Killing a King: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel (3 page)

Instead, the radio announced it in a special bulletin at eight thirty and Peres, who was about to sit down at his official residence with two of the country’s most esteemed journalists, happened to have the radio on. He fumed. The interview with Nahum Barnea and Shimon Shiffer of the newspaper
Yedioth Ahronoth
was meant to highlight Peres’s role in the negotiations and his achievement as a statesman. A producer for the NBC
Today
show waited for his own turn in a production truck parked outside. But inside, the journalists found Peres gloomy and short-tempered—and, at nine in the morning, well into his second round of French brandy. Peres offered each of the two journalists a glass as well, but soon asked them to step outside so he could make a call. They would hear one end of the conversation later on the tape recorder they’d left in the room. “That man ruined my life! He
has been persecuting me for sixteen years!” Peres hollered at Giora Eini, a lawyer who had mediated disputes between Rabin and Peres over the years. “It’s either me or Rabin, otherwise I’m staying home.”

Peres also called the writer Amos Oz, his friend of many years, and told him he would resign. The foreign minister liked the company of novelists and poets and regarded himself a man of letters. It was just one of the ways he and Rabin differed. Peres had grown up in Poland and though he immigrated to Palestine at age eleven, he never fully lost his shtetl accent—a millstone in a society that consciously tried to erase the diaspora culture from its Jewish immigrants. Rabin, by contrast, was a
sabra
, a native son at a historical moment when such a status paid especially high dividends.

Their separate career paths brought them in contact early on but also shaped their rivalry. In those years, the smartest and most capable young members of the Jewish community in Palestine entered either the military or government service, as is often the case in emerging societies. Peres chose politics. He became a protégé of David Ben-Gurion, later Israel’s first prime minister; helped procure arms for the Jewish army in the run-up to the War of Independence; and eventually brokered the deal for the French nuclear reactor that made Israel an atomic power (albeit undeclared). By age twenty-nine, he had come to run the Defense Ministry, the country’s largest and most complicated government agency.

Still, Peres never risked his life on the battlefield, a blemish in a young country that worshipped its generals. To Rabin, he was an apparatchik. He might have heard the sound of gunfire, went the old joke, but only through the telephone.

The antagonism simmered for years, until it boiled over in 1974 during an internal election in the Labor Party. By then, Peres had been a member of parliament for fifteen years, while Rabin had been in politics for just a few months. Rabin had left the military in 1968 to serve as Israel’s ambassador to Washington, returned to Israel in late 1973, and joined the government as a junior cabinet minister. Yet when the party’s central committee members convened to choose a new leader in the aftermath of the devastating Yom Kippur War, they favored Rabin over Peres—a considerable slight to a man who had
clawed his way up the political hierarchy over decades. The fact that Rabin had been abroad in the run-up to the war and thus untainted by its failures went a long way to explaining his victory. But the media’s gushing about Rabin as Israel’s first native-born prime minister compounded the indignity for Peres.

To preserve party unity, Rabin made Peres his defense minister. But he quickly regretted it, complaining to associates that Peres constantly leaked sensitive information to the press and undermined him at every turn. Among other things, Peres sided with a band of Jewish settlers in the West Bank who had squatted at Sebastia, near the Palestinian city of Nablus, forcing Rabin to provide them with provisional housing. The settlement movement was relatively small at the time and the victory gave it a significant boost. Rabin felt sure Peres had done it primarily to challenge his authority.

Three years into his term, Rabin resigned his post when a journalist discovered that his wife maintained a few thousand dollars in a bank account in Washington well after his ambassadorship ended—a violation of Israel’s strict foreign currency laws. For years, Rabin suspected that Peres or one of his minions had leaked the story. Leadership of the party now swung to Peres.

To people who interacted with both men at the time, the differences between them seemed almost chemical. Peres impressed people with his big ideas—the nuclear program of the 1950s and ’60s, and much later a blueprint for a New Middle East. Rabin almost never waxed on about lofty initiatives but could bore into the details of a project—a military operation, for instance—until nothing was left to chance. Peres had a Francophile side, wore double-breasted suits and honed elegant aphorisms that he sprang on people as if spontaneously. Rabin preferred the culture of Washington, where his ambassadorship included schooling in the art of realpolitik from the experts, Nixon and Kissinger. Both men smoked cigarettes and drank whiskey but Rabin had the larger appetite for tobacco. He regularly burned through two packs of Parliament Longs in a day and had yellow stains on the insides of his index and middle fingers to show for it.

By the 1980s, the rivalry had caused huge damage to the Labor Party. Rabin published a memoir full of vitriol against Peres, including
a designation that would stick with him for the rest of his political life: “indefatigable schemer.” The book’s ghostwriter, Dov Goldstein, coined the phrase after long conversations with Rabin. When Rabin encountered it in a draft, he congratulated Goldstein for hitting the mark so deftly. “He called me in the evening and said, ‘Tell me, Dovaleh [Goldstein’s nickname], what was your rank in the army?’ ” Goldstein recalled later. “I told him I was a sergeant. . . . He said, ‘In that case, make a note to yourself. This is the first time in history that a major general salutes a sergeant over the phone.’ ”

Peres, who would go on to lose successive election campaigns, vented about Rabin in regular meetings he convened with five of the country’s top journalists. The “quintet,” as Peres referred to them, included Dan Margalit, of the newspaper
Ha’aretz
, who broke the story of Leah’s US bank account, and David Landau, editor of the
Jerusalem Post
. Peres hosted them in his home, where they watched the news together, talked politics, smoked, and drank. Though the journalists knew all the ugly details of the rivalry, the rough edge of Peres’s tongue continually surprised them. One recurring theme was Rabin’s habit of taking credit for Peres’s accomplishments—as Peres saw it—including the brilliant Israeli hostage rescue in Entebbe, Uganda, in 1976. Peres insisted the idea was all his.

Now, on that Saturday morning seventeen years after Entebbe, Peres once again felt his nemesis was making claims on an achievement he regarded as his own. He ushered the two journalists out of his apartment and began writing a resignation letter. Meanwhile, Eini, the mediator, swung into action. He called Rabin to tell him about the crisis and get his permission to begin a kind of shuttle diplomacy.

In one of the many little ironies of their dysfunctional relationship, Peres and Rabin actually lived in the same neighborhood, just three blocks apart, in similar-style buildings. When his services were needed, Eini would park his car on Rav Ashi and walk back and forth between the two apartments offering bridging proposals, often in writing. If he needed to make a private call, perhaps to consult with another party member, he would stop at a phone booth situated midway between the two buildings. His appearance in the neighborhood signaled to journalists that the elders were fighting again. With his
long frizzy hair, wire-rim glasses, and Frank Zappa mustache, Eini looked like a member of a ’70s rock band but in a suit.

This time, however, Peres had been spending the day in Jerusalem, at the official residence of the foreign minister. Eini did most of the work by phone.

To the mediator it was clear that Rabin could not allow Peres to resign. At such a pivotal moment, it would tarnish the peace deal. But the two men had been competing for so long, both found it hard to view this collective achievement—the product of Peres’s chronically wide lens and Rabin’s rigorous focus on the details—as anything but a zero-sum game. When Rabin defeated Peres in the Labor primaries the previous year and won the general election, he had been determined to exclude him from any significant decision-making role. Only under pressure from party members did he relent and make him foreign minister.

For Peres, the need for public approval had grown with each electoral defeat—in the estimate of even his close supporters, to a compulsive degree. It was in fact Peres’s deputy, Yossi Beilin, who had initiated the contacts with the PLO. Beilin kept it a secret even from Peres until the sides had held two successful meetings and crafted the first draft of an agreement. If anyone should have complained about stolen recognition, it was Beilin. But Peres felt he had earned the credit by pressing Rabin at key moments. “I told him, if you go this way, you won’t have a better colleague than me. If you won’t go this way, you’ll have no greater opponent,” he recounted two decades later.

One way or another, by evening Eini managed to broker an agreement that had something for everyone. Both men would go to Washington. Both would stand on stage at the White House alongside Arafat and the PLO’s second-in-command, Mahmoud Abbas. The two deputies, Peres and Abbas, would sign the accord.

With advisers and guests on both sides, the delegation to Washington suddenly grew to more than one hundred people. Haber would have to tell Rabin’s own daughter, Dalia, that there would be no room for her on the plane. Hours before takeoff he called her again to say a seat was now available but only if she could get to the airport quickly—and pay for the flight. She obliged on both counts.

ON HIS TRIPS
abroad, Rabin flew in an old Boeing 707, a four-engine plane that streaked so much black soot across the sky, some countries would eventually ban it from their airspace. The Israeli Air Force used the plane to refuel its fighter jets in midair when it wasn’t servicing the prime minister. But with a day’s notice, a ground crew could reconfigure it as a luxury airliner—though only in the loosest definition of the term. Mostly it involved inserting several first-class seats in the midsection of the plane and bolting two cots to the floor for Rabin and Leah. In the front part of the cabin, Peres, his staff members, and guests sat in economy seats on one side of the aisle while Rabin’s entourage filled the other side. Journalists and bodyguards sat in the back.

Rabin boarded in the late afternoon on Sunday, took his seat, and promptly asked one of the crew members for a glass of beer. The plane’s flight attendants and pilots were all air force officers, among the most rigorously vetted servicemen in the military. Then Rabin lit a cigarette and sat back as the aluminum frame of the old airliner vibrated through taxi and takeoff.

From the air, the country looked tiny and vulnerable, with most of its urban clusters pressed up against a sloping shoreline. In reality, its security position had been improving for some years. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the smashing of Iraq’s army by US forces in the 1991 Gulf War had created big strategic advantages for Israel. With no superpower to back Israel’s enemies and with Iraq neutralized for now, the old Israeli fear of invasion by a coalition of Arab states seemed less relevant than ever.

Other forces were redefining the country economically and culturally.

Until the late 1980s, Israelis had little access to the big brands and trends that shaped other parts of the West. The country had no indoor shopping mall and just one television channel. Whatever movie aired on television Friday night was often the topic of conversation over the
weekend. But a gradual deregulating of the economy opened Israel to outside influences and allowed for things like cable television in 1990. A basic package came with MTV and CNN, two huge cultural influences that had already been American staples for a decade. The easing of the Arab economic boycott against Israel the following year contributed to the process. Suddenly Israelis could buy Pepsi Cola and drive cars made by Honda and Toyota—companies that had dominated world markets but shunned Israel.

The year 1993 marked a turning point in the transition. Even before Israel announced the Oslo deal, McDonald’s signed its first franchise agreement with an Israeli businessman. Other fast-food chains followed. A second terrestrial television channel went live that year and later formed a news division, the first to compete with the state-run newscasts. Big-name music performers who had previously bypassed Israel put the country on their tour schedule that summer, including Madonna and Guns N’ Roses. The biggest pop star of all, Michael Jackson, was embroiled in a sex scandal over his sleepovers with underage boys in 1993. Yet when he came to Tel Aviv in the fall, 70,000 Israelis gathered to see him.

The Oslo process would accelerate these changes. But it would also affect Israel in darker ways. As Rabin’s plane left Israeli airspace, the country experienced the first convulsion of a peace deal that was already rousing extremists on both sides.

In the southern town of Ashkelon, a Palestinian from Gaza, Ahmad Atala, boarded a commuter bus around six in the evening, pulled the pin from a grenade he brought on board, and lobbed it down the aisle. Earlier in the day, the Islamic resistance group Hamas had issued a statement calling the Oslo deal a disgrace and a sellout and urging Palestinians to oppose it. The group, which rejected any compromise with Israel, would devote itself in the coming years to scuttling the reconciliation. Atala had at least a loose connection to Hamas, along with an abiding rage over an Israeli shooting spree three years earlier that left seven Palestinians dead. He wore a shirt imprinted with the words “Black Sunday,” a reference to the incident, which took place at a bus stop south of Tel Aviv.

Somehow, the grenade failed to explode. To salvage the operation,
Atala turned to the driver and stabbed him several times in the torso, causing him to lose control of the wheel. As the bus weaved back and forth across the lanes, a twenty-year-old corporal sitting near the front had the presence of mind to press a magazine into his military-issue rifle, pull back the charging handle, and shoot Atala in the chest. The Palestinian and the bus driver, Yehiel Carmi, would be the first fatalities of the Oslo era—dead even before the deal was signed.