Book Review: Killing a King: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel by Dan Ephron

Guest post by Andrew Schneider.

On November 4, 1995, Dan Ephron was a young correspondent for Reuters, based in Tel Aviv. Ephron’s editors had dispatched him to cover a peace rally in Kings of Israel Square, just a few blocks from his apartment. The main speaker was Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Ephron interviewed people in the crowd for more than two hours, then started to walk home to his apartment to file his story. But after walking just a few blocks, he received a message on his pager. Rabin had been shot. Ephron ran back to the square. After interviewing several witnesses and phoning his editor with the details, he ran half a mile to Ichilov Hospital. By the time he reached it, the prime minister was dead.

Rabin’s assassin was Yigal Amir, an Ultra-Orthodox Jew and a law student at Tel Aviv’s Bar-Ilan University. Amir had determined to kill Rabin virtually from the moment the Oslo Accord was announced in 1993. He had been heavily involved in anti-government demonstrations and had publicly called for Rabin’s death on many occasions. Yet somehow, Israel’s vaunted domestic intelligence service, Shabak, had never taken him seriously enough to keep an eye on him.

Incredibly, Amir had managed to work his way into the parking lot where Rabin’s armored Cadillac was waiting to retrieve him from the rally, an area that was meant to be secured. Conspiracy theories about how he accomplished this, and who really killed Rabin, are as common in Israel as conspiracy theories about President Kennedy’s assassination are in the U.S.

Amir was convinced he was acting as an agent of God. In his eyes, by handing over Jewish lands to Palestinian control, Rabin was giving over his fellow Jews to the hands of the enemy. Such actions merited a death sentence, under a reading of Talmudic law embraced by several leading rabbis of Israel’s far right. As a Jew, Amir believed he was not only permitted to kill Rabin – he was obligated to do so, if God saw fit to put Rabin within Amir’s reach. Killing Rabin, he believed, would derail the peace process, save Israel, and save the Jewish people.

For several years after, Dan Ephron remained convinced that the assassin had failed. The Israeli-Palestinian peace process had its ups and violent downs, but it would succeed in the end. There would be a two-state solution, an independent Palestine living at peace with its neighbor Israel. But when, after a long absence, Ephron returned to Israel to take up his post as Newsweek’s Jerusalem bureau chief, he was forced to rethink his views. The Second Intifada had left too many Israelis too bitter. By the time Binyamin Netanyahu won reelection as prime minister in 2013, Ephron was convinced the chances of a negotiated peace were all but dead.

This is what convinced Ephron to write about the Rabin assassination. As he says in the book’s epilogue:

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. (p.245)

At the time of the assassination, just over two years had passed since Rabin and Yasser Arafat, Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, had shaken hands on the South Lawn of the White House. In the interim, Rabin and Arafat had developed a working relationship, if not a warm one. Israeli security forces had withdrawn from a number of key cities in the West Bank, along with much of Gaza. The Israeli-Palestinian peace process had also cleared the way for a full-fledged peace treaty with Jordan, the first such agreement between Israel and an Arab state since the 1978 Camp David Accords with Egypt. For the first time in its modern history, Israel had more partners on its borders than enemies.

But those two years also brought a huge upsurge in violence in Israel and the West Bank. Religious hardliners on both sides saw the peace process as an abomination. Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the leading Palestinian Islamist groups and fierce rivals of the secular PLO, launched a wave of kidnappings and suicide bombings. More Israelis died during the first two years of peace than during any two years of the Intifada itself.

On the Israeli side, the opposition was more complex. There was the settler movement, made up of religious Zionists who saw Israel’s control of the West Bank and Gaza as irrevocable, a precondition for the arrival of the Messiah. Settlers regularly attacked their Palestinian neighbors, seeking revenge for each Hamas or Islamic Jihad strike. Most notoriously, a doctor and reserve army captain named Baruch Goldstein had gunned down dozens of Palestinians worshipping at the Cave of the Patriarchs, a site holy to Jews and Muslims alike. Survivors of the massacre beat Goldstein to death, earning him the status of a martyr among Jewish extremists.

The settlers weren’t the only Jews opposing the peace process. A wide swath of Israel’s right wing, those living within Israel’s pre-1967 borders, condemned it. At the very least, they argued that trading land for peace rewarded terrorists and cost more Israeli lives. Each bombing or kidnapping appeared to support their argument. Anti-government demonstrations grew larger, their rhetoric more extreme. Demonstrators regularly denounced Rabin as a traitor or a Nazi. The trend worked in favor of Netanyahu, the young leader of Likud, Israel’s leading opposition political party. Israel was due to hold an election in less than a year. There was a real possibility that voters would reject Rabin, and the peace process, in Netanyahu’s favor.

This was the reason that Rabin, reluctantly, had agreed to the rally in Kings of Israel Square (now known as Rabin Square). Something had to be done to alter the perception that most Israelis opposed the peace process. As Ephron saw himself, the rally demonstrated the peace process, and Rabin, still had strong support. Hundreds of thousands of people showed up for the event, many in response to a newspaper advertising campaign. One ad in Yedioth Ahronoth, the country’s leading daily, read: “You don’t make peace by sitting in your living room. Show up and make a difference. Yes to peace, no to violence.”

Much of Killing a King reads like a thriller, with the viewpoint shifting back and forth between Rabin and Amir. The assassin, in fact, drew some inspiration from The Day of the Jackal, Frederick Forsyth’s novel about a plot to kill French President Charles de Gaulle for ending French control of Algeria. Ephron plumbs Amir’s psychology, works through his attempts to recruit supporters, and explores his numerous missed opportunities. One such instance, just a few months after the Oslo Accord in 1993, placed hunter and prey within a few feet of each other, at the wedding of one of Amir’s friends to the daughter of Israel’s chief Ashkenazi rabbi.

There were ample opportunities for Shabak to have intercepted Amir, if for no other reason than because one of Amir’s associates, Avishai Raviv, was actually a Shabak informant. Amir had threatened any number of times, in Raviv’s presence, to kill Rabin. Raviv would later claim, under interrogation, that he thought Amir was all talk and had no intention of carrying out his threats. Raviv’s involvement would help stoke conspiracy theories that Shabak was aware of Amir’s plans and deliberately failed to intervene.

Ephron concludes the main reason Shabak wasn’t watching Amir as closely as they should have is that, despite his extreme views and his open threats, Amir didn’t fit the profile Shabak had developed for a potential assassin. For years, the organization had been focused on the potential threat from an agent of the PLO, Hamas, or one of the many other Palestinian terrorist groups. Only since the start of the peace process had the agency begun seriously to consider the threat of a Jewish assassin. Simply put, they were worried about another Baruch Goldstein, someone from the violent fringe of the settler movement. Amir may have supported the settlers’ cause, but he himself had lived almost all his life in or near Tel Aviv.

Even if Shabak had not caught up to Amir before he pulled the trigger, Rabin still might have survived. Rabin’s security detail was constantly trying to convince him to wear a bulletproof vest at public appearances, which he refused to do. Such a vest likely would have blocked the shots Amir fired at Rabin’s back as the prime minister was preparing to enter his car after the peace rally. Instead, two of Amir’s bullets punctured Rabin’s lungs, setting off an embolism that went to his brain.

Rabin’s survival would not necessarily have saved the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Amir acted alone, but he did so in an environment where thousands of his countrymen were denouncing the prime minister and his policies as not just wrongheaded but evil. Many Israelis believed the country was heading towards a three-cornered civil war between the government, the Israeli right wing (religious and secular), and Palestinian extremists. It’s entirely possible that Rabin’s death forestalled such an outcome.

Still, Ephron does suggest that either Rabin or Shimon Peres, his erstwhile deputy, might have achieved a permanent peace accord. At the time of Rabin’s death, Israeli and Palestinian negotiators had hammered out a document addressing all the outstanding issues between the two sides: which lands would be transferred to Palestinian control; which settlements would be preserved as a part of Israel; the status of Jerusalem as a shared capital city; compensation for Palestinian refugees, and their descendants, in exchange for giving up the “right of return” to Israeli territory. The outline seems remarkably similar to the deal a later prime minister, Ehud Barak, offered to Yasser Arafat during the Camp David Summit of July 2000, which Arafat rejected.

Could Rabin have pushed such a deal through the Knesset, Israel’s Parliament, had he lived? It would have been a very close vote, as had the votes endorsing the both Oslo Accord and the more-detailed plan for pulling back Israeli forces from the West Bank, known as Oslo II. Arab-Israeli parties lined up with the government in both votes and proved critical for the government’s majority. Netanyahu used this point to claim the agreements lacked legitimacy, because they relied on non-Jewish support.

The story might have had a very different ending, however, if Peres had taken a different approach during his brief tenure as prime minister, following Rabin’s assassination. As in the case of the Kennedy assassination, Rabin’s assassination created a huge groundswell of support for the martyred leader, far more than he’d ever had when he was alive. Netanyahu said at the time that Rabin’s assassination had destroyed any chance of his winning the next election. He may well have been right, had Peres taken the opportunity to dissolve parliament and made it clear that the next election would be a mandate on Rabin’s policies.

The problem was that, as much as Peres believed in the importance of the peace process, which he had done so much to foster as Rabin’s foreign minister, he could not accept the idea that Rabin would wind up with the credit if Peres completed what the two had started together. Nor could he stomach the idea that the only way he could win election as prime minister would be on a sympathy vote.

For twenty years, Peres and Rabin had been bitter political enemies. They had managed, grudgingly, to form a working partnership that served Israel well for the three years between the 1992 victory of Israel’s Labor Party and Rabin’s assassination. Now Peres was in charge, and he wanted to win election on his own merits. He decided he would run out the clock on the Knesset’s current term and call an election in the fall of 1996. But the longer he waited, the more Palestinian terror attacks ate away his vast lead in the polls. By the time he did call for an early election, in May 1996, it was too late. Netanyahu beat Peres and immediately put the brakes on the peace process.

Ephron takes the title of his book from a letter Yigal Amir’s brother and co-conspirator, Hagai, wrote their parents from prison a few days after the assassination: “According to Judaism, killing a king is profoundly significant. It affects the entire nation and alters its destiny.” It this, it would seem, Yigal Amir succeeded.

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Andrew Schneider is the business reporter for Houston Public Media (KUHF), NPR’s Houston affiliate. His work appears regularly on NPR’s Morning Edition and All Things Considered.

The Holy Land by Kieran Colfer

[This article appeared in Time magazine, May 13, 2008]

As we look forward to tomorrow's joint celebrations of the 60th anniversary of the formation of the Israeli state and the 40th anniversary of Palestinian independence, it is a good time to look back at how the peace process between these two nations, shaky at times, has developed, and how easily it could have turned out otherwise.

At the end of June 1967, the world was stunned by the lightning Israeli victory over the joint armies of Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq, in what came to be known as the "Eight-Day War". Israeli tanks stood at the gates of Damascus, and the paratroopers of Ariel Sharon's Southern Division were taking pictures of each other at the foot of the pyramids outside Cairo. The Egyptian and Syrian air forces had been effectively annihilated on the first day of the war, and some Israeli commentators were joking that "there were now more Egyptian soldiers in Israeli POW camps than there were in Egyptian barracks".

A lot of historians contribute the complete success of Israel's pre-emptive strike on the Egyptians and Syrians to the refusal on May 30th of King Hussein of Jordan to sign a mutual defense treaty with General Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, thus keeping Jordan out of the conflict. King Hussein had already been having secret meetings with Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban and Premier Golda Meir for three years beforehand concerning peace and secure borders, and so wanted no part of what he called "Nasser's mad adventurism".

This could have been quite different: in November 1966 an Israeli patrol was blown up by a mine on the border with the Jordanian-occupied West Bank, and a retaliatory strike on a PLO camp in the occupied territories had been planned. This was called off, however, at the last minute. Had it gone ahead, it may have undone all the diplomatic efforts of the last 3 years and driven Jordan into the Egyptian camp.

As it turned out, King Hussein now saw in Egypt and Syria's misfortune a chance to overtake Nasser as the de facto leader of the Arabic world. So, as the United Nations scrambled to produce the abortive Resolution 242 (the so-called "land for peace" resolution), intense back-channel negotiations between the Jordanian and Israeli governments resulted in the Bethlehem Agreement in July 1967 in which Jordan agreed to act as the mediator between Israel and the Arab states. Under the peace agreement brokered by Hussein, Israel agreed to withdraw from their positions around the capitals of Egypt and Syria, and return the Sinai and the Gaza Strip to Egypt and the Golan Heights to Syria in return for peace agreements. The Golans would have to be demilitarized and special arrangement would be negotiated for the Straits of Tiran. This in fact had already been unanimously agreed by the Israeli cabinet on June 19th and sent to the US State Department to pass on to the governments of Egypt and Syria, but for some reason it had never been delivered. America's mistake was now Jordan's gain, as King Hussein, although condemned in the Arabic press as a traitor and an Israeli stooge, could now play "The Great Peacemaker".

As the government buildings where they deliberated were within shelling distance of Israeli tanks, the Arab leaders had no choice but to accept this deal. On the 25th of June, the peace treaty was signed between the warring parties, and on the 30th the Israeli forces started withdrawing under UN supervision. The month of June 1967, which had started out looking so promising for the Arab cause, had turned out to be a disaster. Even worse was to come for the Arab nations, when it was pointed out to them that by signing a peace treaty with "The State of Israel", they were de facto recognizing it as a valid political entity - something which they had refused to do since 1948. One American commentator later described it as "The greatest trick pulled on anyone in the region since Delilah convinced Samson his hair needed a trim".

Even though he was now being feted as "the Harbinger of Peace in the Middle East", King Hussein was not content to rest on his laurels. The talks with Israel had opened up some new possibilities which he was now keen to explore in order to achieve a lasting peace for everyone. For the next few months diplomatic circles around the world were abuzz with rumors of even more high-level discussions between Israel and Jordan, but when the plan was finally unveiled on December 25th it made everyone's jaw drop. In exchange for Israel renouncing all political and territorial claims to the West Bank, Jordan would also withdraw its occupation forces and allow the territory to declare independence. For the first time in history, there was to be a Palestinian state, with its capital in East Jerusalem.

In addition to Palestinian independence, both sides also agreed to donate part of their GDP to a common fund for the reconstruction and development of the new Palestine. Israel would also instigate a lottery program, where every year, 30,000 refugees from the 1948-49 Arab exodus would be offered the right to return to their original homes, or if they declined, a grant of $20,000 and automatic Palestinian citizenship. This program was eventually to be funded by Jewish groups in the USA and overseas. On the Palestinian side, the new Palestinian government had to agree to allow free access to the holy places of all faiths. So, for the first time since the destruction of the third temple, Jews would be able to pray freely at the Wailing Wall.

The news of Palestinian independence caused a furor nowhere more than in Israel itself, where a deep rift in the public attitudes was soon to make itself felt. On one side there were the pragmatists who saw it as a way to get lasting peace, and on the other the religious conservatives who believed that as Palestine was the land God gave to Abraham for his people, no-one had the right to give any of it up. Indeed, the famous quote by Golda Meir: "We will have peace with the Arabs when they love their children more than they hate us, and the best way to achieve that is to give them a place they can call their own," was in response to a statement by Ariel Sharon that "When you are in a struggle to the death, you don't take your foot of the other fellow's neck and offer him your shoes". The public was so divided and tensions were so high in fact that at one point civil war seemed a possibility. However, the assassination of Meir by the yeshiva student Uzi Bar-Dayan at a rally and the uncovering of the "General's Plot", where Ariel Sharon and other high-ranking IDF officials were found to be plotting a coup to overthrow the government if it went ahead with the agreement, swung public opinion firmly away from the conservatives. As one wreath at Meier's funeral put it: "Jews don't kill Jews over Arabs".

The decision to set the date of the declaration of Palestinian independence as the same date as the foundation of the Israeli state was seen as a political master-stroke. On one move, the day that was up until now mourned in the Arab world as "Al Naqba", or "the Catastrophe", was now to become a day of celebration. The last few weeks were a desperate scramble on both sides to get the necessary political and legislative pieces into place, but on May 14, 1968, the new State of Palestine came into existence and took its first steps on the world stage. It was immediately recognized by the US, Great Britain, the rest of Western Europe and the USSR. The Arab states soon followed suit, willingly or unwillingly - behind the scenes they had been told "you are either part of the solution or part of the problem".

Soon after independence, Saudi Arabia, unwilling to let Jordan take all the credit for the new state, announced its own reconstruction fund for Palestine, and the other Arab nations soon added their own contributions. The new state blossomed, and what had started as a trickle of refugees from the camps in Jordan. Syria and Lebanon soon became a flood. Indeed, so much new money was pouring into the country that Israeli Arabs were heard to joke that they'd be better off on the other side of the border! While organizations like the PLO still had as their main aim the liberation of the whole of Palestine and the destruction of Israel, its membership plummeted. As one former PLO commando commented: "better to live like a sultan in Palestine than die a martyr in Israel". Indeed, the PLO eventually entered the mainstream of political life though their Fatah organization, and PLO leader Yassir Arafat eventually became Palestinian President in 1982.

With the coming of the 1970s, the international focus turned to the Gaza Strip. Still chafing under increasingly authoritarian Egyptian control, its people started clamoring to join their brethren in the west bank. A "Peace Wall" was set up by the Egyptian authorities between the Gaza Strip and Israel to prevent its population deserting en masse - Egypt had now gone from "The Liberator of Palestine" to the jailer of the Palestinian people. Eventually in 1975, after a 3-year Intifada (or "uprising"), the Egyptians agreed to turn over control of the Gaza Strip to the Palestinian Government in East Jerusalem. Israel, whose economy in the preceding years had profited considerably from the peace and the largess bestowed on its new neighbor, agreed to allow complete freedom of movement between the two halves of Palestine. Peace at last reigned in the Middle East.

The last few years have not exactly been trouble-free, but in general the region has been a quiet one. Relationships between Israel and its neighbors, while never warm, have become at least cordial, with Israeli embassies opened in Riyadh, Cairo, Dubai and Tehran, and East Jerusalem. This year Israel takes its seat as one of the rotating members of the UN Security Council. Indeed, some people say that the final seal on the Peace process will be the highlight of tomorrow's celebrations, the opening of the Museum of Understanding on the border between Israeli West Jerusalem and Palestinian East Jerusalem. The museum covers the history of the region equally from the viewpoint of both sides, with Jewish recollections of the Holocaust sitting alongside Palestinian accounts of Al Naqba. Indeed, some say there is an accidental and coincidental symmetry to the opening ceremony, with both men who will light the Eternal Flame in the courtyard having histories of suffering. The Mayor of West Jerusalem still has the faded identity number from Auschwitz-Birkenau tattooed on his wrist, while the Mayor of East Jerusalem lost his leg to an errant Israeli shell while fleeing his home in 1948 and lived the early years of his life in a refugee camp in Jordan.

The Eternal Flame that will be lit tomorrow will symbolize the loss and suffering of every nation and people in this "Holy Land". It will have the flags of both Israel and Palestine flying permanently above it, and engraved on bronze around its base are three words, one in Hebrew, one in Arabic, and one in English:

Shalom,

Salaam,

Peace.