Killing a King: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel (23 page)

But even as the perception of the threat against Rabin shifted, the unit did what bureaucracies tend to do: it remained fixed in its old approach. Dignitary Protection had a near perfect record, at least within the borders of Israel. It had never lost a VIP. Though much of the credit belonged to Shabak’s intelligence gatherers, the bodyguards regarded themselves as the best in the world. All were graduates of military combat units and some had served in special operations forces. Shabak trained them to put a bullet in an assailant no longer than 1.8 seconds after the start of a potentially lethal event. Recruits who couldn’t draw and fire fast enough did not graduate from the training course. “Dignitary Protection was a cocky unit. Good but cocky,” recalled Shlomo Harnoy, one of its veterans.

The hubris bred a kind of institutional certainty that nothing bad could happen as long as the bodyguards showed up. It also fostered a culture of condescension toward outsiders, especially those who dared to offer suggestions or criticism. That, anyway, was the experience of a certain Shabak officer who served in one of the agency’s other departments and happened to live in Rabin’s neighborhood. The officer noticed that Rabin walked from his home to a country club in the area to play tennis every Saturday morning, often with Leah. Though it was a short walk and the prime minister had guards with him, he left the house at the same hour every week and took the same route to the club—basic mistakes in bodyguard tradecraft. “There were a lot of tall buildings around [where a shooter could set up] and the smell of assassination was in the air,” he recalled. The officer took up the
issue with the head of the Dignitary Protection Unit. The response he got amounted to a bureaucratic brush-back: Relax, everything’s under control.

That arrogance extended to other parts of Shabak as well. When Mor raised the Halevy issue with the Jewish Affairs Department, he was similarly rebuffed.

Gillon, who had spent his entire career in Shabak, knew the agency’s shortcomings. But he was still new to the job, serving a man who had shown only tenuous confidence in him and coping with the bloodiest waves of Palestinian violence on record—on top of the right’s surging radicalism. In late June, Israeli and Palestinian negotiators engaging in marathon talks in the Egyptian resort town of Taba announced they would not meet their deadline for the Oslo II agreement. Gillon would have more time to prepare for the redeployment. But as the summer heat blistered across the country, members of the settler group Zo Artzeinu launched a new round of protests, blocking key intersections and creating huge traffic jams. Their rhetoric grew so nasty that Gillon decided to appeal directly to opposition leaders and members of the YESHA Council to help lower the temperature.

Most right-wing leaders welcomed the dialogue but the meetings produced nothing tangible. Gillon argued that hotheads on the right might misinterpret the references to Rabin as a traitor and a murderer as an explicit call for violence. He asked the leaders to exert their influence over the rank and file—or to simply refuse to speak at demonstrations where protesters engaged in incitement. The settlers, who suspected Gillon identified with Rabin politically, felt he was dwelling on the actions of a few insignificant rabble-rousers in order to tarnish the entire nationalist camp. They accused him of trying to stifle legitimate protests.

Gillon also made his pitch to a group of senior columnists, asking them to refrain from writing anything overtly inflammatory. The Shabak chief had rarely engaged with members of the media—most knew him only by the initial Kaf. Though meeting this man of secrets was clearly a dream for journalists, at least some resented his message as an attempt to mobilize the press on Shabak’s behalf. Yoel Marcus of the left-leaning
Ha’aretz
newspaper wrote later that the interaction
made him feel like he lived in a banana republic. “Israel is not a country of political assassinations, thank God,” he wrote.

Gillon’s initiatives were all meeting resistance: the Cadillac, the bulletproof vest, the appeals to settler leaders and journalists. Now he faced yet another challenge: Avishai Raviv’s handlers felt they’d lost control of their agent. Raviv kept running amok, assaulting Palestinians and pushing the limits of what the agency thought it could justify. In the messy business of undercover work, informants sometimes broke laws. A reputation for delinquency helped an agent maintain his cover and attract the real criminals or extremists. But Shabak had been forced to intercede with the police or the Justice Department eleven times in the years it had been running Raviv in order to head off indictments. The agency had warned him repeatedly that he would lose his immunity. Yet he continued to demonstrate an almost obsessive hooliganism—and Shabak continued to protect him.

In late July, the agency summoned Raviv for what it termed a “peeling off” meeting: a daylong session in which the informant would come clean about his offenses and submit to a lie-detector test and a psychiatric evaluation. Raviv’s handlers wanted a catalogue of every crime he’d committed, whether police knew about it or not. Over several hours, the informant spared no detail. He confessed to attacking Palestinians dozens of times, often in the Hebron area and often at random, using brass knuckles, slingshots, a crossbow, a flare gun, knives, and even a real gun he borrowed from a friend. He also admitted to teaching two minors how to make petrol bombs. It was a deeply troubling list. Innocent Palestinians were being victimized regularly by a man who drew his salary from Shabak. And by seeking publicity for his thuggery, Raviv contributed to the image of the settlers as violent extremists—a reputation already well established through the acts of Baruch Goldstein and others.

Still, Raviv had shown his value again and again and this was no time to forfeit intelligence assets. His handlers decided to deliver yet another rebuke. They ordered him to get prior permission for even the tiniest infraction. Raviv promised to comply, as he had on previous occasions. But he persisted with the provocations. Several weeks after the meeting, he staged a nighttime swearing-in ceremony for new
members of his Eyal militia at the national cemetery in Jerusalem, complete with guns and balaclavas. With an Israeli television crew filming the event—it would air on Channel One’s nightly newscast—each member pledged to fight the Rabin government to his dying breath. “Much blood will be spilled,” Raviv promised from behind a ski mask. To the few people who knew that Raviv worked for Shabak, the paradox could not have been more stark. Gillon had been making the case to settlers and journalists—to anyone willing to listen—that inflammatory rhetoric would lead to violence. Yet here was his own informant engaging in precisely such rhetoric. Raviv’s undercover work had created a complicated arithmetic: Even his handlers could no longer tell if the benefits canceled out the damage.

With so much going on, Gillon was now meeting Rabin almost every day. Over the summer, the two men reached an understanding about the Cadillac. Rabin would ride in the armored car whenever he attended events that appeared on his calendar—the kind a potential assassin might learn about from the media. For unscheduled events, he would have his driver bring the Caprice. Though Rabin occasionally strayed from the agreement, it seemed to set the relationship on a better footing. Rabin felt comfortable with security people, and Gillon warmed to his boss’s forthrightness. He also identified with Rabin’s social unease. At a gathering in the Caesarea home of President Ezer Weizman around midsummer, Gillon wandered through the house to get away from the crowd. He found Rabin alone in a back room, watching a soccer match on television. The two men remained there together until the game ended.

The delay in the negotiations gave the Amir brothers a respite as well. Three months had passed since Yigal’s aborted mission at the banquet hall in Jerusalem. When he told his brother about it, Hagai became more determined than ever to forge a better plan, something other than a suicide operation. Killing Rabin with a handgun meant his brother would need to get within a few feet of the prime minister—and within easy range of his bodyguards. With an assault rifle, he could shoot him from a safe distance. Hagai had enough money to afford a rifle but by law, Israelis could only buy handguns; assault weapons were issued by the military.

Hagai called the liaison officer in his infantry unit and asked to sign out an M16 rifle. His official address remained at the settlement Shavei Shomron, where his uncle lived. Hagai argued that the hour-long drive between the settlement and his college at Ariel, also in the West Bank, took him through areas where Palestinians frequently stoned Israeli cars. He needed more than a handgun to feel safe.

His company commander turned down the request. The army had issued thousands of guns to settlers over the years and incorporated these armed civilians in community patrol units. By the 1990s, some military officials worried about blowback—the possibility that settlers might turn their guns against the army if it tried to evacuate them under a peace agreement. The Hebron massacre prompted a reassessment of the gun policy; Goldstein had used an army-issued weapon in the shooting. In a phone call, the liaison officer explained that only reservists with a rank of lieutenant or higher were now eligible to sign out rifles. Hagai was a sergeant.

With that idea nixed, the brothers talked almost obsessively about other ways to kill Rabin. Sometimes, Dror Adani joined the conversation. Amir had decided Adani would make a good match for his younger sister Vardit. He brought him to the house several times to get to know her. But Vardit showed little interest and, when they ran out of things to talk about, Adani would head upstairs to sit with Amir and Hagai. As the summer wore on, the brothers confided more in Adani than in anyone else. Ohad Skornik had proposed to a woman at the end of the school year—a fellow student he’d met on one of the settlement weekends—and lost interest in the militia plan.

The ideas they discussed together ranged from the impractical to the bizarre (just outside the room, two washing machines ran almost constantly, muffling their voices). Adani favored bombing Rabin’s car but had no idea how to plant the explosives without getting caught. Amir talked about trying to get an interview with Rabin for a student journal and smuggling in a gun disguised as a microphone—or hiding a bomb in the tape recorder. Hagai’s idea of injecting nitroglycerin into the pipes of the building on Rav Ashi prompted cackles. But even when the conversations strayed to the absurd, Adani, perhaps alone among Amir’s friends, actually believed Amir intended to kill
the prime minister. “He really wanted to kill Rabin,” he would say later. And his outlook in those conversations seemed remarkably similar to Amir’s. Adani believed fully that
din rodef
applied to Rabin. He agreed that a death sentence hung over the prime minister. Occasionally, he raised the concern that murdering Rabin would harm Jewish cohesion, itself a religious precept. But Amir insisted that preventing a withdrawal from the West Bank was more important. Without Rabin, the peace process would collapse in a heap.

At the close of summer, as Oslo’s second anniversary approached, Amir tried one more time to come face-to-face with Rabin. The prime minister would be inaugurating an underpass designed to ease the rush-hour traffic at a junction north of Tel Aviv. In Taba, Israeli and Palestinian negotiators were close to finalizing the Oslo II agreement. Amir thought this might be his last chance to stop the handover of West Bank territory to the Palestinians. The Kfar Shmaryahu junction lay just ten minutes from his home; he knew the area well. An outdoor event would be easier to infiltrate, he thought. For the third time in nine months, he packed his gun and headed out to kill Rabin. But once again God seemed to offer no guidance, no help. Amir arrived at ten in the morning, noticed just a few people milling about, and decided to drive around for an hour. When he returned, Rabin had come and gone.

Amir had been pursuing Rabin for two years now while the prime minister moved closer to his objective: ending the corrosive military occupation in the West Bank and Gaza and forging peace agreements with all of Israel’s neighbors. Rabin had taken huge strides while his stalker mostly blustered and schemed. But a fanaticism defined Amir’s pursuit of Rabin—so much so that any honest interpretation of the Talmudic principle he fixated on would have pointed back at him.

Amir was the real
rodef
.

CHAPTER 7

Seam Zone

“You don’t make peace by sitting in your living room. Show up and make a difference.”

—
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Yedioth Ahronoth

R
abin’s negotiators clinched the Oslo II agreement with their Palestinian counterparts on September 24, 1995. Amir, gloomy and irritable, organized a student weekend in Hebron, where the extremists would be gathering.

The agreement called for Israel to withdraw from all seven cities in the West Bank, including Hebron—though hundreds of troops would remain behind to protect the Jewish enclaves there. Israel would also hand over hundreds of towns and villages in several stages. Oslo II would not end the occupation. Large swaths of the West Bank and Gaza, including the settlements and areas defined as “military zones,” would remain in Israeli hands until the two sides negotiated a final agreement. In the interim period, Israel would continue controlling the borders, religious sites like the Cave of the Patriarchs, the water aquifers, and other natural resources. But the deal would free most Palestinians from many of the day-to-day encumbrances of Israeli military rule. And it would signal to the settlers that their enterprise
had been a historic misstep, one the government was now bent on reversing. The settlement movement had grown accustomed to getting its way. It had amassed far more influence and power than its size merited. Rabin was now declaring that the tail would no longer wag the dog.

Rabin traveled to Washington toward the end of the month for another White House signing ceremony with Arafat. Though the agreement had far more breadth and detail than the original Oslo deal—it ran to 460 pages—the ceremony itself lacked the drama of the signing two years earlier. It took place in the White House East Room in the presence of a few hundred congressmen and diplomats. Journalists from around the world covered the event, but not a single American network transmitted it live. The exhilaration of 1993 had given way to temperance and even caution. But the two leaders now seemed more at ease with each other. Martin Indyk, who had left the White House to serve as the US ambassador in Tel Aviv, watched Arafat press his arm to Rabin’s back at one point and marveled that Rabin let it linger there. “Today we are more sober,” the Israeli leader said in his speech. “We are gladdened by the potential for reconciliation, but we are also wary of the dangers that lurk on every side.”