoil. Several of the agency’s senior officials were already talking to lawyers about what would surely be a state probe into the circumstances of the murder. And its chief, Carmi Gillon, was only now getting up to speed, having returned earlier in the morning to Israel from Paris.

Gillon had been on his way to the airport in Paris the night before when his chief of staff called with the news that the prime minister had been shot. At the El Al terminal in Charles De Gaulle Airport, he joined other Israelis around a television set just as the French network reported that Rabin had died of his wounds. Gillon spent the next five hours contemplating all the ways the murder could have been prevented. “The flight back to Israel was the longest I’d experienced in my life,” he would write in a memoir. “The plane was dark, most people around me slept, and I sat there alone with myself, resting my head against the window and gazing at some meaningless point in the distance. I couldn’t shut my eyes.” When the plane landed in Israel at five thirty in the morning, Gillon headed straight to the assassination site to try to understand exactly what had happened.

At his office later, Gillon consulted with the agency’s top officers and then made several decisions. A team of three retired Shabak officers would investigate how the failure had occurred. Former agency officers would be brought back to help Shabak through the transition period. With the funeral to look after, the ongoing threat of Palestinian attacks, and the possibility of another assassination attempt—a copycat event could not be ruled out—Gillon felt a constant anxiety. He had quit smoking four months earlier. Now he couldn’t go for more than a few minutes without lighting a cigarette.

Throughout the day, thousands of people streamed to Jerusalem to pass by Rabin’s coffin and greet the grieving family. Leah had woken
up that morning with a feeling that something horrible had happened the night before. For a moment, she struggled to recall what it was. Through the window of the car on the way to Jerusalem, she saw hand-painted signs hanging from bridges and stretched out along highway barricades with the Hebrew words that Clinton had spoken in his Rose Garden tribute to Rabin the night before,
SHALOM HAVER
. But it was only when she glimpsed the coffin outside the parliament building that the “inconceivable reality” set in, as she would write later. By midnight, more than a million Israelis had filed past the casket to honor Rabin. Dalia woke up at three in the morning and turned on the television to see the plaza still teeming with people. She roused her mother so that Leah could view the spectacle herself.

The funeral at noon the next day marked the largest gathering of international leaders the Middle East had ever known, with more than two thousand foreign guests. Nearly eighty countries had sent senior representatives, including Egypt, Jordan, Oman, Mauritania, Morocco, Qatar, and Tunisia. The headwear told the story: Jews in skullcaps but also men in kaffiyehs, turbans, military berets, and baseball caps. For a country that had suffered isolation in the region throughout its history, the display underscored just how far Israel had come in the preceding three years. Airport authorities canceled all regularly scheduled flights for several hours in order to free the runways for the government planes. Only Arafat among world leaders was conspicuous by his absence. Israel decided it would be too difficult to protect him from potential assassins.

Clinton and the rest of the American delegation had arrived on
Air Force One
early in the morning. On the flight over, Israel’s ambassador to Washington, Itamar Rabinovich, delivered a briefing to a select group on the situation in Israel. The notables, including former presidents Bush and Carter, wanted to know what to expect of Peres—could he assume Rabin’s security mantle and reassure Israelis about the risks involved in further peacemaking? Rabinovich explained that Peres had been a security figure throughout his career—the father of the Israeli nuclear program and a former defense minister. But the question would come to seem prescient in subsequent months. Rabinovich took in the luxury of the plane—all eighty seats were first-
class recliners. George Shultz, the former secretary of state, leaned over and explained to the Israeli official that it was President Reagan who had ordered the upgrade. Only Reagan could spend lavishly on comforts for the president and get away with it, he said. Several rows behind them, House Speaker Newt Gingrich complained loudly about having been seated so far in the back.

A bevy of leaders eulogized Rabin, including King Hussein, who addressed him as a “brother, a colleague and a friend—a man.” Clinton recalled helping Rabin straighten his bowtie at an event in Washington two weeks earlier, a prop the prime minister borrowed from a US Secret Service agent. “Look at the leaders from all over the Middle East and around the world who have journeyed here today for Yitzhak Rabin and for peace,” Clinton said. “Though we no longer hear his deep and booming voice, it is he who has brought us together again here, in word and deed, for peace.” Haber held up a bloodstained sheet of paper that doctors had retrieved from the inside breast pocket of Rabin’s suit jacket with the lyrics to “A Song for Peace.” “I want to read from this page but it’s difficult,” said Haber. “Your blood covers the printed words.” But it was Rabin’s granddaughter, Noa, whose tribute prompted a teary outpouring: “Others greater than I have already eulogized you, but none of them ever had the pleasure that I had to feel the caress of your warm, soft hands, to merit your warm embrace that was reserved only for us, to see your half smile that always told me so much,” she said.

At two o’clock, a siren wailed throughout Israel, precisely the way it does on Holocaust Memorial Day every year. Traffic stopped and people across the country stood at attention for two minutes. At Mount Herzl, Yuval Rabin recited the Kaddish—the traditional Jewish mourners’ prayer—as pallbearers lowered Rabin’s casket into the grave. Haber, who had studied at Orthodox schools as a child and was well versed in Jewish liturgy, noticed that Yuval mispronounced many of the words in the prayer, a complicated Aramaic text. Rabin had been the paradigm of secular Israel, he thought, and had raised his children that way as well.

The outpouring of grief across the country and the picture of millions standing at attention to honor Rabin created an image of soli
darity in Israel. But the extremists had not gone away, and most were unrepentant. In Kiryat Arba, several people rejoiced at the assassination and continued celebrating through the week. “I am very happy that the dictator Rabin is dead,” one resident, Aryeh Bar-Yosef, told a news crew. Bar-Yosef had been seen blowing a shofar—a biblical ram’s horn—on the night of the murder and singing “Happy Holidays.” Another settler explained that Jewish law required people to “enjoy the fact that Yitzhak Rabin, the head of the traitors, got what he deserved.” When a journalist asked the head of the Kiryat Arba local council about the remarks, he received a lesson in civil rights. “In a democratic state, I’m allowed to demonstrate. I’m allowed to scream and express my opinions. . . . They want to shut our mouths but they won’t succeed.”

Some non-settlers delighted as well. In a few places around the country, graffiti appeared praising Amir. On a wall in Jerusalem, someone scrawled the words
PERES IS NEXT
.

Benjamin Netanyahu, his popularity plunging, tried to draw a line between the extremists and the rank and file of his own party. “These people are not in Likud and won’t be in Likud and I have a message for you and the message is: I don’t want your votes, I don’t want to be elected by you,” he said in a television interview. But he rejected the idea that the vicious campaign against Rabin—the signs calling him a traitor and a murderer, the rabbinical pronouncements, the references to Nazis and their sympathizers—had somehow contributed to the assassination. The YESHA Council complained in the days following the murder that settlers were being blamed collectively when in fact the gunman had never been part of the settler community. Israel Harel, who headed the council at the time, took it further. He said many religious Jews now felt vulnerable walking around in their skullcaps and compared the environment to the climate in Nazi Germany on the eve of World War II. “You couldn’t board a bus if you had a skullcap on your head. . . . It was terrible, really terrible,” he recalled.

The truth was not nearly so dramatic; no one was rounding up rightists. But in a broad sense, the murder had created a binary landscape—
right and left, religious and secular. A skullcap identified a person with the camp that included the murderer, even if he found the assassination abhorrent. Yedidia Stern, who served as the dean of the law school at Bar-Ilan and was horrified to learn on Saturday night that the shooter was one of his students, felt the antagonism almost instantly. Raised in an Orthodox home, Stern had cultivated a kind of moderate observance that eschewed political or religious extremism. Yet on the stairs outside his home the next morning, a secular neighbor scolded him: “What did you people do to us?” he said.

Harel, who headed the YESHA Council, had known Rabin from the occasional meetings settlers held with the prime minister over the years. After the funeral, he conveyed a message to Leah through a friend that he wished to make a condolence visit to Rav Ashi during the shiva—the seven-day mourning period. But Leah, who felt a constant churning of anger and grief, could not stomach the idea. Settler leaders and right-wing politicians had orchestrated the incitement against her husband. She regarded them as Amir’s accomplices.

The shiva gave Leah a way to pass the time without wallowing alone in her husband’s death. She greeted visitors starting early in morning, recounted the moments of the murder, and reminisced about Rabin. Outside, large groups of Israeli youngsters kept vigils going through the week—on Rav Ashi and at the site of the shooting. Candles burned constantly.

On Thursday night, an unexpected guest arrived. Yasser Arafat had arranged through an Israeli intermediary to be flown in a military helicopter from Gaza to Tel Aviv and driven to Rav Ashi. It was Arafat’s first visit to Israel, a secret mission accompanied by his two deputies, Mahmoud Abbas and Ahmed Korei. He entered the apartment in his customary fatigues but without the kaffiyeh, a look that made his facial features more striking than usual. Arafat kissed Leah and the other family members, then sat for ninety minutes drinking tea in the living room where Rabin had lounged only days earlier. The Palestinian leader described how an aide had told him about the shooting and how he’d phoned his Israeli contacts every few minutes, pleading for updates. For all the tensions he’d experienced with Rabin
in the preceding two years, the murder had left Arafat in despair. He wondered whether the peace process could continue without him.

The following morning, Harel read in the newspaper about Arafat’s visit with Leah and bristled. She had agreed to host this arch-terrorist in her home but not me? he thought to himself.

By now, the three retired Shabak officers had concluded their internal investigation. Peres had already announced that the president of the Supreme Court, Meir Shamgar, would lead a state commission of inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the murder. But his probe would take months to complete. In the meantime, the agency would adjust its security procedures based on the conclusions of the retired officers.