Killing a King: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel (36 page)

The next day, I was on the plane with the clothes in the carry-on. The trace evidence from an Israeli tragedy would now make its way to a town in Arizona with a name that seemed to mock the entire endeavor: Carefree. Population 3,418.

ON THE NIGHT
of the assassination, eighteen years earlier, I left my Tel Aviv apartment around seven p.m. and walked a few blocks to Kings of Israel Square. At the foot of the stage where Rabin and the other politicians and entertainers had started to gather, I showed my press badge, passed through a metal detector, and conducted a few interviews. Then I walked the length of the plaza, the size of several football fields, talking to people in the crowd.

By news standards, it was not a particularly significant event: a rally of Israeli peaceniks expressing support for their government’s contentious agreements with the Palestinians. But the huge turnout—more than 100,000 people showed up—seemed to challenge the notion that Rabin’s support was ebbing. In the arithmetic of the newswire—I was working for Reuters at the time—the event warranted a story of a few
hundred words. At around nine thirty p.m., I phoned my editor to say I was leaving the area and would file from my apartment.

A few blocks away, the small black pager on my belt bleeped and vibrated with a message from the newsroom: Shots fired near Rabin, head back now. In the time it took me to race to the parking lot behind the square, I had just one thought: Did I leave the area prematurely, and would it cost me my first real job in journalism? At the scene of the shooting, several stunned witnesses told me they thought the prime minister had been hit. Using a bulky, work-issued Motorola cell phone we’d aptly named “the brick,” I called the details into the newsroom. Then I sprinted to Ichilov Hospital, a half mile from the square, getting there in time for the announcement of Rabin’s death.

For days after that, every interaction with Israelis, every outing, felt surreal. My newsroom rented a scooter from a local shop so that I could get through the traffic and cover the funeral and later the murder trial. Policemen had begun closing off main roads whenever Rabin’s successor, Shimon Peres, moved around. They also put up roadblocks from the airport to Jerusalem to allow the stream of foreign leaders who arrived for the funeral to get around quickly and safely. The resulting gridlock added to the sense that all of Israel had been brought to a gloomy, eerie standstill, that nothing in the country was normal.

The murder had easily been the biggest story I’d covered. It was also the most depressing. Rabin’s peace deals with the Palestinians had plenty of flaws and had triggered bursts of violence. Israeli fatalities from Palestinian attacks nearly doubled in the two years that followed the Oslo Accord compared to the two years that preceded it. But the agreements seemed to shift some big, important things to the inevitable column: a territorial bargain, a Palestinian homeland (even if Rabin never embraced it explicitly), and a veering away from the messianic drift that the 1967 war had set off in Israel. By deciding Israelis would no longer rule over Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, Rabin had struck a blow for the pragmatists over the ideologues. Through the barrel of Amir’s Beretta, the ideologues had struck back.

And yet, the murder did not feel like the end. In the time that I had covered Israel and, later, followed events there from afar, I remained
convinced that Israelis and Palestinians would eventually reach a workable agreement. No conflict could sustain itself forever, I told myself with characteristic optimism (and how better to define an optimist than someone who thinks the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can be resolved?). Even in the bloodiest phase of the past two decades, during the years of the second intifada, I believed that the broad trend lines pointed toward conciliation.

In early 2010, after I’d been away from Israel for years,
Newsweek
sent me back to the region to serve as the Jerusalem bureau chief. It didn’t take long for my assessment to shift. The country I returned to was in many ways a more livable place. It felt safer, more prosperous, and less troubled than it had in years. But the terrible violence and hostility of the second intifada had left even the moderates among Israelis and Palestinians feeling alienated from each other and simply fed up. The fact that life in Israel was good despite the absence of peace meant there was little incentive to revive the process.

In the first story I published during the new posting, I wrote that the diplomatic arithmetic had changed. Many Israelis felt they had nothing to gain from a resumption of negotiations. And since a peace process would almost surely revive the suicide bombings and political instability, they had plenty to lose. “A combination of factors in recent years—an improved security situation, a feeling that acceptance by Arabs no longer matters much, and a growing disaffection from politics generally—have for many Israelis called into question the basic calculus that has driven the peace process. Instead of pining for peace, they’re now asking: who needs it?”

This analysis helped explain why Israelis had elected Netanyahu, the hardliner, months earlier. There were other factors as well. The Israeli settlement movement, which had viewed Rabin’s Oslo Accord as an act of treachery, had more than doubled in size since his assassination and greatly expanded its political power. Its representatives in parliament would come to include Moshe Feiglin, who had been convicted of sedition for organizing rowdy protests during the Rabin era. The parliament I was now covering in Israel also included a record number of Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Jews—who form the country’s two fastest-growing communities and whose views on
the issues of war and peace are consistently hawkish. When Israelis reelected Netanyahu in 2013—for a third time in eighteen years—I wrote in
Newsweek
that the religious and right-wing parties opposed to ceding substantial portions of the West Bank might have something akin to a permanent majority. Even if they lost a vote, history seemed to be foreclosing on the possibility of a negotiated peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians.

It was around this time that I made up my mind to write a book about the Rabin era. If the prospects of a peace agreement had shrunk to almost nothing in the intervening years, the assassination felt even more significant in retrospect. Had he lived, Rabin might plausibly have reshaped Israel broadly and permanently. In killing the Israeli leader, Amir had done better than the assassins of Lincoln, Kennedy, and King, whose policies had gained momentum as a result of their murders. During the years of his imprisonment, he had the satisfaction of watching Rabin’s legacy steadily evaporate.

That was what I told Dalia Rabin at our first meeting. And how I’d come to possess her dead father’s clothes.

CAREFREE LIES ABOUT
forty minutes north of the Phoenix airport, a desert town with adobe houses, huge boulder formations, and cactus plants almost everywhere you look. In the 1970s and ’80s, it housed a film studio where some Hollywood hits were made, including one with Bob Hope. Now lined with golf courses and gated neighborhoods, the town has the feel of a Florida retirement community transplanted to the gold-tinted landscape of the Old West. Apparently it’s marketed that way. A real-estate website I happened on listed Carefree’s motto as “the Home of Cowboys and Caviar.” On one of the nights I was there, I watched an hour of live bull riding at the Buffalo Chip Saloon, then dined at a fancy French restaurant.

In the desert heat people start their day early, so by six thirty I was already pulling into the Good Egg, a diner I spotted on the way to Haag’s home. I had kept the carry-on close to me during two days of
travel, imagining the awful prospect of having to tell Dalia I'd lost the clothes or let them get stolen. Now I wheeled it across the parking lot, lifted it into the booth, and ordered coffee and the morning special: peach cobbler pancakes. The dish seemed somehow in step with the broader juxtapositional weirdness. If Rabin’s bloody clothes had any business in Carefree, the person who brought them there should obviously be eating peach cobbler pancakes. When they arrived, I tucked the suitcase under the table and out of sight.

Haag lives on the eastern ridge of Carefree, just in front of a huge nature reserve with high cliffs and dry riverbeds. When he’s working on a case, he’ll sometimes drive his SUV to a spot in the reserve and re-create the conditions of a certain shooting incident to deduce precisely what happened. He also has an indoor shooting range in his home with its own ventilation system. He moved to the area in 1965, after graduating from UC Berkeley, to take up a job at the crime lab of the Phoenix Police Department. Until his arrival, the lab had just one employee. Now it occupies a five-story building and employs 150 people, including one of Haag’s two sons. Both young men followed their father into the profession.

We started the morning going over documents in Haag’s backyard, where he warned me to watch for javalinas, a kind of wild pig that can show up unannounced. The folder I’d amassed included photos from just before and just after the shooting, police lab reports, and hospital documents detailing Rabin’s wounds. After scrolling through several files, the sun was so bright that I could no longer see the screen of my laptop. We moved inside, reviewed the remaining documents, and then moved again, this time to his laboratory.

The room, sandwiched between the den and the living room, resembled a high school science class, with microscopes and beakers laid out on several large countertops and books stacked on shelves. It also contained objects not ordinarily found in a classroom—namely guns. Haag is a collector and he displays some of his firearms on a high shelf in the lab, including a Russian bolt-action rifle used in both world wars. He bought it in the Soviet Union during a visit in the ’80s and has fired it about fifty times but says it bruises the shoulder in a way that, now in his early seventies, he no longer wishes to endure.
Two other rifles on the shelf looked like AK-47s but he corrected me and said they were AK clones—the kind that shoot only in semiautomatic mode, not in rapid fire.

Haag unzipped the suitcase, pulled out the box with the clothes, and placed it on one of the counters. He inspected the jacket first, noticed that the lower bullet hole had caused some tearing of the fabric, and said Amir was probably closer in when he fired that shot, almost at contact point. Then he unwrapped the shirt and, after inspecting the two punctures on the back, he turned it over and found the mystery hole. “Whoa, I’m really surprised,” he let out, more expressively than anything else he’d said so far. But he quickly recovered his scientist timbre and issued a qualification. “Whoa doesn’t mean ‘Oh my God it’s a bullet hole.’ Whoa just means that’s a very clean, sharply defined hole. . . . You certainly brought something different and very interesting.”

Gunshot analysis involves mostly geometry and chemistry—figuring out pathways the bullets travel and testing for residue they leave behind. At one point during the morning Haag took a call from a lawyer and, when he returned, explained how geometry was going to sink his case. The lawyer represented a policeman who shot a young man dead and was being sued for damages. He hired Haag to help prove the policeman’s version of events—that the man had been lunging at him when the officer discharged his gun. But the facts Haag gathered suggested the opposite: the man was actually backing away. Two findings led him to this conclusion. The bullet carved a straight tunnel through the midsection of the victim’s body, a line that ran perpendicular to his spine. After exiting his back, it hit the wall behind him just a few inches up from the floor. “It’s a straight path through the body and everyone agrees they were standing, facing each other,” Haag explains. “So think about it. If a bullet goes through me as a standing victim and hits the wall low, I had to be leaning away to accommodate that.”

With Rabin’s shirt, determining whether a bullet had caused the hole was mainly a matter of chemistry. Most modern bullets have a lead core and a copper coating. They tend to leave traces of one or both elements on the clothes they penetrate, especially on man-made
fibers. There’s also lead in the propellant—the powder that sits in the case of the cartridge and ignites in the process of gunfire. When a bullet is discharged, lead vapors burst out of the barrel and can cling to fabric at close range, creating a ring of soot around the bullet hole. So Haag would be looking for three things—copper, lead, and soot. The traces of each tend to stick around for decades.

If any of the test results were positive, Haag said he would run other tests to determine the bullet type. Amir fired hollow points made by Winchester, bullets with rounded, carved-out tips instead of sharp, pointy ones. The Winchester hollow point—Silvertip is the brand name—has a nickel patina that makes it shiny and leaves a distinctive residue. But if a bullet had indeed hit Rabin from the front, it was unlikely to have come from Amir’s gun. So the next step, should we get that far, would involve contemplating some unsettling scenarios—including the possibility that a second gunman may have shot the Israeli leader.

While Haag prepared the shirt for the first test, I described to him the conspiracy theories that had surrounded the murder and the way they had gained traction among significant numbers of Israelis, especially on the right side of the political map. One theory posited that rogue elements within the security establishment killed Rabin, using Amir as their patsy. Another laid the blame at the feet of Shimon Peres, Rabin’s deputy and longtime rival within the Labor Party. The account that proved to be the most resilient put Rabin himself at the center of the plot, alleging that he helped stage his own shooting in order to raise his sagging approval rating—and died in some unintended twist.

Haag has honed a kind of doubt-but-verify approach to conspiracy theories, a paraphrase of Reagan’s attitude toward the Soviet Union’s disarmament in the 1980s. For an episode of the television series
NOVA
, Haag spent long hours reviewing the evidence of the Kennedy assassination and carrying out his own test fires. He said investigators tend to make more mistakes in high-profile cases than in just regular ones because “everyone is rushing around trying to do something.” The Kennedy case was no exception. But none of the forensic or ballistic evidence he examined made him doubt the
conventional narrative: that a lone gunman, not exceedingly smart, hatched a relatively crude plan to assassinate the most guarded man in the country and succeeded. “There’s a natural inclination to want it to be more than that,” he said. “It’s got to take more than just one lone loser with a thirteen-dollar rifle to kill the president.”