Killing a King: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel (29 page)

Not surprisingly, the three men found serious flaws in both the planning and implementation of Rabin’s protection on the night of the murder. Among other things, the Cadillac should not have been parked at the base of the stairs. It revealed to Amir where the prime minister would end up after the rally. But the failure to keep people out of the parking lot amounted to the unit’s biggest lapse. Many in the agency would end up pointing a finger at one man in particular, the bodyguard who stood alongside Rabin’s car during the forty minutes that Amir lingered in the lot. Though the distance between the two was measured at just four meters, the agent never approached Amir to verify whether he posed a threat. “Forty by four” became the shorthand locution in the agency for the bodyguard’s catastrophic negligence (Shabak has never identified him publicly). He would end up leaving Shabak a few months after the assassination. Regarding Glaser and Rubin—the latter of whom spent several days in the hospital recovering from the wounds to his arm—the panel had no complaints.

The retired Shabak men recommended suspending four senior officers in the agency and overhauling the Dignitary Protection Unit. From now on, dozens of bodyguards would ring the prime minister wherever he went and keep the public well away. Israeli leaders would no longer have the routine interactions with people that Rabin had—attending parties and weddings, playing tennis in a country club teeming with people, and occasionally driving himself to events.
The almost small-town intimacy that had existed between Israelis and their politicians was over.

The panel left other issues for the Shamgar Commission to investigate, including whether the intelligence side of the agency—the Jewish Affairs Department—should have known in advance about Amir’s intentions. For the time being, responsibility for the security lapse rested squarely on the protection department. The failures on the intelligence side would emerge soon enough, seeping from the rooms where Amir and Hagai were being interrogated.

THE AMIR BROTHERS
opened up easily. Yigal Amir spent the first night recounting the preceding two years since the Oslo deal, how he spotted Rabin at a wedding and realized it would be possible to kill him, then tried three times to hunt him down. He stretched his arms up and behind his head from time to time, whistled to himself during pauses in the conversation, and responded sarcastically to questions he didn’t like (police videotaped many of the interrogations). When an investigator—several of them switched off during the night—asked him if he uttered anything while firing at Rabin, Amir sneered: “
Allahu Akbar
?” To the question, “Did you work on your shooting recently to improve your aim?” he replied: “At that distance, you don’t have to be a genius to hit the target.”

Amir explained
din rodef
and
din moser
several times. When the investigator Yoram Ben-Haroush asked him if he had something to add about the murder, Amir gave a short sermon that seemed rehearsed. “I don’t regret it and I would do it again right now, for God, for the nation, and for the country. I’m just sorry that the family is suffering.” Yours or Rabin’s? Ben-Haroush wanted to know. “Both,” Amir replied. At one point the investigator announced they would be heading to the crime scene soon to reenact the shooting, something police often did with suspects following a confession. Amir pleaded for a hairbrush and shampoo. The man who had murdered Rabin in cold blood a few hours earlier now wanted to look good, in
case the media was on hand. “Let me near a faucet so I can wash my hair,” he said. But with so many people still lingering at the plaza, police put off the reenactment.

Hagai, by contrast, conveyed a twitchy nervousness during his first interrogations. He drank several glasses of water and coffee and asked to go to the bathroom three times in the span of a few hours. His initial instinct was to let his little brother take the blame alone for the murder. The first time an investigator asked him whether he’d ever heard Amir say Rabin needed to be killed, Hagai insisted he had not. The murder, he said, was unacceptable to him. But by morning, after investigators staged an encounter between the two brothers, Hagai changed his story. We planned the assassination together, he now told them.

The questioning continued intermittently throughout the day and night, with police and Shabak interrogators taking turns in the room. In the traditional division of labor, police tended to prod the suspects for confessional statements that would cement the indictment. Shabak focused on exposing the broader picture, including who else took part in the plot and what threats still loomed. The Amir brothers would satisfy both masters, describing the militia plan and the various schemes for killing Rabin and naming accessories—those who participated in the planning and those who merely knew about it.

By midweek, the two brothers had met with the lawyers who would represent them, sat through remand hearings in Tel Aviv, and huddled briefly with their parents. They received phylacteries to pray with and religious texts to help pass the time. The ongoing interrogations, initially a source of anxiety for Hagai, would soon offer a reprieve from the loneliness and monotony. Hagai told investigators about the munitions hidden in the chicken coop and about asking Ben-Yaakov to remove them. Once he’d confessed to his role in the murder, there was no reason to withhold the details. Police paid another visit to the house on Borochov Street and found the stash precisely where Hagai had left it. Ben-Yaakov had never touched the munitions.

Back in his cell, Hagai wrote his first letter home, an apologia aimed at shoring up his parents and assuring them that his brother (Gali, as they called him) had been guided by God. Amir had “managed
to kill the king,” Hagai wrote, placing the assassination in the tradition of Jewish rebellion against apostasy. “According to Judaism, killing a king is profoundly significant,” he would add later with devastating prescience. “It affects the entire nation and alters its destiny.”

Dear Mom, Dad and the rest of the family,

Gali and I are very sorry for the damage and suffering we’ve caused you in these difficult days. I hope that after you read this letter, you’ll feel a bit better and you’ll have a more optimistic way of grasping the situation.

I saw a picture of Dad and Mom coming out of my hearing, Mom wearing her glasses and Dad with his eyes closed. It caused me much pain. I’m accustomed to seeing Dad with happy, tranquil eyes, but it all disappeared. Dad, I expect you of all people to be strong inside. After all, you know that things happen for a reason in our world and especially in this age of anticipation for the messiah.

I thought a lot about what Gali did and to this moment I can’t believe he did it. Gali was ready to sacrifice his life in order to kill Rabin. This shift was not clear to me until after the fact and I’m still amazed. . . . I used the talents that God gave me and came up with all kinds of things—whether ideas or actual things—and for that I’m not ashamed. I was careful of course not to leave them [armaments and explosives] someplace where they might endanger people’s lives, or in a form that might be dangerous. That was one of my basic approaches to the work. The fact is that nothing happened to anyone, with God’s help. I’m glad I didn’t share the information with you because that would have made you accessories.

In any event, I expect you, Dad, to understand that the fact that Gali survived is a huge miracle for our family. I had discussed with him how unlikely that would be. For that alone—we’re thankful.

The very fact that Gali managed to kill the king suggests that the incident has long term implications for the life of our people in Israel. And as far as I know, what it means for the people of Israel is, at the end of the day, positive. For this reason, the fact that Gali managed to do what he did without getting hurt [proves] it was divinely guided. And because this tragedy happened to our family—to people who are all honest, simple
, doers of good deeds, there’s no reason for you to suffer so much. This again suggests that the consequences will be only good for the people of Israel.

For this reason, Father, in the same manner that you accepted the good things in life, with joy and with gratitude to God, you must also accept the things that at first look bad and believe that they are ultimately for the better. Because it’s quite possible that this is the way God wants to save [the people of Israel] and Gali from what might have happened in the future. You will one day thank him for this.

You must understand that Gali and I will most likely be in prison for a long time (then again, maybe not) and I expect you to be strong and to project strength outwardly because that will help us be strong as well. The path ahead is still long and full of struggles and I’m only at the start. But I have faith in God that it will all turn out well, and that you’ll one day get to have grandchildren from me and from Gali.

Dad, I have no doubt you will one day serve in the Jewish Temple as a poet . . . so go back to work and trust in God that it’s all from him. By the way, you know that Gali himself did not intend to go to the protest because on Friday when I came back from classes, he suggested that we go to Shavei Shomron and I said no.

Mom, I’m very proud of you for your strong stance and I hope that you’ll continue this way. Don’t be afraid to tell the press (scums) what you really think of them. Don’t apologize to anyone because you’re not to blame, and they’ll only use it as a weapon against you. . . .

With love from Hagai. Be strong and courageous.

Hagai’s appeal for support and understanding brought mixed results. For all of Amir’s ranting about Rabin at home, the murder had stunned his parents. Their son boiled at the government’s peace deals with the Palestinians, that much they knew. But neither contemplated the possibility that he would assassinate the prime minister—how could they? Israelis did not murder their politicians; there was no precedent for it. Geulah spent the first phone conversations with Amir screaming into the receiver—
What got into you?
Eventually, she would come to defend him (and later, to embrace conspiracy theories and deny he’d actually committed the assassination). But in her first television interview days
after the shooting, Geulah renounced her son. “He’s not mine anymore. He left the borders of this house. . . . I can’t be a partner to this. He betrayed us in a way that’s difficult to describe . . . I don’t wish on any Jewish mother—even an Arab mother or a non-Jewish mother—the suffering that I’m enduring.” The interview prompted Hagai to write a second letter, this one harsh and insistent: “I’m unwilling to accept any kind of criticism from you and I demand that you support him and stop saying he’s a stranger to you. . . . I don’t want you to argue with him about the incident every time he calls. It doesn’t change anything anyway. Just give him the love that a family can give at these difficult moments when he needs it most.”

Over the course of the week, police brought in Amir’s friends from Bar-Ilan, starting with Ohad Skornik and Margalit Har-Shefi. A spreadsheet pulled from Amir’s computer identified the students who had attended the settlement weekends. Phone logs showed which of them he’d spoken to in the days leading up to the murder. Based on Amir’s testimony—he talked so much that by the third day he needed a throat lozenge—police put Har-Shefi and Skornik in the first circle of possible co-conspirators. Amir had told each about his attempts to kill Rabin and talked to both about joining his militia. But their interrogations would unfold in dramatically different ways.

Skornik had anticipated his arrest. Already on Sunday morning, he consulted with one of the country’s most well-connected lawyers, Jacob Weinroth. The advice he got would keep him out of prison: Say little, be polite, and write down every question and answer in the interrogation. His unhurried longhand made the questioning tedious and frustrating for investigators. In at least a dozen interrogation sessions during the weeks that followed the murder, he studiously refrained from incriminating himself, making it difficult for police to substantiate an indictment against him.

Har-Shefi did the opposite. She spoke at length, defended Amir, insulted her interrogators, and insisted that Rabin had indeed betrayed his people.

Har-Shefi’s first interrogation began just as the siren for Rabin sounded across the country. She refused to stand up—there was no reason to honor his memory, she said. The defiance would set the
tone for the weeks to come. Outside, most Israelis were reeling from the details of the murder and enraged by Amir’s triumphalism—he had smiled throughout his remand hearing. But Har-Shefi, who had turned twenty several months earlier, seemed unable to process the social environment, even if just to help her own cause. “We spoke about the murder of the prime minister and she failed to express sorrow or condemnation,” one of the investigators noted. “She stated that Rabin is a traitor, no doubt about that, and that he caused the murder of Jews. She . . . prayed and hoped that he would suffer a heart attack or get arrested and tried for treason. She admits and is proud of the fact that at protests she shouted ‘Rabin is a traitor.’ ”

In her defense, Har-Shefi said she never believed that Amir would actually kill Rabin. Like many others who heard his bluster, she simply underestimated him. But the potentially mitigating value of the explanation seemed to be eclipsed by her plainly evident loyalty to Amir, the sheer number of times she heard him talk about wanting to kill Rabin and having already tried, and her grating surliness in the interrogation room. When investigators told her after eight hours of questioning that she would be formally arrested for failing to prevent the murder, she scowled. “So what?”

If Har-Shefi had left room for doubt about the sway Amir held over her, it came through clearly in notes he passed to her through the interrogators. Allowing the suspects to write notes and letters formed part of the investigative strategy. The texts would then be entered into the file as evidence.

In one of the notes, Amir wrote: “You should continue with the Sabbath gatherings when your questioning ends and make sure to get the list of activists. Nothing is over. I feel terrific and I’m doing everything I thought to do. My parents need shoring up. Have people go over there and talk to them about me. They don’t exactly understand what happened here. They live in [a bubble] and have no idea what’s happening in the country so the shock for them is total.