Killing a King: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel (5 page)

Bandar talked Arafat out of a plan to hand Clinton his gun during the ceremony, a theatrical gesture meant to signify his turn away from the armed struggle. The symbolism, at least, seemed apt to Bandar, but the Secret Service would never let him close to the White House with a sidearm. (Clinton, on hearing the plan, quipped that if
Arafat gave him a gun onstage, he would shoot him with it.) But he couldn’t talk him into a suit. When Arafat tried on one of the jackets, his advisers chuckled. They had never seen him in anything but military green. Arafat was still sore with them for forcing him to leave his wife, Suha, behind in Tunis. The tension between his aides and his wife had climbed steadily since their wedding three years earlier.

Feeling stage-managed and a little humiliated, Arafat returned to his standard garb but left off the medals and insignias he often displayed on his chest. Without them, the outfit was technically just a safari suit. Then he put on his kaffiyeh and headed out.

But Rabin knew a military uniform when he saw one. In his room at the Mayflower, he caught a glimpse of Arafat on television leaving his hotel for the White House and yelled for Haber. Rabin had freckles and fair skin—he was what Israelis called a
gingi
, a Hebrew variation on the British term for “redhead.” When his anger rose, as it did now, his face flushed brightly. Haber got Indyk on the phone and told him—to Indyk’s horror—that Rabin was sulking in his room and would not be coming. By now, hundreds of dignitaries had gathered on the South Lawn of the White House, including former presidents Bush and Carter and several former secretaries of state. To Indyk’s relief, the crisis lasted just a few minutes—Rabin quickly withdrew the threat. But the episode foreshadowed difficulties in the rapport between Rabin and Arafat. It would take time to build.

With the two delegations now at the White House, the full significance of the event began to set in. A year earlier, Israel still had a law barring its citizens from just meeting with PLO members. A few weeks earlier, the Oslo process was undisclosed and uncertain. Now Rabin and Arafat stood on either side of Clinton in the Blue Room, an Israeli general and a Palestinian guerrilla leader about to take the stage together. Arafat reached across Clinton to shake Rabin’s hand, but the Israeli leader kept his arms crossed behind his back and motioned outside, where the crowd was waiting.

Nearly three thousand people had gathered on the South Lawn, including ambassadors of Arab countries officially at war with Israel. Rabin’s son, Yuval, had driven five hours from Raleigh, North Carolina, and was seated many rows back, along with his sister, Dalia.
He had not had a chance to talk to his father before the ceremony. Yairi, who had time for a brief rest in the hotel, took a seat near the front, close enough to read the facial expressions of the seven men onstage, including Peres and Rabin, Arafat and Abbas, Secretary of State Christopher and the Russian foreign minister, Andrey Kozyrev. From the raised platform, these men looked out over a mass of mostly gray heads and dark suits—and beyond, at the white obelisk of the Washington Monument towering over the National Mall.

In the coming years, signing ceremonies and Middle East peace conferences would take place with some regularity. Eventually, they would come to serve as reminders that peace itself remained elusive. But at this first event, the sheer enormity of the moment, the unscripted interactions, the nervous asides, all generated currents of electricity. Until their encounter in the White House, the two protagonists had never met, which meant the audience, on the lawn and at home via television, was seeing
in real time
the body language of icy hostility slowly thawing. Even the speeches, predictably lofty and infused with biblical quotations, had a mesmerizing quality—less for the words and more for the astonishing context.

The signing itself took place around a long wooden table dragged out from one of the White House offices—the same table Israeli and Egyptian leaders had used to seal their peace treaty in 1979. Peres sat down first, putting his name to two copies of the agreement, which included cross outs and notations in pen, changes made during the course of the morning to resolve last-minute disputes. He signed in two places on each copy of the agreement, big sloping signatures both in English and in Hebrew. Then he tucked the pen in his inside pocket. Abbas signed next and when he rose from the table, he shook hands with each of the men on stage, including Rabin and Peres. It was the first direct interaction between a Palestinian and Israelis at the ceremony and it caused people in the audience to stand and applaud.

But the real drama occurred a few minutes later, after Christopher and Kozyrev added their names to the agreement as witnesses. Clinton, who had rehearsed for this moment, shook hands with Rabin to his right and Arafat to his left, then spread his arms wide to nudge the two men together. Arafat’s extended hand, almost mannequin-like in
its pallor, hung in the air for an instant before Rabin reached out to clutch it. At the moment of contact, a collective gasp went up from the crowd, followed by loud cheering. Then Rabin turned to Peres and said quietly in Hebrew: “Your turn now.”

Yairi, who could see the ambivalence on Rabin’s face, thought of the handshake as a reluctant groom’s
I do
at a wedding. Whatever misgivings existed before, the public act itself would help enforce the commitment. Nabil Shaath, one of Arafat’s advisers, also thought of nuptials as he looked on from the lawn. When Clinton came over to him later, he tiptoed to whisper into his ear: “Don’t worry, Mr. President, you haven’t lost an Israeli daughter, you gained a Palestinian son.” Barnea, who would suffer a searing personal tragedy with the unfolding of the Oslo Accord, wrote the next day: “[Rabin’s] awkwardness left a mark on the grass but it won’t go into the history pages. It will disappear and what will be left, for better or for worse, is the dramatic photo of the handshake between two enemies.”

With the ceremony now over, Clinton took Rabin to the Oval Office to discuss the next steps. The agreement Peres and Abbas just signed contained significant gaps and flaws. It established the principle of Palestinian control over the Gaza Strip and one of seven cities in the West Bank, Jericho. But it put off negotiations on the full scope of their governing authority. It also set as a goal Palestinian autonomy in the occupied territories—without addressing the matter of Jewish settlements and how their relentless sprawl would affect the process. All the broad issues, including whether Israel would one day agree to a Palestinian state, were left to later, on the assumption that the trust built over this interim period would make the final negotiations easier. Beilin, the deputy foreign minister who launched Oslo, would come to view this as the agreement’s fatal flaw. It would give time for opponents of the process on both sides to poison it with violence—undermining trust all around.

Alone with the president now, Rabin sipped ice water and explained how he had come to accept the PLO as a peace partner. The Palestinian uprising in the West Bank and Gaza had convinced him Israel could no longer put off a decision on the fate of more than two million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. If it chose to
keep the territories, Israel would lose its Jewish majority and become an apartheid regime, he said, invoking a term few Israelis dared utter in their own context at the time. Though Israel preferred to negotiate with Palestinians from inside the West Bank and Gaza—as it had done since the Madrid conference in 1991—it was clear to Rabin that the local leaders consulted with Arafat by phone in Tunis on even the tiniest issues. He knew so because Israeli intelligence agencies had intercepted their conversations and given Rabin the transcripts. There was simply no alternative to negotiating with Arafat.

Whether Rabin would eventually agree to the creation of a Palestinian state, he did not say. In interviews over the preceding week, he emphasized that the agreement allowed for Palestinian autonomy, not more. But his decision to deal with the PLO, a group that had devoted itself entirely to bringing about Palestinian independence for more than thirty years, meant statehood was undisputedly on the table. As Haber would point out some two decades later, no one internalized this better than Rabin. “I can tell you that no doubt he understood immediately that signing such an accord . . . in the end it will [lead to] a Palestinian state.”

With just a few hours left before the Israelis were to leave Washington, the delegation members attended a lunch with their Palestinian counterparts, hosted by the State Department. Rabin and Arafat stayed back at the White House. Among the invited guests was Henry Kissinger, who had served as secretary of state in the Nixon and Ford administrations and spent much time in the Middle East brokering armistice agreements after the 1973 war. Turning to Beilin at one point, Kissinger alluded to former Israeli prime minister Golda Meir, who said in an oft-quoted newspaper interview in 1969 that there was no such thing as a Palestinian people. “If Golda was alive, she would have erected gallows for you and hanged you,” Kissinger told Beilin. It was an odd remark for such a festive moment. But it would resonate with Beilin in the coming months as Israeli hardliners began referring to the architects of Oslo as traitors deserving of the death penalty.

By evening, Rabin was back on the 707, less than eighteen hours after touching down at Andrews. Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year’s holiday, was two days off and Rabin—unbeknownst to most
people on the plane—had another country to visit on the way home. In an itinerary change coordinated hastily over the weekend, the Israelis would stop over in Morocco as the guests of King Hassan II. Morocco had no relations with Israel, and while the king maintained secret contacts with some Israeli leaders over the years—Rabin actually toured Rabat in 1976 wearing a wig and glasses—a public visit was unprecedented. It signaled to Israelis that resolving their conflict with the Palestinians would give them access to much of the Arab world. Hassan hosted Rabin at his palace and then gave the Israelis a tour of a Casablanca mosque built in his name—an imposing shrine overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, designed to accommodate more than 100,000 worshippers. In a guest book at the site, Rabin wrote in English: “This is the most impressive mosque in the world.” Peres, certainly the more eloquent of the two, wrote: “Peace and faith go hand in hand.”

The small world that Israelis had been accustomed to inhabiting was expanding quickly, a welcome change for people who had long craved acceptance in the region. An opinion poll published in Israel’s
Yedioth Ahronoth
newspaper after Rabin returned showed a large majority of Jewish Israelis—61 percent—supported the agreement. But the opponents included some formidable figures, among them Benjamin Netanyahu, a rising politician whose verbal polish had helped vault him to leadership of the right-wing Likud Party. They also included the brothers Yigal and Hagai Amir, religious fundamentalists, recent veterans of infantry units in the Israeli Army, and amassers of ammunition and explosives.

CHAPTER 2

To Fathom God’s Will

“Hit them hard, hit here, push there. Destroy stuff.”

—
BOAZ NAGAR

B
y the time the Israeli delegation landed, a wraithlike stillness enveloped Israel, the kind that precedes religious holidays and imposes itself on the observant and nonobservant, Jews and non-Jews alike. Shops and restaurants closed early for Rosh Hashanah, public transportation stopped running, and traffic on the highways became sparse. The military order preventing Palestinians from crossing into Israel remained in effect.

Three more funerals were held for victims of Palestinian violence while Rabin was away, soldiers caught in a Hamas ambush in the Gaza Strip. Still, the agreement signed in Washington suffused Rosh Hashanah with hopeful anticipation—not just for a new year but a new era. Newspapers printed for the holiday, with more sections than on any other day of the year, included pages and pages of speculation about the potential dividends of the peace deal. The daily
Ma’ariv
ran a large map showing roads Israel might soon build from its main cities to the capitals of Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon.
Yedioth Ahronoth
published a section in its business pages titled “Peace and Your Pocket:
Investments, Prices, Real Estate, Markets, Restaurants.” Rabin had told reporters on the way home that he spoke by phone to other Arab and Muslim leaders who might soon forge ties with Israel. A headline on his return announced that the Foreign Ministry was hoping to recruit more Arabic-speakers for possible postings in the region.

Other issues occupied Israelis as well. The country would soon be marking twenty years since the Yom Kippur War, a surprise assault by Syria and Egypt that killed thousands and, for a few critical hours, appeared to threaten Israel’s very existence. In a front-page story,
Yedioth Ahronoth
published long excerpts of a new book by the man who’d served as the head of military intelligence during the war, Eli Zeira. His assessment at the time that war was improbable accounted for the government’s disastrous decision not to call up army reservists ahead of the invasion. Also on the front page was a prison-cell interview with a convict nicknamed Ofnobank, a serial bank robber whose motorcycle getaways had made him something of a folk hero to Israelis. In one of the inside sections, a feature story described the changing sexual norms of Israelis. For women, the ideal male was no longer the coarsely textured hard charger but the sensitive type with a strong feminine side. Yet somehow, Israeli women felt simultaneously drawn to and contemptuous of this new man.

Jewish New Year is not the carousing party night that December 31 is for Americans. Israelis tend to spend the evening with family. And so as the sun dipped into the Mediterranean, Rabin and Leah headed across town to the home of daughter Dalia’s in-laws. The idea that the prime minister faced some new danger to his life for entering into a peace process with Arafat would not seriously dawn on the people around him for some time to come. Instead of summoning his driver, Rabin was in the habit of driving himself to private events on the weekends, protected by just a small security detail.