Killing a King: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel (33 page)

In mid-February, the traditional Muslim forty-day mourning period for Yahya Ayyash came to an end. Shabak had assumed that if Hamas had the capacity to avenge his death, it would do so immediately following the interlude, as it had in the aftermath of the Goldstein massacre two years earlier. So as the days passed and the group remained passive, Peres felt a wave of relief. Though his campaign was off to a strong start, he had squandered large leads in three previous elections. Winning in polls but losing elections had come to be known as the Peres curse. Carmi Gillon, now in his final days as head of Shabak, shared the sense of relief. On February 22, he briefed his successor, the former navy chief Ami Ayalon, took part in a hand-over ceremony in Tel Aviv, and cleared out his office.

A day later, Ayalon convened the agency’s top officers and announced that, starting Sunday, he would be reviewing all of Shabak’s old policies and directives. The Rabin assassination had brought about a general collapse of the agency, he said. It needed to be rebuilt. Ayalon spent the weekend at his home in the Carmel Mountains near Haifa and told his driver to pick him up at six on Sunday morning for an early start. But the agency review would be overtaken by something else altogether.

On his way in to work, just before seven a.m., a radio news announcer broadcast the first details of what seemed like a suicide attack on a bus in Jerusalem. From the backseat of his agency car, Ayalon asked the driver to turn up the volume. Bus number 18, which ferries residents from the southern neighborhoods of the city to the busiest part of downtown and then on to the central bus station, blew up toward the end of its route. The damage to the bus and the buildings surrounding it looked to be extensive, according to a reporter on the scene. Ayalon could hear the wailing of ambulances through the radio. The casualty toll would likely be high.

Nahum Barnea, the
Yedioth Ahronoth
columnist, heard the radio report as well. At his home in Jerusalem, he put on a striped dress shirt and a black leather jacket and rushed to the scene. Barnea’s son, Yonatan, a twenty-year-old soldier in an intelligence unit, rode the 18 line to his base on Sunday mornings. Barnea wondered whether Yonatan had been on the bus—whether he would be reporting on his own son’s death.

At the scene, Barnea opened his notebook and wrote the date at the top of an empty page: February 25. Around him, body parts lay strewn on the street, alongside glass and twisted metal. The blast had reduced the bus to a burned-out shell. But before he launched into his reporting routine, Barnea received a message from his editor in Tel Aviv, Eitan Amit, instructing him to leave the area and report to the newspaper’s Jerusalem office at once. Amit had learned that Yonatan Barnea had indeed been on the bus and had died in the blast—along with twenty-five other passengers. He worried that his reporter would learn of his son’s death in the most horrific of ways: by seeing his body, or perhaps fragments of it, on the street.

When Barnea reached the bureau, Amit spoke to him by phone from Tel Aviv. “I’m sorry to have to convey the worst possible news. . . . Your son is among the dead,” he told him. Barnea had covered or written about nearly every one of the suicide attacks in the preceding two years. He had coined the term “victims of peace” to convey the irony of a peace process that had caused a surge rather than an ebb in violence. Now he held the phone to his ear and tried to understand the words. When a cabinet member paid a condolence call later in the day, Barnea confided that Yonatan had been a Peres supporter. “You lost a vote,” he said. Then he added: “You probably lost a lot of votes today.”

Within days, Shabak pieced together a chronicle of the attack. Soon after the strike on Ayyash, a Hamas operative had slipped out of Gaza and crossed to the West Bank to plot the group’s revenge. He assigned the Jerusalem bombing to a cell in Al Fawar, near Hebron. Members of the cell, the agency learned, were now hiding out in Ramallah, one of the cities that had come under Palestinian control months earlier. A
second suicide bomber they had sent to Ashkelon blew himself up at a junction an hour after the Jerusalem attack but managed to kill just one person other than himself.

Ayalon now faced a dilemma. Arresting the cell would require Israeli forces to enter a Palestinian-run city, which the Oslo II agreement expressly forbade. But waiting until the Hamas men returned to Al Fawar, a town still under Israeli security control, would mean putting off interrogations that might produce time-sensitive information. What if the cell had already set a third attack in motion? After consulting Shabak’s top officers, he chose to wait.

It would prove to be the wrong decision. On Sunday morning, exactly a week after the Jerusalem bombing, the cell struck again—on the same bus line. This time, the assailant killed fewer people, nineteen, perhaps because some regular passengers had decided to avoid public transportation altogether. But the psychological impact of the third suicide attack in a week was devastating. Israelis who had withstood wars and sieges now talked about staying away from buses and public events. The government had sealed off the West Bank and Gaza, and yet Hamas continued its campaign. Its attacks seemed unpreventable.

Peres, who had been at his apartment in Tel Aviv when the second bus exploded, set out to see the horror for himself. Years later, he would recall it as a traumatic experience. As he entered Jerusalem, some ninety minutes after the bombing, a heavy rain began to fall. “There were thousands of people around. The bodies of the dead were still there and the blood covered the whole square. . . . As I came in, they all started to shout, ‘Murderer, look what he did to us.’ What could I say to them?” Peres left without addressing the crowd.

But Hamas was not done yet.

The day after the second Jerusalem attack, a suicide bomber tried to enter Dizengoff Center, Tel Aviv’s largest mall. When a policeman turned him away, the assailant walked into an adjacent intersection and detonated the forty-four-pound nail bomb he had strapped to himself, killing thirteen people. The afternoon crowd outside the mall included many children in costumes—Israelis would be celebrating Purim that evening. Five teenagers were among the dead.

For the first time, Ayalon comprehended the encumbrance he’d taken on in agreeing to lead Shabak. Fifty-nine Israelis had died in his first ten days on the job. He now recommended to Peres that the army impose a cordon around the West Bank’s main cities. Palestinians would not only be barred from entering Israel, they would also be unable to travel from one part of the West Bank to another. Outside the Defense Ministry, where Ayalon briefed cabinet members, a few hundred protesters burned torches and shouted angry slogans—mostly directed at Arabs but also at Peres.

That evening, Barnea’s editor called to ask if he would write a column for the next day’s paper. The mourning period at his home had ended just a day earlier and the idea of resuming his work routine so soon seemed jolting. But Barnea could not bring himself to say no. He pondered whether to write something personal, to tie in the country’s sudden turn with his own tragedy. But Barnea had the instincts of an analyst, not a memoirist. Instead, he wrote that Peres stood to lose the election if he could not stem the violence. “The man who was the central figure in Oslo sees the process withering with every strike by a Hamas bomber.” The polls seemed to bear it out. In just a week, Netanyahu had closed most of the gap between himself and the prime minister.

In the days that followed, Peres spoke to Arafat several times by phone, demanding that he crack down on Hamas. The Palestinian leader rounded up several hundred members of the group and confiscated some weapons. In a conversation with reporters, his remarks suddenly sounded like those of Israeli officials. “We have to . . . destroy their infrastructure and to uproot terrorism,” Arafat said. To Peres, it seemed that Arafat had finally understood how destructive Hamas could be to the process.

But the emotional tide in Israel had already shifted—from grief over Rabin’s assassination to anger at Palestinian violence. For months, the country’s most ubiquitous bumper sticker had been
shalom haver
, the line from Clinton’s remarks after Rabin’s death meaning “Goodbye, friend.” Now someone coined a variation in plural that summed up the new sentiment:
shalom haverim
, “Goodbye, friends”—a reference to the scores who had died in the Hamas attacks.

Clinton followed the transformation in Israel with a sense of foreboding. In early March 1996, he organized a “summit of peacemakers” that would focus on ways to combat terrorism in Israel and the region. In reality, it was an effort by the American president to stem Peres’s political free fall. The event at Egypt’s resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh had all the trappings of the Oslo-era ceremonies, including lofty speeches and camera-friendly interactions between Arab and Israeli leaders. In his address, Peres framed the Hamas attacks as the last thrust of a waning nihilism in the Middle East. “Our region is going through a period of transition. The dark days are at an end. The shadows of its past are lengthening.”

But Israelis had grown tired of peace conferences. And it wasn’t at all clear whether the extremists, Arabs or Israelis, were declining or ascending.

TOWARD THE END
of March, the election campaign intensified. Pictures of the two candidates, the seventy-two-year-old Peres and the forty-six-year-old Netanyahu, suddenly appeared on billboards and banners across the country, most framed in the blue and white of Israel’s flag. In the West Bank and Gaza the combination of Israel’s cordons and Arafat’s clampdown seemed to be working. With Hamas neutralized, the prime minister maintained a small but consistent lead over Netanyahu in opinion polls, usually of 5 or 6 points.

Peres had hired two outside advisers, the Israeli advertising man Moshe Teumim and the American Democratic Party consultant Douglas Schoen. Two senior members of Labor, Ehud Barak and Haim Ramon, led the campaign’s strategy team. But for all the experience and talent in the room, the operation suffered from a constant drone of chaos and indecision.

Schoen had first worked in Israel during the 1981 campaign, representing Peres’s adversary, Menachem Begin. His impression of Peres from that earlier time stuck with him. Peres seemed smart and visionary, but he lacked Begin’s scrappy resourcefulness, a vital ingredient
for winning elections. He also suffered from image problems. Though Peres had been a founding father who had worked with David Ben-Gurion, many Israelis viewed him less as a statesman and more as a politician, a shifty and manipulative one. Peres had led Begin in opinion surveys throughout the ’81 campaign. When voting ended, Israeli Television announced Peres the victor on the basis of exit polls. But by morning, Begin had surged ahead, winning by a small margin.

Schoen had actually been hired by Rabin back in November, a full year before he would stand for reelection. The American consultant prepared his first poll for Rabin on Friday, November 3, and intended to issue it after the weekend. The assassination sent him back to the United States. When he returned to Israel in February to work for Peres, the candidate struck him as wildly overconfident. “He simply couldn’t fathom the idea that he might lose—particularly to someone as radical and polarizing as Benjamin Netanyahu,” Schoen would recall. Schoen suggested targeting specific groups with discrete campaigns, starting with women and Russian immigrants. But Peres brushed him off: “Doug, we don’t really do that here.”

Oddly, Peres seemed uninterested in going after Netanyahu directly. In part it was his notion that even criticism would somehow legitimize Netanyahu as a candidate. Peres had a real track record, a vision for the country’s future, and a huge lead in opinion polls. He outmatched his opponent so dramatically, it was better to ignore him, he thought.

The two men also had a history that appeared to soften Peres’s attitude toward Netanyahu. Peres had served as defense minister when Israel staged the Entebbe rescue in 1976, the operation that took the life of Netanyahu’s older brother, Yonatan. He seemed to retain latent guilt over it; in effect, he had sent Yonatan, the commander of Sayeret Matkal and the pride of the Netanyahu family, to his death. While Peres could summon real malice for other adversaries, he seemed mostly indifferent toward Benjamin Netanyahu.

After the bombings Schoen pushed Peres to begin using Rabin’s assassination to his advantage. The issue prompted raucous debates among members of the campaign staff: how to invoke the murder without sounding manipulative. It also revealed to Schoen the candidate’s
obsessions and how they were sabotaging his own race: his rivalry with Rabin and his determination to win the election on the merits of his own achievements. Somehow, the strategists ended up leaving Rabin out of the campaign much of the time and spurning Leah, who had offered to make appearances around the country. “In retrospect, I feel I should have perhaps insisted, but I was so reluctant to push myself and so sure they were going to succeed anyway,” she would write in her memoir.

The campaign also suffered from internal strife. Peres suspected that Barak would eventually challenge him for leadership of the party. Barak, in turn, saw Ramon as his adversary in Labor’s future succession battle. As long as Peres enjoyed a substantial lead over Netanyahu, the rivalries remained submerged. But his sudden decline infused the campaign with an air of hostility and dysfunction.

Netanyahu, by contrast, managed to squelch Likud’s infighting and utilize every advantage he could possibly muster against Peres—starting with the suicide attacks. His American consultant, the Republican Party strategist Arthur Finkelstein, had a record of keeping his candidates on message. With his Israeli client, the message sought to exploit the increasing vulnerability Israelis were feeling. Netanyahu, the terrorism expert and former commando, would restore Israel’s security, while Peres would divide Jerusalem. Peres had balked at using footage of Netanyahu at rowdy right-wing protests and drawing a connection to the Rabin assassination. Instead, burned-out buses—the ones attacked by Hamas suicide bombers—became the defining image of the campaign.