Killing a King: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel (32 page)

Hagai provided no names; he claimed that his brother withheld them. But investigators had already put their hands on the letter the three settler rabbis had written earlier in the year suggesting Rabin was an accomplice to murder through the tenets of
din rodef
and
din mose
r. And Yoel Bin-Nun, the moderate settler who had maintained a correspondence with Rabin, implicated at least one other rabbi. The assassination had caused a crisis of faith for Bin-Nun. He announced days after the murder that he would expose the agitators if they did not come forward on their own. “The problem is these Torah authorities, without whom, no kid would have dared do such a thing,” he said at a public meeting of settlers and other rightists. “If they don’t resign their rabbinic posts by the end of the seven-day mourning period, I will fight them, even to the death.”

Police questioned rabbis throughout the fall and winter, including Dov Lior and Eliezer Melamed, two of the letter’s three authors. Both claimed that the references to
din rodef
and
din moser
were theoretical
inquiries—a scholarly attempt to verify whether the edicts applied to current events. All the rabbis questioned denied having made specific rulings regarding Rabin. Chief Superintendent Ofer Gamliel, who helped lead the murder investigation and spent many hours with Amir, felt sure the rabbis were lying. But with no hard evidence, police eventually closed the file against them. “The letter was examined but the contents could not substantiate criminal charges,” the attorney general wrote about the three rabbis. Regarding suspicions against other religious figures, he was clear: “Rumors alone cannot form the basis for criminal charges.”

Gamliel would come to see the inquiry into the rabbis as a failure. “I have no doubt in retrospect that certain people encouraged him [Amir], either directly or indirectly,” he said years later. But the tendency of the religious community to close ranks around its leaders and punish the rare whistle-blower hampered the probe. Amir, who had no trouble incriminating his friends at Bar-Ilan and elsewhere, would not implicate rabbis. Bin-Nun, who did, would suffer death threats and eventually be driven from the settlement where he had lived for years.

For Gamliel, who had worked on some of Israel’s biggest cases in the preceding two decades, the murder investigation presented few other challenges. Amir had provided enough information to support indictments against himself, Hagai, Adani, and Har-Shefi, on counts ranging from murder and conspiracy to the much lesser charge of failing to prevent a crime. A military court would convict one other suspect, the active-duty soldier Arik Schwartz, for stealing explosives from his base and giving them to the Amirs.

But Gamliel did puzzle extensively over one issue: Who cried out, “It’s not real” at the murder scene? At least a dozen people in the parking lot and beyond heard the words or variations on them, including “it’s fake” and “blanks, blanks.” Reports about it, coupled with the disclosure that Avishai Raviv had worked for Shabak, were already fueling conspiracy theories about the murder. If Amir had fired blanks, clearly someone else killed Rabin.

The conspiracy theories surged when Amir cited a rumor during one of his remand hearings about a Shabak bodyguard who died mysteriously
after the assassination. The story turned out to be incorrect. The theories continued to circulate even after a video shot by an amateur photographer surfaced showing Amir lunging at Rabin and firing his gun, and the prime minister falling forward. The photographer, Roni Kempler, submitted the video to the Shamgar Commission probing the murder and sold the rights to Israeli media some weeks later.

As part of their inquest, investigators drew up a table with the names of all twenty-five policemen on the scene and asked each one to report what words he heard and who said them. None could point to a specific person. Gamliel considered the possibility that it was Amir himself, uttering the phrase as he squeezed off his rounds. He and his brother would certainly have been crafty enough to calculate the effect of it—how it might sow confusion and deter Rabin’s bodyguards from firing back. It seemed like the kind of detail Hagai might have read in a thriller or a manual for the amateur assassin.

But Amir denied it repeatedly. Gamliel, who shared Amir’s ethnic background, felt he had some insight into the suspect’s character. He found him easy to read. Whenever Amir seemed to be withholding something, Gamliel would deliberately underestimate him—you aren’t smart enough to have thought of that. The slight would launch Amir into bragging mode and draw out the information Gamliel was seeking. To the investigator, Amir’s denials seemed genuine. If he had survived the shooting because of his own clever tactic, Gamliel felt sure he would have boasted about it.

At some point, Gamliel began focusing on members of the Dignitary Protection Unit. Shabak’s culture of secrecy made interrogating agency officers a delicate affair. To put them at ease, Gamliel summoned the bodyguards in the evenings, when the precinct emptied out, and questioned them alone. Often, he would leave their names off the interrogation log and include only their positions or other identifying details. Eventually, one of them provided an account that would clear up the mystery, at least partially.

The Shabak man told Gamliel he’d heard the shots fired from Amir’s gun and lost his focus. The words “it’s not real”—in Hebrew, “
ze lo ameetee
”—flew from his mouth almost involuntarily, as an
expression of his own disbelief: This could not be happening. Around him, people trained to respond to a shooting instantly had failed to fire back at Amir. His own inaction and the possibility that others had hesitated because of the words he uttered filled him with shame. He asked that his name not be disclosed.

The story failed to explain how some people had heard variations of the words the Shabak man shouted. But Gamliel had a theory. He surmised that others at the murder scene echoed the cry—not precisely as they heard it but in the manner they construed it. In what he thought of as a real-life version of the game Telephone, “it’s not real,” became “it’s fake,” which in turn became “blanks, blanks.” A cry of incredulity had morphed into a hint at something sinister—through serial reinterpretations. Gamliel took down the account and agreed to keep the Shabak man’s identity a secret.

Toward the end of the year, Israel completed its withdrawal from each of the cities in the West Bank except Hebron and from many of the towns and villages. Oslo II, the agreement that cost Rabin his life, was quietly taking shape. Peres remained focused on the talks with Syria but in the final days of 1995, another issue vied for his attention: Yahya Ayyash, Hamas’s master bomb maker, was finally in Israel’s sights.

After hiding in the West Bank for years, the Hamas bomb maker responsible for the deaths of more than fifty Israelis had quietly crossed into Gaza, where his wife and child lived. Among the people he took into his confidence there was a certain Palestinian businessman who also happened to be an informer for Shabak. Through the informer, the agency learned that Ayyash was hiding in a safe house in Beit Lahiya, on the northern edge of Gaza. On Peres’s order, Carmi Gillon now informed the prime minister, Israel could eliminate the most formidable terrorist it had ever faced.

To Gillon, the decision seemed easy. Ayyash had headed Israel’s most-wanted list since 1992. He excelled not only at engineering but also at persuading young men to become suicide bombers, a skill that troubled Shabak almost as much as his technical aptitude. Killing him would end a sustained manhunt that had taxed the agency’s resources.
Gillon hoped it would do something else as well: redeem Shabak, and perhaps himself, from the failure of the Rabin assassination two months earlier. “The morale was low. In addition to the grief and the feeling of failure, the entire Shabak was talked about in the media as incompetent,” he admitted.

For Peres, the arithmetic seemed more complicated. Hamas had not carried out a suicide attack in more than four months, the longest stretch since the Goldstein massacre. Whether killing Ayyash would reinforce the trend or trigger a new wave of bombings and undermine Peres’s political standing was anyone’s guess. In effect, Israel would be gambling on the idea that Ayyash alone possessed the skills to engineer large deadly attacks. If he had trained others, a reasonable assumption, they would certainly want to avenge his death.

Like Gillon, Peres seemed to have had motivations beyond the immediate battle with Hamas, including a drive to match Rabin’s security record. And he needed a standout achievement now that hope in the Syria talks was fading. In late December, he authorized the strike.

On the first Friday of the New Year, Ayyash answered a call on a cell phone he had received from the Palestinian businessman, expecting to hear his father. Shabak technicians had embedded a small explosive in the phone with a minimal blast radius. When a surveillance team identified Ayyash’s voice on the line, soldiers on a plane overhead triggered the explosive, blowing out the side of the man’s head.

It would take several hours for Shabak to corroborate that Ayyash had died. When the confirmation came, Gillon felt enormous relief. “After the killing of Yehiya Ayyash, people . . . stopped talking about the agency as worthless,” he would write in his memoir. “I personally felt that I had now made good on my promise to Peres that I would put the agency back on track and restore its sense of confidence.” Gillon tendered his resignation two days after the cell-phone strike.

He would not be around to face the consequences.

BY THE END
of January 1996, Peres grew tired of Assad’s dithering. At his office in Jerusalem, he wrote the Syrian president a note, taking a tougher line this time. The only way forward was through a series of meetings between the two leaders, Peres wrote. If Assad was serious about peace with Israel, now was the time to move. Secretary of State Warren Christopher carried the letter to Damascus on February 5 and brought back a reply the following day: Assad realized that a meeting would be necessary eventually but he was unwilling to set a date.

To Peres, the response meant one thing: With virtually no prospect of clinching a deal in the coming months, his November election gambit had failed. The prime minister still had a double-digit advantage over Netanyahu in polls, but his aides wondered how long he could sustain the lead as the anguish over Rabin’s assassination faded. Peres pondered the question himself; perhaps he’d committed a mistake back in November when he decided to serve out Rabin’s term. A week after Christopher’s shuttle mission to Damascus, Peres convened a press conference to announce a new decision: he would bring up the date of the elections to May.

The announcement effectively launched the race between Peres and Netanyahu. It would be a referendum on the peace deals with the Palestinians and a contest over the status of the West Bank and Gaza: would they continue to be military-ruled enclaves where settlers strove to bring about Jewish redemption—or would Israel cede them to the Palestinians? A change in the election law meant that for the first time, Israelis would elect their prime minister in a direct ballot and cast a second vote for the party they preferred. The new system was devised to minimize the agonizing horse trading that went on after elections, when left and right vied for the support of the ultra-Orthodox parties to form a majority coalition. It seemed to favor Peres. With his commanding lead and his incumbent status, the election was his to lose.

The winter of 1996 was colder than usual; the campaign ramped up slowly. Peres and Netanyahu both rented office space for their headquarters and hired American political consultants. Both scheduled political events around the country. Among Israelis, the feeling that this election carried particular weight seemed palpable. It even
permeated the Tel Aviv courtroom where Amir’s trial had been under way for more than a month now. Edmond Levy, who led the trial’s three-judge panel, struggled to prevent the defendant from turning every hearing into a political spectacle.

Amir seemed adept at creating chaos in his new environment. In the first weeks of the trial, two of his lawyers resigned, leaving his defense in the hands of a Texas-born immigrant who appeared to know little about Israeli law and almost no Hebrew at all. Amir took over from the lawyer at one point, questioning the witnesses himself. In prison, he somehow wheedled extra phone privileges from a guard, using the minutes to call Margalit Har-Shefi and Nili Kolman. Both women hung up on hearing his voice. When Har-Shefi’s father complained to police about the call, prison officials punished Amir and the guard.

Hagai passed the time in his cell adding entries to his diary, a yellow notepad he hid from the guards. In pages and pages of tight little handwriting, he recounted dreams, complained about the guards, and fantasized about a natural disaster striking Israel—a huge earthquake—so that he and his brother could flee prison. Hagai even expressed a modicum of regret for his actions, though not from any sense of sorrow at Rabin’s death. “Sometimes I think, did we really need all this? Why did we get involved?” he wrote on February 10. “We could have lived our lives like everyone else, without a care. I know it’s a defeatist attitude but I can’t stop thinking about it in these difficult, depressing moments.”

In another entry, Hagai admonished himself for having cooperated with his interrogators. “It turns out from the testimony that I talked too much and that I have only myself to blame for my situation. Not only that but I harmed other people, like Dror and Margalit,” he wrote. “I hate myself so much for it, for my stupid gullibility. . . . The experience shattered a myth I had about myself that I’m good at withstanding pressure. No one exerted any real pressure on me, and yet I kept talking, out of sheer stupidity and gullibility. I feel bad for the suffering it’s causing my family. I have no words. I deserve everything.”

Hagai ordered books from the prison library and kept a record of
the ones he got through. It included some classics like Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s
Crime and Punishment
and William Golding’s
Lord of the Flies
, but also the self-help bestseller
I’m OK
—
You’re OK
by Thomas A. Harris and a book on meditation. Years later, he would add the Harry Potter series to the list.