Killing a King: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel (31 page)

With the help of their teams, Beilin and Abbas had produced a thirteen-page agreement that settled all the difficult issues facing the two sides. Considering how intractable the conflict had been, it was a remarkably straightforward document. The Palestinians would get a state of their own on about 95 percent of the West Bank and Gaza. Israel would incorporate some large Jewish settlements into its borders—about 5 percent of the West Bank—but would dismantle all the rest. To compensate Palestinians for the annexation, Israel would cede roughly the same amount of land from its own territory. The two sides would redraw the borders of Jerusalem to include several large Jewish settlements and then share the city, with Arab neighborhoods run by Palestinians and Jewish neighborhoods by Israel.

Regarding what Palestinians referred to almost sacredly as the “right of return,” Abbas agreed that the repatriation to Israel of ref
ugees displaced in 1948 was impractical. Instead, these refugees and their progeny would settle for “compensation and rehabilitation for moral and material loss.”

The parameters far exceeded the positions Rabin had articulated publicly. In his last address in parliament weeks earlier, the prime minister referred to a Palestinian entity that fell short of a state. But Rabin had repeatedly shown himself willing to be far more flexible than his public positions indicated—that much was clear from his readiness to cede the Golan Heights. And his closest aides, including Haber and Sheves, believed that withholding support for full Palestinian sovereignty until the final status talks was part of his negotiating strategy. Ron Pundak, who had helped lead the back channel in Stockholm, felt sure Rabin would recognize the benefits for Israel. “Based on everything we knew, we were confident he would say yes.”

Peres was more dovish than Rabin. But making dramatic concessions to the Palestinians in the aftermath of the assassination now struck him as divisive, not exactly what he aimed for in an election year. When Beilin unrolled a map that corresponded to the plan, Peres pointed to the Jordan Valley, a territory that the Labor Party had traditionally sought to retain for Israel’s security. Israelis are not ready for it to come under Palestinian control, Peres said. The plan would have to wait until after the elections.

That left him with Syria. Peres hoped he could entice Assad to negotiate with him directly, as Egyptian President Anwar Sadat had done with Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin at Camp David seventeen years earlier. If the two sides could agree on the outline of an accord, the election would become a referendum on a peace deal with Syria. “Peres was very seasoned at timetables,” Rabinovich would recall. “For an election in November, he wanted a major achievement by May.” Preferring the Syrian track, then, would be the second big decision of his premiership. In less than a week, Peres had laid down two wagers, one on himself and one on Assad. Both were risky bets.

The seven-day mourning period lasted through Saturday evening. Though it drizzled over the weekend, many thousands of Israelis made their way to Rabin’s gravesite on Jerusalem’s Mount Herzl, where
patches of freshly packed dirt had turned to mud. That night, one of the darkest weeks in Israel’s history ended with a downpour.

On Sunday evening, Leah left Rav Ashi to speak to a huge crowd that had congregated once again at the plaza in Tel Aviv, this time to commemorate Rabin. From the stage, the gathering looked even larger than it had the week before. More than 200,000 people stood in silence, listening to songs and speeches and, at the request of organizers, withholding applause. “Never have so many people stood in one place so quietly. Not in Israel,” Nahum Barnea would write. The public outpouring over the preceding week had persuaded Leah that the murderer failed. Instead of wrecking Rabin’s peace process, he had given it momentum. Now she addressed her husband: “I want to believe that this terrible tragedy which has befallen me, us, all of us, this monstrous price that you and we have paid, was not a vain sacrifice. For we have all risen from the nightmare to a different world.”

The event ended on a hopeful note: Tel Aviv mayor Roni Milo announced the plaza would now be called Rabin Square. But it would take more time to determine whether Amir had failed or succeeded. And the nightmare would not go away so quickly.

Four nights after the gathering, investigators brought Amir to the plaza for a reenactment of the murder. The suspect, his ankles bound together in a long chain, vaulted from a white police van just after two in the morning, followed by guards and a police camera crew. For twenty-five minutes Amir directed the action, positioning the stand-ins and retracing his own steps from the night of the murder. On the roof of the adjacent shopping mall, Shabak officers watched in dismay, including the bodyguard Yoram Rubin, his arm still in a sling. Police had barred them from bringing their sidearms, fearing one of them might be tempted to take a shot at Amir. Beyond police barricades, a small crowd gathered.

When Amir drew a toy pistol and made the sound of gunfire, gasps of horror rose from the crowd. Yoav Gazit, an investigator in the case and the stand-in for Rabin, lunged forward as if hit with real bullets. Though they’d never met on campus, Gazit and Amir had been fellow students at Bar-Ilan.

“OK, so after you took us through the event, do you have something to add?” another investigator asked Amir, holding a microphone to his mouth to record the exchange.

“No regrets,” Amir said.

“Excuse me?” the investigator asked, leaning in.

“It needed to be done and that’s it.”

CHAPTER 9

The Man Who Voted Twice

“Our last chance is this election and if the Labor Party wins again, this is the end of Judaism and you are also responsible.”

—
YIGAL AMIR

P
olitical assassinations don’t necessarily change a country’s direction. In democratic societies, an extremist who kills in order to prevent certain policies from going forward can end up accelerating them—in part by infusing them with a sense of historic inevitability.

In Israel, Rabin’s murder seemed to rouse the peace camp and weaken its opponents. People who had been largely silent in their support for Oslo now made themselves heard, displacing the rowdy hardliners at the plazas and town squares. Settlers and other rightists toned down their rhetoric, some from a recognition that lines had been crossed, others simply because the climate had changed. The novelist Amos Oz captured the feeling of peace’s inevitability in a short essay he penned a week after the murder. “The peace process between Israel and the Palestinians, Israel and the rest of the Arab world will continue; there will be a comprehensive peace agreement,”
Oz wrote. “There is simply no alternative to a historic compromise between Jews and Arabs.”

In reality, the murder did not make peace inevitable, and neither did it settle the great debate in Israel. Large segments of the country still viewed the ceding of land as dangerous or sacrilegious. Extremists on both the Israeli and Palestinian sides remained determined to sabotage any reconciliation. Israel’s direction now depended on how adroitly Peres would maneuver in the two hundred days ahead—the coda to the Rabin story.

He was off to a shaky start.

Peres had learned that the Israeli negotiation with Syria foundered mainly over the security arrangements. Rabin demanded limits on Syrian troop deployments along the border and the posting of early warning stations following a retreat from the Golan, a mountainous region that towered over much of northern Israel. To President Assad, these seemed like infringements on Syrian sovereignty. Rabin also wanted a staged withdrawal, stretched out over several years. Assad expected to get the Golan within months of a peace treaty.

Peres had ideas for breaking the logjam. In late November, he discussed them with Uri Savir, the former Oslo negotiator who would now run the talks with Syria. Peres would be willing to bend on security if Assad agreed to make the Golan the hub for a thriving commercial relationship between the two countries. The more Syria benefited economically from its relationship with Israel, he told Savir, the less incentive it would have to violate the deal and rekindle old hostilities. In effect, industrial zones and high-tech ventures would trump military measures as the real guarantors of Israeli security.

Peres also raised the idea of a summit meeting between the two leaders. Assad had ceded almost no authority to the negotiators he dispatched to meetings with Israelis over the years, making the talks slow and frustrating. Peres felt sure he could move quickly to the essence of the dispute in direct talks—as he had with Arafat whenever a disagreement arose among lower-level negotiators. Assad’s reluctance to meet face-to-face reminded Peres of an old joke he shared with Savir: A young man who was too shy to confess his love to a woman
directly, put it in writing, sending her a letter every day. After a year, the woman married the mailman.

In December, Peres conveyed a series of questions to Assad through US Secretary of State Warren Christopher regarding the way forward in talks. They included references to Peres’s schedule—one year to complete the first draft of a peace agreement. Assad did not rule it out but didn’t explicitly embrace the timetable either. His willingness to entertain the idea encouraged Peres, who set about formulating positions for a new round of talks. But Rabinovich, one of Israel’s most astute Assad watchers, sensed a rebuff. “Assad generally preferred to make an agreement with Israel in the beginning of a prime minister’s term,” allowing time for an Israeli withdrawal before an election brought someone new to power. “I don’t think he ever intended to complete a deal with Peres,” he would recall.

By late in the month, Assad’s reticence would become evident to Savir as well. The Syrian leader dispatched a delegation for several days of talks with Israel at the Wye River Conference Center on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, a rustic lodge with grassy knolls and rows of cherry trees. It was the most intensive interaction Assad had allowed between his representatives and their Israeli counterparts to date—a significant upgrade in the process. But on the Israeli proposals Peres thought of as deadlock-busting—the economic development that would substitute for security guarantees—the Syrians conveyed an ambivalence that seemed to flow directly from Assad. “They were interested in an accommodation with Israel but feared being overwhelmed by the economic strength of their Westernized, democratic neighbor,” Savir would write in a memoir, years later. “The solution they were seeking was aid without influence and peace without engagement.”

By the end of the round, the teams had failed to make significant headway.

At home, Peres struggled as well. In the days after the murder, the outrage Amir had inspired across the political spectrum prompted coalition and opposition figures to rally around the new prime minister. But the more time passed, the less the assassination factored as
a political consideration. When Peres presented his new government to parliament on November 22, eighteen days after the assassination, a large majority of lawmakers endorsed it. But his decision to press ahead with the hand-over of West Bank cities to the Palestinians restored the political realm to its fractious self, minus the ugly invective (at least at first).

The hand-over also ate at the margin Peres held over Netanyahu in opinion polls. He still led by a lot—20 points, according to some surveys. But the trend line looked troubling. Netanyahu, who had rated his own chances of defeating Peres at zero in the days after the murder, seemed to be regaining his footing. In a conversation with Labor’s Uzi Baram in December, he offered a new assessment: If Palestinian terrorism picked up in the winter, Netanyahu said, Peres’s popularity could plunge dramatically. To Baram, the remark seemed breathtakingly calculating. The assassination had changed so much about Israel’s political culture, he thought—and yet it had changed nothing at all.

Amir’s regular remand hearings kept the horror of the murder firmly in the public consciousness. His courtroom polemics and his relentless triumphalism drew scorn. But the publicity also galvanized extremists who were quietly finding ways to venerate the murderer—just as they had venerated Baruch Goldstein. Letters of support now flowed to Amir’s home from Israel and abroad, bundles of them. When Amir’s younger sister, Vardit, got married in December, supporters mobilized to make sure no one interfered. “Thankfully, God heard our prayers and sent hordes of Haredis to keep out the few Hellenizers who came to cause trouble,” Hagai would write in a diary he kept in prison. “And some anonymous person made sure to supply security people and a car for the bride.”

The support buoyed Hagai, who worried that his siblings would bear the stigma of the assassination. It also suggested to him that certain religious figures were ready to quietly embrace the Amir family. When his sister sought benedictions from rabbis before and after her wedding—privately, in their offices—some conveyed their blessings to Amir and Hagai as well. “Many of the rabbis in the Haredi
world supported us,” Hagai would say years later. “If they would have attacked us, it would have been a problem.”

Determining whether rabbis—those or others—had given Amir a religious authorization to kill Rabin remained a priority in the police investigation. Amir denied it. He didn’t need rabbis to interpret Jewish law for him, he told his interrogators. He knew it well enough himself.

But Hagai admitted several times that his brother
had
consulted with rabbis and received at least an implicit confirmation that
din rodef
applied to Rabin and that targeting him was thus permissible. On November 6, one investigator who questioned Hagai wrote in his notes: “The subject repeats that he heard from his brother about having received corroboration from a rabbi regarding the fact that
din rodef
and
din moser
apply to him [Rabin].” Another investigator wrote the following day that Hagai described Amir as having driven to a Jewish seminary in Samaria to ask a rabbi there for permission to assassinate Rabin. “After Yigal received the permission,” the interrogator noted, “he came home and told the subject [Hagai] about it and together the subject and Yigal decided to carry out the murder.”