Killing a King: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel (11 page)

The settlers came to see Rabin as a dangerous opponent, a political figure with no religious or romantic attachment to the territory
they saw as sacred. Their fears about him materialized when, as prime minister in 1992, Rabin froze government housing projects in the settlements. The move would signal to the Palestinians that he intended to negotiate more earnestly than his Likud Party predecessor, Yitzhak Shamir. But it also conveyed Rabin’s determination to change Israel’s priorities—from security and settlements to infrastructure inside Israel and to education. Spending on education doubled during his first year in office. Previous governments had enticed Israelis to move to the settlements with tax breaks and lower-interest mortgages, incentives that helped swell the communities with people who sought a better standard of living, not some ideological fulfillment. Now the settlers complained that Rabin was hanging them out to dry.

To placate the settlers, Rabin appointed his deputy defense minister, Mordechai “Motta” Gur, as an informal liaison to the YESHA Council. A retired general, Gur had commanded the division that conquered Jerusalem’s Old City during the Six-Day War. The settlers viewed him as an ally in the otherwise hostile Labor Party and trusted him to notify them before the government took any significant steps regarding the West Bank and Gaza. Rabin also maintained a direct dialogue with some of the more pragmatic settler leaders. One of them, Yoel Bin-Nun, took it upon himself to explain the settler position in long, handwritten letters he sent Rabin every month or two beginning in 1992 and in occasional meetings with the prime minister. Bin-Nun had been one of the founders of the settlement Ofra and a member of the YESHA Council. A former paratrooper, he served under Gur in the battle for Jerusalem in 1967.

His letters during the first year of Rabin’s term were short and friendly enough. Bin-Nun wanted Rabin to invite the National Religious Party, a parliamentary faction that represented the mainstream of the settler movement, to join his coalition. Though he acknowledged deep ideological divisions between Labor and the NRP, Bin-Nun thought the two parties could cooperate at least until the moment negotiations with the Palestinians or Syria produced a breakthrough—a moment he doubted would come. When that endeavor failed, Bin-Nun tried to persuade Rabin to annex the main settlement blocs to Israel and to accept the position that Jordan was the
real homeland of the Palestinians. “The PLO, in its current situation, might be the only group that can take control in Amman at this critical hour and stop the rise of Islam,” he wrote Rabin on September 9, 1992, suggesting that King Hussein was losing ground to Jordan’s Muslim Brotherhood.

Bin-Nun also tried to defuse tensions between Rabin and the settlers, a near-impossible undertaking. Even before the Oslo Accord, settlers had taken to protesting outside Rabin’s office in Jerusalem. One of his cabinet ministers, Uzi Baram, recalled years later Rabin hearing their chants during a particular cabinet meeting, walking over to the window, and growing red with anger. More often, though, he would dismiss their rants with a downward flip of the hand.

The Oslo Accord with Arafat raised the hostility to new heights. After it was signed in Washington, Gur went to the home of YESHA Council leader Israel Harel in the settlement Ofra and got an earful. The YESHA Council had become so influential in the preceding decade that its leaders could not imagine a prime minister making sweeping decisions without consulting them first. Gur tried to reassure them by pointing out that the interim agreement did not include the uprooting of a single settlement. But this old ally of the settlers had lost his credibility. Rabin had kept the secret of Oslo from him as well.

Bin-Nun, who attended the meeting, felt betrayed by Rabin. But he also felt a need to preserve his line to Rabin in hope of minimizing the damage from the Oslo deal. Bin-Nun saw himself and the other members of the YESHA Council as moderates who had risked their own standing in the settler community by advocating dialogue with Rabin. Now he worried that he and his cohorts would lose ground to the hardliners, including the Hebronites. “In this whole process, the extremists are getting stronger, the ones who warned all along not to trust this government,” he wrote Rabin in a six-page, handwritten letter dated September 29, just sixteen days after the signing in Washington. “In a short time, if there’s no dramatic change, I will no longer be able to influence people towards moderation the way I have for years because everyone knows that nothing will come of our quiet contacts and cooperation with you. . . . The struggle is moving towards militancy and I’m not sure we’ll be able to control it.”

The warning was certainly prescient, as the Goldstein massacre would demonstrate. The Oslo deal fired up the militants on both sides. But it was also self-serving. Rabin was Israel’s democratically elected leader. He had won the election on a promise to forge peace deals between Israel and its neighbors, including the Palestinians. The settlers, by contrast, had put only a few lawmakers in parliament; a hardline list led by the Hebron rabbi Moshe Levinger drew fewer than 4,000 votes. Bin-Nun’s argument struck Rabin as a kind of extortion bid: meet the YESHA Council’s demands or contend with the violence of the extremists. As with most of Bin-Nun’s letters, he read this one personally (Bin-Nun had written at the top: “Personal—Urgent!”) but did not respond.

Bin-Nun continued to write Rabin regularly over the next two years. A letter five days after the six-page one argued that Arafat’s Fatah group had not really dropped its policy of armed struggle as promised and that its operatives in the West Bank and Gaza were working together with Hamas militants to attack Israelis. As evidence, he included photos of graffiti he spotted in Beit Hanina, a Palestinian neighborhood in East Jerusalem, where someone had scrawled: “Fatah and Hamas, together till victory.”

But while he prodded Rabin to listen more attentively to the settlers, Bin-Nun also took part in YESHA Council meetings where settler leaders plotted ways to grind down his legitimacy. In one of them sometime after the signing in Washington, the council invited psychologists and public-relations executives to strategize how to discredit Rabin personally and force him to resign. Bin-Nun recalled the discussions years later with some embarrassment. “[The idea] was to break Rabin, those around him, his legitimacy, his image. There was an orderly discussion about attacking Rabin alone. If both [Rabin and Peres] were attacked, the campaign would become diffused and Rabin would get off because public opinion would blame Peres.” The council members decided, among other things, to dispatch hecklers whenever Rabin appeared at a public event.

One such event took place at Bar-Ilan University, where in the fall of 1993, Rabin received an honorary doctorate. The university had chosen the recipients months in advance, well before the Oslo
negotiations had come to light. They included Margaret Thatcher, the former British prime minister, and Robert Jay Lifton, an American psychiatrist and scholar of the Holocaust and the psychology of genocide. Rabin was to be the main speaker but when he stepped up to the podium dressed in the traditional black cap and gown, protesters in the audience stood and jeered. One of the hecklers managed to tap into the public address system and cause a loud buzz whenever the prime minister leaned in to speak. Rabin waited silently while guards pulled the protesters out.

By late 1993, Rabin had had enough of the settlers. The YESHA Council was pushing for a meeting to make its case for a partial lifting of the settlement freeze—enough to accommodate what it defined as “natural growth” in its communities. But Rabin now felt the chasm was too wide to bridge, a clash over the very character of Israel. Haber, whose job as chief of staff included smoothing the wrinkles with various constituencies, pushed Rabin to meet the settlers and concede something small—agree to form a committee, say, that would study their demands. But Rabin had virtually no skills in diplomacy—he couldn’t hide his contempt. An argument erupted as soon as the settler leaders sat down.

“He couldn’t pretend he’s now friends with these people,” recalled Uri Dromi, who served as director of the Government Press Office at the time. “He felt they were undermining everything we’re trying to build.”

With all that as the backdrop, the massacre at the shrine now struck Rabin as the biggest wrecking ball his opponents had launched at the peace process yet. Goldstein wanted revenge for the bloodshed he’d seen in the preceding months. But he also aimed for something bigger—a prayer-hall slaughter so horrific that it would ignite the Arab street and turn Palestinians away from the peace deal. Hamas would surely respond in kind, souring Israelis on the process. The nihilists on both sides had a common agenda.

Rabin recognized the danger. And yet he found himself wavering about the evacuation of Tel Rumeida. Yossi Beilin, who thought the decision was all but finalized Friday night, listened to the radio
throughout the weekend expecting to hear the announcement that soldiers had begun dismantling the enclave. It never came.

A STEADY RAIN
fell on both sides of the green line over the following days, helping diffuse the protests in the West Bank and Gaza but not the tension. Goldstein’s family sought to bury the body in Hebron’s old Jewish cemetery on a hill surrounded by Palestinian homes, a move that would surely have provoked more friction and violence. When the army refused, settlers in Kiryat Arba cleared a section at the end of a park in their town, named, aptly, for Meir Kahane.

The funeral drew more than a thousand people, including Kach activists now fleeing arrest warrants. Baruch Marzel, who led Kach and lived in Tel Rumeida, eulogized Goldstein as “a saint, a great man who had the courage to carry out a heroic act.” Another Kach activist, Avigdor Eskin, promised to name his newborn son after the killer. Incredibly, some people held signs demanding revenge for
Goldstein’s
death. His family had the gravestone chiseled with the words “He gave his life for the nation of Israel, its people and its land,” and also a line from the Book of Psalms: “Clean hands and a pure heart.” With little else in the park but gravel and shrub, the stone tomb protruded from the earth like a shrine.

Rabin spoke to Arafat by phone in Tunis, laying out the measures his cabinet had enacted. In addition to outlawing Kach and Kahane Chai and starting to arrest top members of the groups, authorities had decided to ban some fifteen hard-core settlers from the West Bank and Gaza for now and to confiscate weapons from another twenty people. Rabin also informed the Palestinian leader that he would be releasing hundreds of Palestinians from prison in the coming days, a gesture that had already been agreed upon in the talks and not yet implemented.

But Arafat stood by his decision to suspend the negotiations. Though he kept the conversation polite—the two men had already met face-
to-face several times since the signing in Washington—he told Rabin the measures seemed minor for such a horrific event. “Hollow and superficial,” is how he described them to a journalist later. Arafat pressed Rabin to move the hundreds of settlers from Hebron itself to Kiryat Arba less than a mile away. He also wanted an international force deployed in the city.

Whether or not to evacuate some Hebron settlers now became entwined with the very fate of the peace process. Rabin would ponder the question for weeks, with legal advisers and military officers giving him a range of opinions. The generals who ran the military, the body that would be charged with carrying out the evacuation, mostly opposed it. Dismantling Tel Rumeida alone would require several battalions in addition to the three stationed there routinely, they informed Rabin. The settlers would resist, perhaps violently. When troops evacuated the last remaining Israelis from Sinai in 1982 under a peace accord with Egypt, right-wing activists had dropped sandbags and burning tires at soldiers from rooftops, in images that Israelis found difficult to stomach. Some extremists—mostly Kach people who had moved to Sinai in the weeks leading up to the withdrawal—threatened to blow themselves up if soldiers tried to pull them out.

The specter of an armed confrontation in Hebron worried Rabin. It also stirred dark memories of the
Altalena
affair forty-six years earlier, a violent clash between soldiers under Rabin’s command and members of the right-wing paramilitary group known as the Irgun. The
Altalena
was a cargo vessel the Irgun had purchased to ship tons of weapons and ammunition from France to Israel in the weeks following independence in 1948. Though Irgun leader Menachem Begin had offered to give much of the weaponry to the newly formed Israel Defense Forces—while keeping some for Irgun battalions—Ben-Gurion had already resolved to bring all the fighting groups under a single jurisdiction. The weapons ship seemed to undermine that objective. As the
Altalena
drew close to Tel Aviv’s coastline, soldiers fired on it and took control of the cargo, leaving sixteen people dead. To historians, the affair marked a critical point in the provisional government’s assertion of sovereignty. But it also poisoned relations between left and right for decades to come.

Rabin’s role in the ordeal had come about by chance. He had been visiting government headquarters when the ship came in and was ordered to the beach. Though he brushed off accusations over the years that he’d been responsible for the shedding of Jewish blood, it seemed to friends that the affair left a scar. “I think the
Altalena
case haunted him,” recalled Amos Eiran, who had worked with Rabin at the Israeli embassy in Washington in the late 1960s. The two remained friends—and tennis partners—for decades.

Whether Rabin would face legal hurdles in seeking to dismantle Tel Rumeida was also a question. Settlers had established a presence in Hebron in 1979 with the same wildcat tactics that worked elsewhere in the West Bank, squatting in a building known as Beit Hadassah that served decades earlier as a clinic for Jews. The Israeli government at the time was initially opposed to a Jewish enclave in the city but gave its approval following a Palestinian shooting attack in Hebron. Over the years, the settlers were allowed to take over other buildings once owned by Jews and expand steadily.