Killing a King: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel (30 page)

“Tell the whole truth, you have nothing to lose. On the contrary, if you don’t say everything, you’re liable to get hurt. Don’t try to look like a hero when it’s not necessary. . . . You’re on the outside in order
to continue the activities so don’t mess things up. I miss everyone and especially Nili and Hila. Give them my warm regards.

“You’re my voice on the outside. Only you know precisely why I did this and only you can get the message out, so don’t mess up. No one is beating me in the interrogations and all the information they have about you is from me. I was only trying to lessen the damage. . . . You have nothing to fear, you didn’t do a thing. . . . See you in the next life.”

At the end Amir added: “Make sure that friends help my family by visiting them and talking about me. My family doesn’t know me like you guys know me.”

Only Dror Adani among Amir’s friends spoke as much and as candidly in the interrogations as Har-Shefi. In his very first sit-down with police he confessed that he, too, believed Rabin needed to die. “By definition, yes. Someone had to stop Rabin. According to the
Shulchan Aruch
[the Code of Jewish Law], a person who hands over the cities of Israel to a foreign ruler is a
moser
and in principle a death sentence applies to him so that he doesn’t cause the death of others.” Adani tried to explain certain theological nuances that distinguished him from the killer. And like Har-Shefi, he claimed to have harbored doubts about whether Amir would go through with it. But Amir and Hagai had already described to investigators by now how Adani sat with them in the bedroom on Borochov Street and suggested ways to kill Rabin—making him an accessory to the murder. Adani did not deny it.

Other friends helped round out the picture but were not viewed as suspects. Nili Kolman described Amir’s role in planning the settlement weekends and his admiration for Baruch Goldstein. Rachel Adani told police about the assassin’s interest in astrology and Rabin’s zodiac sign. When investigators summoned Hila Frank for questioning, they expected to learn more about Amir’s behavior on campus. Frank, whose boyfriend, Shlomi Halevy, had fabricated the story about a conversation overheard in the public bathroom at Tel Aviv’s central bus station, had a more dramatic tale to tell.

Frank had slipped into near catatonia when she saw Amir’s mug on
television the night of the assassination. The very real possibility that she could have prevented the attack filled her with dread. She spoke to Halevy by phone and then paid a visit to the home of a lawyer who was also a family friend. Once in the interrogation room, she recounted her conversation with Amir in a campus hallway several months earlier, how he told her he’d recited the confessional prayer,
vidui
, before setting out to kill Rabin at Yad Vashem. She explained to investigators how Halevy ended up telling police that “a short Yemeni guy with curly hair” might be plotting to kill Rabin while withholding Amir’s name.

In the already battered agency, the testimony landed hard. Shabak had chosen at the time not to summon Halevy for questioning by its own interrogators. Now, it turned out, his strange bathroom tip contained the key to preventing the assassination. Even after the murder, no one connected the intelligence Halevy had delivered with the suspect himself—the short Yemeni gunman with curly hair. When the details of the story surfaced in the Israeli press a few days later, the stench of failure that had clung to Shabak’s protection unit now infected the intelligence side as well.

In his office in Tel Aviv, Carmi Gillon struggled to cope. In the few hours’ time he had to sleep at night, he found himself thinking over and over again about the moment of the shooting. Peres had rejected Gillon’s offer to resign, but the decision had not been a vote of confidence—more like a desperate measure to keep Shabak functioning. Soon, the agency would suffer yet another embarrassment.

Among the friends Hagai and Amir discussed with interrogators, Avishai Raviv’s name came up several times. To Shabak, it was no surprise; Raviv had mentioned Amir in his reports. But the brothers both included Raviv on their short list of people who’d heard Amir talk specifically about plotting to kill Rabin. That detail distressed Raviv’s handlers. Why did their agent withhold the information?

Three days after the murder, they summoned Raviv for a meeting. To the media, it looked like the agent was one more extremist being hauled in for questioning. Over several hours, Raviv came clean to his handlers, once again unloading information he’d kept from them. Yes, Raviv had heard Amir talk about
din rodef
applying to Rabin,
sometimes in group settings and sometimes in conversations alone. And yes, he’d heard him say that Rabin needed to be killed. On one occasion, Raviv said, Amir went further, actually specifying that he intended to murder the prime minister.

The confession bewildered the Shabak officers. At the very least, the agent had failed spectacularly. He’d heard someone scheming to assassinate the prime minister and reported nothing. But was it more than just negligence? A debate would ensue over Raviv’s future with the agency, specifically whether to fire him and put him on trial for failing to prevent the murder. For Raviv, it was a frightening prospect; he could not imagine a life outside Shabak. He explained to his handlers that many people in the milieu where he’d embedded himself talked about
din rodef
and the need to kill Rabin. He simply did not take Amir seriously. Still, it was his job to report on potential threats—not to assess their veracity.

While Raviv’s fate hung in the balance, an Israeli journalist learned about his relationship with the agency. On November 17, nearly two weeks after the murder, Channel One’s Amnon Abramovich reported that Raviv was a Shabak mole operating under the code name Champagne. The journalist inserted the detail at the end of an in-studio report focused mainly on the exchanges Amir and other suspects had with their interrogators. Among other things, Abramovich described how Margalit Har-Shefi refused to stand during the siren for Rabin. But it was the detail about Raviv that caused an uproar. Within days, the agency would be forced to confirm the report.

Once again Shabak found itself on the defensive. In opinion polls, huge numbers of Israelis now regarded the entire agency as incompetent—its bodyguards, its intelligence gatherers, and its informers. Settlers and other rightists blamed Shabak for running an agent provocateur in their midst with the aim of smearing the entire right-wing camp. Though most of the incitement against Rabin had been generated by activists and politicians with no connection to Shabak, the Champagne ordeal allowed them to slyly shift the blame to the agency.

The Raviv debacle would also nurture conspiracy theories about the assassination—that, in hindsight, would be its lasting legacy.
Given the relationship between Amir and Raviv, the conspiracists would claim, Shabak must have known what was coming and allowed it to happen. Over time, the theories would morph and mutate. They would migrate from the far right to the Israeli mainstream. Though no evidence would surface to support these theories, they would prove to be exceedingly resilient.

SHABAK’S TROUBLES WORRIED
Peres. He needed a functioning security agency if he was to proceed with the hand-over of West Bank territory to the Palestinians—which he intended to do. With the trauma of the assassination still lingering, he also needed to feel personally secure. The protection unit now had dozens of men guarding the prime minister. They took extraordinary precautions whenever he moved around, halting traffic, putting up curtains to hide his passage through seam zones, and keeping even journalists far away. But instead of inspiring confidence, the measures radiated overcompensation and self-doubt.

Peres had spent the first days after Rabin’s death considering whether to call a quick election or serve out the year that remained on Rabin’s term. To most of the political figures surrounding him there seemed to be one clear answer. Rabin’s murder had prompted an outpouring of sympathy for Peres and contempt for Netanyahu. Though the Likud leader had nearly matched Rabin in popularity polls before the assassination, a new survey showed him losing to Peres by a huge margin, more than 30 percentage points in a head-to-head contest. Winning an election would give Peres four full years to complete a final accord with the Palestinians and negotiate a peace deal with Syria. The region would be transformed.

Yossi Beilin advocated strongly for elections. The architect of the Oslo Accords had been in New York on the night of the murder. He flew back to Israel on a commercial flight, seated next to Ehud Barak, who had left the military to serve as Rabin’s interior minister. In Jerusalem on Sunday, Beilin spent nearly an hour with Peres.
His old mentor looked haggard and unfocused. For the first time, Beilin informed Peres about the yearlong backchannel negotiation he’d been conducting with Arafat’s deputy, Mahmoud Abbas. The two men had completed the draft of a full-blown peace accord days before the murder. Though it was nonbinding, the so-called Beilin–Abu Mazen agreement—Abu Mazen being Abbas’s nom de guerre—would give the official negotiators a huge head start once the talks on a final accord got under way.

Beilin had been planning to show the draft to Rabin at a meeting already scheduled for November 8. Now he was suggesting that Peres win a mandate of his own in a snap election and then wrap up the Palestinian track quickly. The longer he waited, the more time opponents on both sides would have to undermine the process with violence, he said.

But Peres wavered. The murder had created a mesh of complicated emotions for Peres, not just trauma and survivor’s guilt but also a tinge of envy that his lifelong rival had been immortalized by the assassination—leaving him alone with the fallout. “Rabin became a saint that night,” the columnist Nahum Barnea would say later. “So Peres was envious.” Peres’s string of electoral defeats over the years had left him craving public approval. But a victory now would really be Rabin’s victory. Peres wanted to earn it himself.

Beilin and others sensed the old rivalry reasserting itself, even in Rabin’s absence. In his own philosophical way, Peres would admit it himself, years later. “I thought it was unfair to take advantage of this occasion that was created after the murder of Rabin. I thought it wouldn’t be . . . correct historically.” But in the moment, he framed it as a practical issue. The government had a year to press ahead with the peace agenda, including the West Bank pullback, Peres told Beilin. He was leaning toward serving out the term.

The rivalry between Peres and Rabin would be a factor in other ways as well. Since Rabin had also served as defense minister, that position now needed to be filled. Barak, who had been a popular army chief and the most decorated soldier in Israel’s history, was the obvious choice. But Peres preferred to keep the job for himself, just as Rabin had done. Uzi Baram, who served as the tourism minister,
quarreled openly with Peres over the issue. He argued that Barak would bring some of Rabin’s badly needed security mettle to the table. And he would provide Peres some distance from the electorally damaging suicide attacks, in case they persisted. But Peres stood his ground. Why didn’t you urge Rabin to surrender the position? he growled. At a moment in Israel’s history when the challenges seemed particularly complicated, Peres would not allow himself to assume a lighter load than Rabin’s. He kept the portfolio and made Barak his foreign minister.

Those first days had an endless quality to them, stretching from four or five in the morning until after midnight. Rabin’s aides had turned over classified documents for Peres to read and briefed him on issues Rabin had kept from his cabinet ministers. Among other things, Peres learned that Rabin had given Washington a tentative pledge to evacuate the entire Golan Heights in exchange for a satisfactory peace agreement with Syria. The willingness to withdraw violated a promise Rabin made during the 1992 election. Israel had captured the Golan in 1967, along with the West Bank and Gaza; successive governments had described it as vital for Israel’s security. Peres seemed surprised.

Rabin had told the Americans to keep the pledge tucked away until Syrian president Hafez al-Assad agreed to Israel’s terms on security and other issues. Among Clinton’s peace team members, it became known as “the pocket.” Itamar Rabinovich, the Israeli ambassador to Washington and lead negotiator with the Syrians, would make sure to correct anyone who referred to it as a commitment. It was a “hypothetical, conditional willingness to withdraw in return for a satisfactory package of peace and security,” as he put it. Though Rabinovich had been negotiating with Syrian representatives for more than two years, Assad had failed to offer what Rabin regarded as an acceptable package.

After Rabin’s funeral, Peres and Clinton met at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem to discuss the Syrian track. The hotel had housed the offices of the British Mandate when it was blown up by Jewish militants in 1946. The reconstruction made it Jerusalem’s most elegant
and stately hotel, with its Art Deco lobby and spectacular view to the walls of the Old City. Members of the American peace team, including Martin Indyk and Dennis Ross, had long regarded the Syrian track as more important than the process with the Palestinians. Now Clinton wanted to know if Peres would honor Rabin’s pledge regarding the Golan Heights. The new prime minister tarried for a moment, then agreed to embrace his predecessor’s formula: for the right deal, he would cede the Golan in its entirety.

By the end of the week, Peres had taken the option of a quick election off the table. He would serve as prime minister for a year, establish his own record of success, and then compete against Netanyahu. It was his first big decision as prime minister and it would turn out to be a fateful one. Now he faced a second dilemma. Peres would need a significant achievement to point to in his election campaign. A year was enough time to work toward a full peace accord with either Syria or the Palestinians but not both.

Peres had invited Beilin to Jerusalem on Saturday night, November 11, to hear more about the agreement with Abbas and review the maps the two men had drawn up. He hosted Beilin in the living room of a small apartment that the government made available to him as foreign minister—Peres had yet to move into the prime minister’s residence.