Killing a King: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel (34 page)

Yigal Amir’s trial did keep Rabin in the public consciousness for part of the race. The hearings continued through the winter, and though judges barred journalists from broadcasting the proceedings, Israelis followed them closely. When the panel delivered its verdict and sentence on March 27, 1996, several hundred people showed up, packing the small Tel Aviv courtroom and fanning out into the hallway. Eitan Haber, who had left his government job soon after the assassination, sat near the front.

Amir had spent the preceding months arguing that he had not actually intended to kill Rabin but only paralyze him. As evidence,
he cited the fact that he had aimed for Rabin’s back and not his head. Now, in his final remarks, he called the proceeding a “show trial” and complained that he had been denied his right to explain his motives fully. “This is not a regular murder trial, but a trial about the existential problem of the State of Israel, the contradiction between a Jewish state and a democratic state,” he said. “This subject was not dealt with at all.”

Israeli law allows for capital punishment only in rare circumstances, including genocide and treason. In this case, the judges sentenced Amir to life in prison for the murder plus six additional years for wounding Yoram Rubin, the bodyguard. Haber, who had vowed after the assassination to stalk the Amir family for the rest of his life, felt no real sense of satisfaction. “I very much hope that before this scum of the earth rots away in jail, he will get to see that the murder has achieved precisely the opposite of what he had intended,” he told reporters outside the courtroom. “For Yitzhak Rabin, peace will avenge his blood.”

In his prison cell, Hagai wondered whether his brother would ever be freed. Israel’s president routinely commuted life terms to twenty- or thirty-year sentences, but he doubted Amir would get a reduction. Hagai comforted himself with the thought that the messiah would appear soon—or that Israel would be struck by some devastating force. “I’ll be surprised if the country continues existing for more than a decade,” he wrote in his diary.

The day after judges announced the verdict, the Shamgar Commission issued its findings. By now the media had examined the lapses at the murder scene so thoroughly—through interviews with witnesses and an analysis of the Kempler video—that the panel had little new to say. Not surprisingly, it faulted Shabak for the failures that allowed the assassination to happen and singled out officers from the protection unit. Carmi Gillon bore overall responsibility as head of the agency, it concluded.

In a secret annex (parts of which the government would eventually declassify), the report criticized Shabak’s handling of Avishai Raviv, but once again said nothing particularly illuminating in its conclusions. “Every reasonable person understands that gathering information
is vital and that the people involved in the endeavor are not necessarily righteous and honest. But the agency needs to guard against provocateurs who would take advantage of the backing they get and initiate illegal activities,” the report said. “The conclusion is that the agency must wield effective control over the agent and prevent misconduct.”

Oddly, the panel said it had failed to determine who shouted “It’s not real” at the murder scene. Though one of the Shabak bodyguards had confessed to Chief Superintendent Gamliel that the words came from his mouth, his witness statement was somehow left out of the murder file reviewed by the Shamgar commission. The fact that Gamliel had solved the mystery would remain unknown until 2009, when he disclosed the testimony to an Israeli television news program. Even then, fourteen years after the assassination, he refused to name the Shabak man.

Other legal proceedings related to the assassination would continue for years to come, including a separate conspiracy trial for Amir, Hagai, and Adani, as well as several appeals. Judges would sentence Hagai to a total of sixteen years in prison and Adani to seven years. But Amir’s murder trial had been the main event and once it ended, interest dropped off. Margalit Har-Shefi’s legal ordeal would wind on till 2001. She would eventually serve six months of a twenty-four-month sentence, express “sincere regret” over the murder, and have the rest of her jail time commuted.

In April, seven weeks before the election, Peres faced one more complication, this one on Israel’s northern border. A partial truce the United States had mediated between Israel and the Islamic Hezbollah group in Lebanon three years earlier seemed to be disintegrating. The group had fired Katyusha rockets at Israel several times in the span of a few days, forcing thousands of Israelis to take cover in bomb shelters. For Netanyahu, it was yet another opportunity to call into question Peres’s handling of the country’s security. Israeli analysts attributed the escalation to Syria, which wielded a certain amount of influence over Hezbollah. The way Itamar Rabinovich saw it, Assad wanted to remind Peres that Syria could still inflict pain on Israel through its Lebanese proxy.

On April 11, Peres ordered a broad assault against the group, with
air strikes across Lebanon. The prime minister hoped with the operation to reprise the earlier understandings Israel maintained with the group—essentially that neither side would target civilians. He also thought he might recoup some of the public confidence he’d lost with the Hamas suicide attacks. But as Operation Grapes of Wrath wound on, the images of Lebanese families streaming north by the thousands made Israel’s Arab population decidedly uncomfortable. With Israelis now electing their prime minister directly, the nearly 1 million Arab-Israelis would play a decisive role on Election Day. Peres expected to get at least 80 percent of their votes.

A week into the offensive, tragedy struck. An Israeli Special Forces unit combing southern Lebanon for rocket launchers came under heavy fire from a Hezbollah team. The unit’s company commander, a twenty-four-year-old officer named Naftali Bennett, used his field radio to order an artillery strike. But instead of hitting the Hezbollah men, the 155mm shells he summoned struck a UN position near the village of Qana, where some eight hundred civilians had taken refuge. The bombardment went on for seventeen minutes, killed more than a hundred people, and dealt Peres yet another setback. To most Israelis, it seemed like a tragic mishap, the kind of botched targeting that sometimes occurs in wars. But many Arab-Israelis thought of it as something worse—if not a deliberate massacre, at least an example of Israel’s disregard for the lives of civilians on the other side of the border. When the operation ended after sixteen days, prominent Arab-Israelis called on members of their community—fully 18 percent of the population—to sit out the election.

For the first time since the start of the campaign, Peres felt a deep despair. He still led in opinion polls but every decision he made seemed to somehow work against him. Peres also suffered from fatigue. “These were sleepless nights, all the time telephone calls during the night,” he would recount years later. “I think of myself as a strong man physically but there are limits.”

Peres had been accustomed to hard-fought elections, but the stakes in this one felt particularly high, perhaps higher than at any time in Israel’s history. If Netanyahu won, the Likud leader would do his utmost to roll back the agreements with the Palestinians and tighten
Israel’s hold over the West Bank and Gaza. Rightists viewed it as even more decisive. Peres would use his mandate to cede more God-given land and end the redemptive dream of Greater Israel.

Yigal Amir had done his part to tip the balance in the right’s favor by killing the one man who had both a vision for peace with the Palestinians and the public confidence required to keep it going, even in the face of terrorist attacks. Now, with characteristic pomposity, he thought of another contribution he could make: persuade religious Jews abroad to move to Israel in the weeks before the vote so that they could invoke their right to immediate citizenship, cast their ballots, and help defeat Peres. As the date of the election drew near, Amir crafted a letter in English to family friends in the United States. “Dear Rachel’s Children in the Diaspora,” he wrote.

Yigal Amir writing you from the prison in a desperate attempt to save the “holy land” from the sons of Israel. The holy land belongs not only to its inhabitants but to every Jewish soul around the world in our days and all generations which past and [which are] going to come. Therefore, this government has no right to give up our claim on the holy land, which has been promised to us by God itself three thousand five hundred years ago. . . .

The Jews in Israel have lost their spirit, they have lost their belief, the love to the land. The Arabs inherited these values. That’s why they succeeded to get the land. Now the Arabs kiss the earth when they return and it seems as if they are the sons of Israel who came back. The Jews are not sacrificing for their beliefs, only the Arabs.

We still have hope. The majority of the Jews in Israel, the moral people, still have the faith. Our problem is that this minority . . . who prefer the culture of emptiness, they control all the powerful posts in the state and mainly the media. The majority has had no way to express protest in the past three years. The government . . . turned it into materialistic and the media washed its brain until we came to the situation that people abroad know better than us what is really happening in Israel. . . . People are afraid to talk against the peace process. I get a lot of letters with no name and people write me that they are afraid to talk and support me. It’s not a democracy any more.

Our last chance is this election and if the Labor party wins again, this is the end of Judaism and you are also responsible. The only hope is for you to come here and vote and repair the damage that has already been done. We are in the Great Days but the people are tired. Please save us from ourselves.

He signed it simply, Yigal Amir.

The last weeks of the election brought new promises from the candidates, both of whom now targeted swing voters. Peres vowed to submit any peace agreement with Israel’s neighbors to a referendum before signing it. Netanyahu acknowledged that Israel could not renege on the parts of Oslo already implemented; he would not try to reoccupy Gaza or send troops back to the West Bank cities now under Palestinian control.

On May 27, two days before the vote, Peres and Netanyahu met at a television studio in Tel Aviv for the taping of a thirty-minute debate moderated by the journalist Dan Margalit. The two men had agreed to the event earlier in the campaign and as the date drew near, some members of Peres’s staff felt he should back out. Netanyahu, twenty-six years younger than his opponent, simply looked better on camera. He had spent years in Washington and New York mastering the art of the television interview, delivering minute-long responses that sounded both eloquent and unassailable, albeit in English. At least one member of Peres’s campaign conjured the American presidential debate of 1960—the first one ever televised—which propelled the younger, better-looking John F. Kennedy to an election victory over Richard Nixon. But Peres ruled out the suggestion that he should cancel his appearance.

Though Peres could be inspiringly eloquent himself on good days, he had spent the last months filling two extremely demanding positions (serving as both prime minister and defense minister), coping with suicide attacks and a war in Lebanon, and watching his double-digit lead in opinion polls shrink to almost nothing. From his opening remarks through the last minutes of the debate, when each candidate posed a question to the other, he seemed irritable and defensive. He referred to Rabin only once, some two-thirds into the debate. Somehow
, the event that had consumed Israelis just two hundred days earlier, that had triggered the chain of events that led to the election—the Rabin assassination—never came up.

Netanyahu, by contrast, gave a polished and disciplined performance. He began nearly every response with the words, “I’ll answer that, but first . . .” and then delivered a short but effective retort to whatever point Peres just made. He attacked Peres relentlessly over the suicide bombings and the security anxieties they had created for Israelis. In less than fifteen minutes of actual airtime, Netanyahu invoked the word “fear” more than a dozen times.

When the taping was over, Netanyahu stepped into an elevator and spotted Uzi Baram, the tourism minister he’d had the exchange with in December about his election chances. So, who won the debate? Netanyahu wanted to know. Baram conceded that Peres had not done well. “You did, but you’re still going to lose the election,” he said. In the edit room, Margalit, the moderator, watched the tape several times and drew the same conclusion: Peres had lost badly. Israel’s Channel Two television aired the debate that evening. An opinion poll conducted after the broadcast showed Peres’s lead dropping to three points. With the margin of error at 3 percent, the candidates were in a dead heat.

On Election Day, Peres woke up early and voted in his neighborhood polling station before heading to the Defense Ministry. Though Tel Aviv’s oppressive humidity had made a pre-summer appearance earlier in the week, a slight chill hung in the air. Leah Rabin stopped by the same polling station later in the morning. It occurred to her that she had never voted without her husband at her side—at least as far back as she could recall. Netanyahu cast his ballot in Jerusalem before setting out to visit activists in several cities around the country. In Kiryat Malachi he sat with a prominent rabbi of the Hasidic Chabad movement, which had organized a last-minute billboard campaign with the slogan “Bibi Is Good for the Jews.” In a country where non-Jews made up nearly one-fifth of the population, it was an almost gleefully divisive campaign.

Israel’s election law allowed convicts to vote at polling stations in prison. Around midmorning, five guards escorted Amir from his cell
to a booth at the Ohalei Kedar penitentiary, where he was presently serving his sentence in solitary confinement. The guards waited while he stuffed a square of paper with Netanyahu’s name on it into an envelope and then slipped it into a cardboard box. Thomas L. Friedman, the
New York Times
columnist, would refer to Amir later as the Israeli who voted twice—first with a bullet and then with a ballot.