Killing a King: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel (4 page)

The news reached Rabin midflight and instantly made plain to him the profound vulnerability of the agreement. Lone extremists, Palestinian or Israeli, could easily undermine what the two sides would now devote much of their energy to achieving—a new relationship between them, a sense of security for Israelis, and greater freedom for Palestinians. The episode would replay itself again and again in the coming years, to devastating effect. Rabin instructed Yatom, his military secretary, to seal off the West Bank and Gaza for the time being. The measure would keep out other potential militants but also prevent more than 100,000 Palestinians who worked in Israel from reaching their jobs. These extended “closures” would come to characterize the Oslo deal as well, prompting many Palestinians to wonder whether the agreement made their lives better or worse.

After a stop in Amsterdam—the 707 burned too much fuel to fly directly from Israel to Washington—Rabin spent most of the night either in his seat or on the cot, across the aisle from his wife. Leah had a clear role as the wife of Rabin the army general and later Rabin the ambassador and prime minister. At big gatherings she would take charge of the mingling, drawing the social pressure away from her husband. The two had married forty-five years earlier, during a break between battles in the War of Independence. But because Rabin had been absorbed in combat much of the time, he had a friend handle the wedding preparations, including booking the venue and the rabbi. On the day of the ceremony, Rabin was so shy that the rabbi thought it was the friend who was marrying Leah.

Peres, by contrast, kept moving around the cabin talking to anyone who remained awake. The insomniacs included Dalia Yairi, whose husband had died trying to rescue hostages held by PLO guerrillas eighteen years earlier. Rabin and Peres had allotted three seats on the
plane to family members of terror victims. Their presence at the ceremony would signal that even Israelis who suffered deeply and directly from the conflict were ready to set aside the enmity. It would also help shield the decision makers from accusations that embracing the architect of these attacks amounted to a betrayal of the victims. Yairi was Rabin’s choice. She hosted a popular radio show and knew him going back two decades.

Yairi’s husband, Uzi, had been on leave from the army when a PLO team landed at a Tel Aviv beach in rubber dinghies in March of 1975 and took hostages at the Savoy Hotel. The guerrillas hoped to trade the captives for Palestinians held in Israeli jails. Years earlier, Uzi had commanded the military’s top antiterrorism unit, Sayeret Matkal. As the standoff entered the night, he persuaded his old comrades in the unit to let him join the assault team. But the raid on the hotel the following morning went badly. Uzi and two fellow soldiers died, along with eight hostages. The team killed seven of the eight Palestinian guerrillas.

For Yairi, the plane ride brought back the anguish of that morning but it also infused her with giddy energy. On her radio show, she had gently mocked Peres during the preceding year over his dreamy pronouncements about the coming of a New Middle East. Now he teased her back, insisting the fantasy was materializing. From Yairi’s vantage point on the plane, the two teams seemed to play symbiotic roles. She saw them as the dreamers and the doers. And while tensions were palpable, members of the two camps were now mixing across the aisle and telling jokes. Only one person in the front section aired any skepticism aloud. Danny Rothschild, a major general who served as the liaison between the government and the military rulers of the West Bank and Gaza, pointed out that Palestinians lacked governing institutions—the very kind that Jews had built before their independence. “We’re only at the beginning. It’s too early to celebrate,” he said. The remark struck one of the passengers on the Peres side as a bit of chutzpah. After all, Palestinians lacked institutions because Israeli authorities in the West Bank and Gaza had prevented them from organizing for the preceding twenty-six years.

Oddly, the two people who had played perhaps the biggest role
in
Oslo were absent from the plane. When Beilin launched the secret channel, he sent Yair Hirschfeld and Ron Pundak to do the actual giving and taking. Hirschfeld was an academic with ties to Palestinians, and Pundak had been a journalist and a former intelligence officer. The Foreign Ministry’s director general, Uri Savir, would eventually take charge of the negotiation but Hirschfeld and Pundak formed the first rapport with the PLO delegation and attended every session until the deal was clinched seven months later. Still, when preparations were being made for the signing, Peres informed the two men that there would be no room for them on the plane and no seats available at the ceremony in Washington.

The foreign minister had made clear he wanted to share the spotlight with as few of the project’s collaborators as possible. “You don’t invite the midwife to the bris,” he told people in his office. Somehow, this man of grand visions could engage in the pettiest of calculations, Pundak thought at the time. But he would not be thwarted. With a few phone calls, Pundak secured two seats at the ceremony from the batch allotted to American Jewish leaders. And he persuaded a German foundation to buy the round-trip air tickets for Hirschfeld and himself.

In the rear of the plane, the journalists waited for scraps of information to make their way back to them. Nahum Barnea, the columnist for
Yedioth Ahronoth
who had interviewed Peres at his official residence the previous day, had accompanied Rabin on several trips abroad. He liked to stay up after the other journalists fell asleep, in case the prime minister strolled back looking to share a smoke. In those moments, Rabin could be a generous talker. He didn’t schmooze with journalists, but he might spend an hour peeling back the layers of a certain political dilemma, leaving the reporter with enough material for a strong front-page story. Barnea, whose witty columns often reflected the national mood, had mostly praise for the Oslo Accord. But he felt that Israelis would only embrace a slow, cautious advance. He summed it up with one sentence in a column published earlier that day: “Yes to the agreement, no to the euphoria.”

Most of the reporters on board had been covering the senior echelons of government for years. They numbered among Israel’s most
well-connected journalists. Yet for all their sources, not one of them detected over the preceding seven months that the biggest Israeli story in decades was unfolding in Norway. The failure had caused some embarrassment for journalists and editors—Israeli officials were, after all, notorious leakers. But it pleased Rabin, who had kept the secret even from his inner circle. He told Sheves about the talks only at the point when he wanted opinion polls conducted to gauge how Israelis would respond to a deal with the PLO. Haber had been on a private trip abroad when news of the deal broke in August. It caught him by surprise.

The one newspaperman who came close to sniffing out the story was a reporter for the broadsheet
Ha’aretz
who did not cover the prime minister’s office at all. Yerah Tal wrote mostly about political parties and spent at least one day a week at Labor headquarters in Tel Aviv, chatting up party functionaries. He was in the building one day in July when a source told him that Israel and the PLO had been staging a series of high-level meetings overseas. The source provided no other details, and when Tal got back to the newsroom, his editor voiced skepticism. So did the more senior journalists at the paper, including Ze’ev Schiff, whose military contacts were said to run so deep that army generals regularly called
him
for information.

Still,
Ha’aretz
published a front-page piece on July 12, 1993, under the headline: “Jerusalem Conducted Secret Negotiations with the PLO Leadership.” The story got most of the details wrong, describing the venue of the talks as “an Arab country,” and their focus as “Jerusalem and the borders of a possible autonomy zone.” Tal’s second source for the story, a PLO official, had no knowledge of the negotiation under way in Oslo but had been privy to other contacts between Israelis and PLO members. On the phone with Tal from Cairo, he confirmed the wrong back channel. For Rabin and Peres, who feared any publicity would wreck the negotiation, the errors in the story amounted to a lucky break. They allowed Peres’s office to issue a more-or-less honest denial, ensuring no other newspaper would follow up.

After almost fourteen hours in transit, the 707 touched down at Andrews Air Force Base in darkness early Monday, September 13, 1993. The temperature was already seventy degrees and humid outside
, typical late-summer weather for Washington. It would climb to nearly ninety degrees by the start of the ceremony later that morning.

HABER HAD RESERVED
nearly forty rooms at the Mayflower Hotel, a landmark in downtown Washington about five blocks north of the White House. Built in 1925 and adorned in gold trim, the hotel had been dubbed by President Harry Truman the “second best address” in Washington—second, of course, to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. By the time the Israeli delegation arrived, throngs of people were pouring out of the Farragut North Metro stop near the entrance to the hotel, on their way to work. Rabin crossed the lobby and rode the elevator to his suite. Haber, who had already written Rabin’s speech, phoned Clinton’s Middle East adviser, Martin Indyk, to settle a few last details. The weekend had been filled with drama. The next few hours before the signing would be as well.

When Rabin decided to make the trip to Washington, Haber conveyed to the White House a request that Arafat refrain from wearing his iconic military uniform and sidearm to the ceremony. To Arafat these were the symbols of a lifelong struggle for Palestinian independence, but Israelis associated them with PLO terrorism. Rabin wanted his countrymen to begin perceiving Arafat differently.

Haber also sought to ensure that Arafat would not greet Rabin in the manner of Arab tradition: a kiss on each cheek and sometimes one on the forehead as well. Rabin had resolved to make peace with Israel’s enemies, but he was no hugger. He certainly did not want to feel Arafat’s whiskers pressing against his face. “All right. All right. But no kissing,” he had told Clinton by phone over the weekend when the president pressed for a handshake onstage. Seeing to the requests required some creative maneuvering by the White House staff. Clinton, who had been in office for nine months by this point, felt determined to make Rabin comfortable.

The relationship between the two men began awkwardly a year earlier. Rabin had just started his term as prime minister and was
visiting the United States for meetings with President George H. W. Bush. Clinton asked to sit down with him as well. The former Arkansas governor was in the final stage of a tough election battle against Bush and hoped a photo with the Israeli leader would help his campaign. Rabin tried to put him off. He hated the idea of being a factor in the US election. But Clinton kept pressing.

When they did get together on August 12 at the Madison Hotel, along with the vice-presidential candidate, Al Gore, and staff members on all sides, the opening niceties gave way to a series of uncomfortable silences. Rabin felt wary of Democrats, a vestige of his run-ins with Jimmy Carter during his first term as prime minister. And though Clinton on good days could fill a room with his charm, the two men were just extraordinarily dissimilar—Rabin a regimented old soldier, and Clinton a freewheeling baby boomer and former Rhodes scholar.

Sheves, who had known Gore and his aides from a stint years earlier on a leadership program in Washington, felt the meeting drifting toward disaster. He whispered to Gore that Clinton should raise the issue of American military aid. Israel had been the biggest recipient of US defense funding since the 1970s. Perhaps Clinton could commit himself as president to sustaining the nearly $2 billion aid package, Sheves offered. Gore scribbled a few words on a scrap of paper and passed it to Clinton, who, on reading it, launched into a speech about America’s commitment to Israel’s security. It seemed to work—Sheves noticed Rabin perking up.

At their next meeting in March, Clinton was already president and hoping, like many of his predecessors, to help bring peace to the Middle East. The Oslo talks had been under way by then but Rabin kept the details to himself. Still, Clinton sensed a determination on Rabin’s part to forge a deal with either Syria or the Palestinians—though not both at the same time. He also felt drawn to Rabin’s directness and honesty, the gruff exterior notwithstanding. Clinton would say later about the meeting that Rabin “was sort of sizing me up, and I already knew he was bigger than life.”

To head off any awkwardness between Arafat and Rabin, Indyk solicited the help of Bandar bin Sultan, a Saudi prince who had been serving as ambassador to the United States for a decade. An influential
figure in Washington, Bandar had cultivated close ties with American elites, including members of the Bush family. He also had connections to most Arab leaders and knew Arafat personally. Indyk asked Bandar to brief Arafat about both the “no kissing rule,” as people in the White House were now calling it, and the matter of his attire. While Arafat was still en route to Washington, Bandar ordered several suits delivered to his hotel room.

With three hours left before the ceremony, the two issues—tiny representations of the sensitivities Israelis and Palestinians would have to overcome—were now occupying the president and his staff. At a meeting in the Oval Office, Clinton’s national security adviser, Anthony Lake, said he knew a way to thwart the traditional Arab embrace. It involved extending the right arm for a handshake while simultaneously planting the left hand firmly on the approaching person’s forearm. Done right, the maneuver would prevent the person from leaning in for a kiss. Clinton practiced it several times with his national security adviser, at one point raising his knee toward Lake’s groin to demonstrate his backup plan. If he could keep Arafat from kissing him onstage, Clinton thought, the old guerrilla leader would not try to kiss Rabin.

Back at Andrews Air Force Base, television journalists had set up mobile units to broadcast Arafat’s arrival live on television. The United States had shunned Arafat since his rise to prominence in the 1960s. Now he grinned widely as he walked off the plane and onto the Andrews tarmac, America’s gateway for visiting dignitaries. Among the benefits Arafat had hoped to reap from the Oslo deal was access to the administration in Washington—and here it was. He shook hands with Edward Djerejian, the assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, and then spotted Bandar in the reception line. “Andrews, Bandar. We’re at Andrews!” he spoke into his ear. The two men rode together to the hotel.