Killing a King: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel (37 page)

The Rabin assassination inspired similar incredulity. It had to take more than just one religious extremist, waiting in a parking lot for forty minutes with nothing but a handgun, to kill the prime minister. But the conspiracy theories that followed also served a political purpose. For members of the right wing, who took part in depicting Rabin as a traitor and a murderer for his peace deals with the Palestinians, the alternative narratives helped deflect a collective responsibility that many in the country felt they bore. If a right-wing zealot had indeed killed the Israeli leader, the right’s incitement against Rabin might well have influenced him and contributed to the murder. But if a darker and more sinister plot lay behind the assassination—perhaps one orchestrated by Rabin himself or by the security agency sworn to protect him—their complicity would be washed away.

The conspiracy theories in the Rabin assassination have never stood up to any serious scrutiny. They endure in part thanks to those loose ends, including the testimony of witnesses at the murder scene who heard someone yell out, “It’s not real” (or something similar) moments after the shooting. To the conspiracists, the odd detail suggested that the assassination was staged. But in one of the interviews I conducted, the former police officer who helped lead the murder investigation offered a somewhat more sober explanation—a complicated one, but the only one I’ve heard that actually tallies with the rest of the facts in the case. Dramatic events make people say or do odd things. Sometimes those things point to hidden information and help investigators uncover the real circumstances of a crime. But—and this is the part that’s hard to accept in high-profile crimes—often they point nowhere, and mean nothing.

And still, there was the shirt. Haag folded it into the butcher paper, carried it across the house, and took it onto his back patio. He stretched it out on a table under the glaring midday sun and took pictures of the area of the hole using an infrared camera. With ultra-violet
light streaming from the sun’s rays, anything black would show up as white through the lens of the camera. If there were soot around the hole, embedded in the bloodstained fabric, he would see it in the viewfinder.

Haag stepped up onto a footstool and aimed the camera down at the shirt. “I don’t think there’s soot here,” he said straightaway. He snapped several photos, scooped up the shirt, and walked back to his office adjoining the lab. Haag connected the camera to his computer and with a few mouse clicks brought up a close-up of the mystery hole. At maximum magnification, the shirt threads looked like coarse strands of rope woven together tightly. The hole itself appeared slightly oblong and the fibers around the margins looked almost perfectly clipped. “I can’t remember the last time I saw something like this,” Haag said. There was no sign of soot on the computer screen. His first test had come up negative.

Back in his lab, Haag sprayed a diluted ammonia solution around the hole in the shirt and then pressed a square of transfer paper onto the fabric. If there were copper particles around the hole, the solution would loosen them just enough for some to adhere to the paper. But the copper wouldn’t be visible against the transfer paper. So Haag poured a few CCs of DTO—dithio-oxamine—into a pressurized bottle and sprayed the reagent onto the page. When DTO reacts with copper, the particles turn orange. Together we stared at the wet transfer paper for several moments, like a couple waiting on a home pregnancy test. Nothing happened. We were zero for two.

By now, Haag was speculating aloud what, other than a bullet, could have caused the defect. Insects can chew away bits of fabric in evidence storage rooms over time. But the hole was too clean and round to be the work of an insect, and how to explain the fact that the hole in the undershirt lined up? A cigarette could have burned a ring through both layers. Rabin was a heavy smoker. But under a microscope in polarized light, the threads along the margins lacked the clumped thermal effects associated with a burn (or a bullet hole, for that matter). Haag seemed to settle on the idea that the hole was caused on the operating table. In the emergency room, a doctor had thrust a tube into Rabin’s chest cavity to drain the air and fluid that
had accumulated. The procedure usually involves stripping the patient first. But in the chaos, in the rush to stabilize Rabin, maybe the instrument plunged through his shirt and undershirt. That would explain the clean shape and the lining up of the holes, he said.

When the third test—the one for lead—came up negative, Haag imagined himself on the witness stand, being cross-examined by an attorney. Could someone have lifted off all traces of copper and lead in a previous test or through some other procedure? Unlikely, he responded to his own question, but not impossible. To exclude even that remote possibility, he suggested a final test. He would cut out a small square of the fabric from somewhere else on the shirt and shoot a hole through it at close range. Then we could compare the hole he made with the mystery hole to see if they were similar.

By now, we were well into the afternoon in Arizona—nighttime in Israel. It was too late to call Dalia and ask for permission to cut out a section of the shirt. The question was left to me and it posed a dilemma. Dalia had entrusted me with her dead father’s clothes and I was determined to bring them back safely. But she also badly wanted an answer to the question of the hole in the shirt. In that meeting at her office, it seemed more important to her than the garment itself, which had languished in a box for years. I told Haag to go ahead.

Working with a plain pair of scissors, Haag cut out a patch about five inches long and four inches wide. He used scotch tape to fix it to what looked like a block of yellowish gelatin. Haag described it as a tissue stimulant, a loaf of translucent silicone that behaves much the way the body’s insides behave when struck with slicing metal. He suggested using the same gun and bullets Amir used, a 9mm Beretta with Winchester hollow points.

Together we walked over to his indoor range, a long, narrow room with thick walls and a soundproof door. He loaded a single hollow-point bullet into a magazine and clicked it into the Beretta. Then he handed me earmuffs and slipped a set on his own head. From six inches away, he pointed the gun at the gelatin block and pulled the trigger. Hollow points expand on impact, the metal in front peeling back and forming razor-sharp edges. They tend to cause more internal damage than regular rounds and stay lodged in the body—reducing the
chance of a bullet passing through one person and injuring someone else. Most US police departments issue them to their officers.

Haag peeled off the fabric square and took it back to the lab. He placed it on the counter near the shirt so that we could examine both holes. They looked nothing alike. Haag’s bullet had created an almost star-shaped perforation, with some vertical and horizontal tearing in the fabric. The threads along the margins of the hole were loose and uneven. After scrutinizing the panel and the shirt from different angles, Haag gestured that we were done. The chemistry alone had satisfied him that the mystery hole was not caused by the passing of a bullet. But the shooting test produced something more tangible—a physical piece of evidence that members of a jury could hold and pass around.

“I’ve been looking at bullet holes for forty-seven years or so. I shoot things for a living,” he said, wrapping the shirt back in the butcher paper. “Everything I see says it’s something other than a bullet.”

BY THE TIME
I returned to Israel in September, the holiday season was under way—that three-week period between the Jewish New Year and Simcha Torah when children are out of school, government offices are closed, and any work at all feels strictly optional. I had sent Dalia a short email summarizing Haag’s findings and we agreed to meet at her office so that I could give her a copy of his report. She walked from her desk to the door to greet me.

Dalia had worked as a lawyer in both the private and public sectors before her father was assassinated. She had no political ambitions and, except for her occasional involvement in high-profile legal cases, was not in the public eye. But the murder made her a national figure and the victory of Netanyahu over Peres in 1996 gave her a reason to enter politics—to help unseat him and get the country back on the peace track. She started campaigning for parliament in early 1999.

To the dismay of her mother and others, Dalia chose not to join the Labor Party. It was now led by Ehud Barak, a former army chief who
had been Rabin’s protégé but whose overture a few months before the election had put Dalia off. “He said, ‘I need a Rabin on my list.’ I didn’t like his approach towards me.” She aligned herself instead with the Center Party, won the sixth spot on the list, and just managed to enter parliament.

Her tenure lasted four years and included a stint as the deputy defense minister—a position that put Dalia in the core of her father’s old milieu. But she never quite found her footing in politics. She left parliament in 2003 to establish an educational center in her father’s name that includes a museum and an archive from his years in public life. The Cadillac in which Rabin was spirited to the hospital after the shooting is parked at the entrance to the center, on permanent display.

I gave Dalia a thumb drive with a copy of the report and the photos Haag had taken. She plugged it into her computer, brought up the first document, and scrolled to the key line: “The source of the sharply-defined hole in the front of the dress shirt and the likely associated hole in the front of the undershirt . . . were effectively
excluded
as being bullet-caused.” Dalia said the conclusion came as a relief, though I had a sense that it wasn’t exactly closure. She said she would go over the report slowly on her own.

Then we got to talking about the anniversary of the assassination, which was a few weeks off (Israel marks it officially according to the Hebrew calendar, which in 2013 put it around mid-October). Dalia said she dreaded the annual ritual. Her obligations start with the state ceremony in parliament attended by the Israeli prime minister—in this case, Benjamin Netanyahu, the man Dalia held responsible for much of the incitement against her father. Then she rushes from one public event to another in what feels like a failing endeavor to keep the memory of her father alive. She told me that the one engagement she looks forward to every year is the ceremony at the headquarters of the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency. The employees gather along a spiral staircase and look down over the banister at a staging area on the ground floor, where a short observance is held. The security establishment’s enduring solidarity with her father is palpable, she says.

Other events have left scars. For a while, Dalia would visit schools around the anniversary to talk about her father’s legacy and about
the Rabin Center’s effort to promote democracy. At a religious girls’ school in the settlement of Alon Shvut in the West Bank a few years earlier, she told the students about a program at the center that brings smart, underprivileged high school kids from outlying areas—including Arab-Israelis—to Tel Aviv and Haifa for a series of lectures on law and government. One girl raised her hand and asked why Arabs are included. Dalia explained that as citizens of Israel, they are equal members of society. “But they’re not Jewish,” the girl countered.

When she talked about her father’s assassination and how it had highlighted the deep divisions in Israel, another girl raised her hand. She said it was actually Dalia’s father who had created the divisions by agreeing to hand over parts of biblical Israel to the Palestinians.

The interactions, those and others, would not have been traumatic if Dalia thought the voices represented a small minority in Israel. But she has come to view the last twenty years as the story of a power shift from the likes of her father—secular, pragmatic, and moderate—to the advocates of Alon Shvut (and the settlement movement generally): ethnically chauvinist, uncompromising, often messianic. That the assassination would mark the birth of this new Israel is nothing short of horrifying to her. When a foreign correspondent asked Dalia at a small gathering of journalists a few years ago whether she and the Israeli mainstream had diverged at some point, she nodded without hesitation. “I don’t feel I’m part of what most people in this country are willing to do.”

And what of the Amirs? How have they fared since the assassination? Yigal Amir remains in prison, without the possibility of parole. He spent the first seventeen years of his sentence in total isolation. Since 2012, prison authorities have allowed him to study with other religious inmates for an hour a day, several days a week. Amir married while in prison and has a son he sees on visitation days two or three times a month. He can make at least one phone call each day but cannot talk to journalists.

His brother, Hagai, completed a sixteen-and-a-half-year sentence in 2012. He returned to his parents’ home in Herzliya at age forty-four and found a job within weeks as a welder. The first time I met him, a year later, he was about to start a degree program in construction
engineering. He showed me the second-floor bedroom he had shared with Amir growing up and the small shed behind the house where he tinkered with bullets to make them more effective at penetrating a car or an armored vest.

I wondered how people respond to seeing Hagai and the rest of the Amirs in public. Israelis recognize him and his parents from the media coverage over the years. His siblings are not familiar faces, but it’s enough for them to mention the last name and the town Herzliya for some people to draw the connection. Yet the image I’d conjured of a family that remained stigmatized and isolated did not hold up. The brothers and sisters had all married. Four of them were university students at the time I conducted my interviews; one was doing a master’s degree in psychology. The Amirs seemed to lead something close to normal lives. On one of the evenings I interviewed Hagai, he and the family had just returned from an outing with friends at the beach in Herzliya. On another night, they came from a wedding in Jerusalem. They were invited by the bride’s father, a prominent right-wing activist. “We have a lot of support,” Hagai told me. “People come up to us on the street and say it clearly.”