Killing a King: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel (35 page)

During the course of the day more than 3 million Israelis would vote in the election, for an official turnout of above 79 percent. Analysts would put the actual participation level at close to 90 percent, a calculation that involved discounting Israelis not present in the country on the day of the vote. Few Western countries had higher turnouts.

Israel Television broadcast the results of its commissioned exit poll a little after ten o’clock at night. Based on interviews with voters as they departed balloting stations around the county, the Channel One exit poll held a kind of hallowed status in Israel. With the exception of the 1981 debacle, it had been predicting elections accurately for more than two decades. Now, the channel’s most renowned anchor, Haim Yavin, announced that Peres held a small lead over Netanyahu—50.7 percent to 49.3 percent. But he urged caution. Until the real tallies from polling stations around the country came in through the night, the race would be too close to call.

At the Cinerama auditorium in Tel Aviv, Labor Party activists chanted and cheered. Peres remained out of sight for the time being, chastened by the experience of 1981. But his campaign managers told reporters that the exit poll seemed to support other polling conducted over the preceding week. If anything, the real numbers would look better for Peres, they said. The optimism percolated at Leah’s apartment on Rav Ashi as well, where she watched the broadcast with some twenty friends and family members.

But by one in the morning, Peres seemed to be losing his advantage, a trend that would continue throughout the night. Netanyahu, who had also kept himself secluded, appeared suddenly at the main Likud gathering in Tel Aviv to buoy his supporters. “The race is very, very close. Do not lose hope,” he said. In the morning, with all but the absentee ballots counted, Netanyahu was ahead by half a percentage point.

He had won the election.

To the Israeli peace camp, it was the second devastating blow in six months. At Rabin’s murder site, someone left a sign saying: “Rabin was killed on November 4. Peace was killed on May 29.” Among the Oslo originators, Yossi Beilin felt particularly crushed. His draft agreement with Mahmoud Abbas, which might have resolved the conflict with the Palestinians for good, was now a dead letter. Beilin showed up at Peres’s office the next day expecting to find his mentor wallowing in misery. Instead, Peres seemed less tired than he had in months and relieved that the election was finally over. His electoral defeats over the years had made him remarkably resilient. Peres was talking to his wife on the phone, asking what was for lunch. Chicken, Beilin could hear her saying. Peres told her he would be home soon.

In Herzliya, the Amirs rejoiced. Geulah and her husband had voted for Netanyahu, along with Amir himself. Hagai refrained from casting a ballot; he felt it would be wasted. But in his diary, he marveled at the results. “It’s nice to see Peres, the evil one, fall,” he wrote. “Gali saved the country.”

Epilogue

T
he eleven-hour flight from Tel Aviv to New York, over Europe and across the Atlantic, can pass like an easy night’s sleep or it can feel interminable. In the countless trips I made back and forth over the years, I had forged a strategy: book the red-eye and swallow an Ambien while the plane is still on the ground. The jostling of bags, the swapping of boarding passes between Hasidic men horrified to find they’d been seated next to women—the general chaos of the Israeli condition starts to dim even before the cabin doors close. But in the late summer of 2013, I was too agitated to sleep. I had been nervous about the security check at Ben-Gurion Airport, where vigilant young screeners specialize in detecting anxiety. If one of them decided to search my luggage, how would I explain the bloody clothes wrapped carefully in large sheets of white butcher paper and stuffed in my carry-on?

I had been living in Israel since 2010, filing dispatches to
Newsweek
, the steadily withering publication that had been my professional home for more than a decade. Sometime during the posting, I decided I would write a book about the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. The murder of the Israeli leader by a fellow Jew in 1995 had profoundly shifted the course of events in Israel. It had also left a deep impression on me. I had covered Israel during the Rabin years, reported from the peace rally where he was assassinated, and then attended every session of the murder trial. Now almost two decades later, I wanted to reconstruct
the twin narratives of Rabin’s endeavor to forge peace with Israel’s neighbors and Yigal Amir’s fanatical effort to stop him. But in one of my first interviews with Dalia Rabin, the sixty-three-year-old daughter of the slain leader, I got sidetracked. “Do you know about the hole in the front of the shirt?” she asked me at her Tel Aviv office.

I did not.

At our next meeting, Dalia produced a cardboard box and in it the clothing Rabin was wearing the night of the assassination: a white Marks & Spencer dress shirt, encrusted entirely in blood; a sleeveless undershirt, similarly stained; a dark, tailored suit jacket and pants made of heavy wool; a pair of white cotton underwear; black socks; and leather shoes. She laid out the dress shirt on the table, holding the edges with the tips of her fingers. It had been torn in several places, presumably on the operating table. First she showed me the back side, where two bullets had struck Rabin. Amir had approached the Israeli leader from behind and fired three rounds from a 9mm Beretta. The first and third bullets entered his back—one high and to the right of his spine, the other low and to the left—and lodged in his body. The second bullet missed its target and passed through the arm of Rabin’s bodyguard Yoram Rubin.

Dalia then turned the shirt over to show me a third hole in the front, on what would have been Rabin’s lower left side. It was perfectly round and a little smaller than a dime, about the size of the perforations in the back. She showed me a similar hole in the front of the undershirt. Then she laid the undershirt inside the shirt, the way the garments would have hung on her father’s five-foot-six-and-a-half-inch frame. The holes seemed to line up. In hospital records and other documents I’d reviewed relating to the assassination, there was no mention of Rabin being shot from the front, no evidence of an exit wound or other anterior injuries. Yet something had punctured the face of the garments, quite possibly while Rabin was wearing them (otherwise how to explain that the defects lined up?). The holes, Dalia said, had come to her attention ten years after the murder and had never been properly investigated. They were a mystery.

Murder cases, no matter how thoroughly investigated, almost always leave in their wake a trail of unanswered questions or just bits
of evidence that don’t add up. With political assassinations—and no one knows this better than us Americans—those loose ends tend to become the source material for theories about cover-ups and conspiracies. The main questions surrounding Rabin’s murder were broad and sweeping: how did Amir elude Israel’s esteemed intelligence and security agencies and how could the Israeli leader have been so exposed? But there were little ones as well, including discrepancies over the precise distance between the shooter and his target, and the time it took Rabin’s driver to get him to the hospital. Most vexing was the testimony of nearly a dozen witnesses who heard someone at the scene shouting that the shots fired were “not real” or “blanks.”

That odd detail in particular fueled conspiracy theories almost from the outset, mainly from the right side of the map—the political camp to which Amir belonged. In opinion polls over the years, at least one-quarter of Israelis have said they doubt the official version of the assassination. Among religious and right-wing Israelis, the number rises above 50 percent.

Dalia, of course, was no conspiracist. A lawyer by training and a former parliament member and deputy defense minister, she had spent much of her time since the killing nurturing the legacy of her late father. But she had her own questions about the night of the murder. In one of our conversations, she said she felt the whole truth about the assassination had yet to emerge. Seeing her father’s clothing for the first time deepened her suspicions. Dalia learned about the holes from members of an Israeli documentary team who had come across the garments in the national archive in Jerusalem. After conducting their own probe (and producing an inconclusive film about it), one of them told Dalia cryptically that the mystery surrounding the clothing should keep her up at night.

In fact, it did. One scenario she kept replaying in her mind involved a bodyguard whirling around to shoot Amir but hitting her father instead. She wondered whether the security service that protected him would have covered up such a blunder to avoid yet more embarrassment—going so far as to have the pathologist leave the evidence out of his report. But Dalia also worried that raising any questions publicly or trying to have them investigated would give
ammunition to the conspiracists. In a way, they had paralyzed her. Their accounts of the murder were so outlandish, she thought, and so clearly designed to exonerate Amir and the hardliners who had incited against her father that she vowed to avoid saying or doing anything that might give them momentum. In 2005, Dalia took possession of the clothes from the national archive and tucked them in a storage room at the memorial institute she ran in Tel Aviv, the Yitzhak Rabin Center, alongside her father’s other belongings. They were still there when she mentioned them to me eight years later.

In early August 2013, a few weeks after those first meetings with Dalia, I sat down at the computer in my Tel Aviv rental to write her an email. I had met with Dalia several times in the preceding months while making progress on the research for this book. By then, my own view about the bits of odd evidence had been shaped in interviews with scores of people, including members of Rabin’s security detail. “I want to be candid with you about this,” I wrote. “With all the reporting I’ve done, I feel reasonably confident that the question marks surrounding the night of the murder . . . do not point to some cover-up.

“And yet, the hole in the shirt is a mystery. Having seen it with my own eyes, I find it hard to dismiss.”

I asked in the email if I could take the clothes to the United States and have them inspected by an expert. I had spoken by then to several forensic examiners to find out whether it was possible nearly two decades after the event to determine what caused the holes in the garments, whether gunfire or something else. Crime-scene examiners who work privately often make their money by testifying on behalf of their clients. An investigative reporter I’d worked with and trusted in Washington, DC, had warned me to choose carefully—that the flaw in the profession is the vested interest examiners have in telling their clients what they want to hear.

Eventually, I got referred to Lucien Haag, a firearms specialist in Arizona whose credentials seemed unassailable. A former Phoenix police criminalist, he had been examining evidence from crime scenes for almost fifty years, including the Kennedy assassination and the FBI assault on Ruby Ridge. An article in the
Arizona Republic
described him as the Michael Jordan of his profession. On the phone, he sounded
intrigued. If something other than a bullet caused the hole, it would be difficult so many years later to determine precisely what it was. But the important thing was to test the gunshot theory—to substantiate it or rule it out. That much, he was confident he could do.

Within a few days the cardboard box with the clothing sat in the foyer of my apartment. For Dalia, my proposition held appeal. She stood to get the answer to a question that had been gnawing at her for years—without having to initiate the procedure herself. Dalia seemed unsentimental about the garments. They were musty and soiled and held memories of a terrible ordeal. When I picked up the box from her office I had the feeling she was happy to be rid of it, even for just a few weeks.

My own calculations were mostly pragmatic. If Haag could exclude gunfire as the cause of the holes, it would help discharge the conspiracy theories altogether. If, on the other hand, a bullet had caused the defects in the front of the shirt and undershirt, the entire narrative of the Rabin assassination stood to be upended. That’s the kind of information a writer wants to verify before embarking on a book—not after.

I opened the box and phoned Haag again. I wanted to know which garments he wished to inspect in addition to the shirt and undershirt and how best to pack them. The items had been strewn carelessly in the box for years, some in plastic bags, a messy heap of bloody remnants from one of the most significant events in Israel’s history. I stretched out each piece on my dining-room table, which I had covered with long sheets of white paper. A washed out yellow tag attached to the suit jacket bore the Hebrew acronym for the police department’s Criminal Identification Bureau, Mazap. The first thing Haag wanted to know was the composition of the dress shirt. A label on the inside seam listed it as 55 percent cotton, 45 percent polyester. Good news, he said. Burn traces were easier to detect on fabric that included man-made material. Then he instructed me to discard the plastic bags and wrap each garment in butcher paper. Mold tends to grow in plastic and can alter the chemistry of the evidence.

By now my flight was just two days away and I had visions of being arrested at either Ben-Gurion Airport or at John F. Kennedy in New York—or at least having to do some serious explaining. Haag said
sniffer dogs in the baggage hall at Kennedy could potentially smell the blood in my carry-on, prompting a search. Customs agents might decide that the garments were a biohazard and seize them.

Working quickly, I drafted a letter for Dalia to sign, saying the Rabin Center had allowed me to take the clothing to the United States for a forensic exam. Then I called the Department of Homeland Security’s customs bureau in New York. In an awkward exchange, I tried to explain why I needed to import the bloody clothes of a dead foreign leader. The spokesman on the other end of the line had not heard of Rabin and didn’t seem particularly interested. I began thinking it was a mistake to raise the issue at all, that I should have just taken my chances. But by the next morning, I got an email from public affairs specialist Anthony Bucci: “Customs & Border Protection at JFK is aware of your arrival and you will be expedited. There will be no issues with the clothing.”