Arabs, it is true, had been trying to kill Rabin for roughly half a century. A commander in the Jewish underground at the birth of Israel, Rabin, 73, had survived three wars. After the Six Day War in 1967, Israeli soldiers made up a song mocking the Egyptians for even trying to get Rabin, then the chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces; the song became a popular hit on the radio. Having won all his wars, and then the Nobel Peace Prize, Rabin felt confident that no enemy of Israel could kill him. To him–if not to those around him–it seemed improbable that a Jew would even try.
In the Middle East, at least in the American mind, the face of terror is usually wrapped in a kaffiyeh. But the assassin who put three bullets into Rabin last Saturday night as he left the peace rally was a clean-shaven 27-year-old Israeli law student. His father is a scribe who hand-copies Holy Scriptures; his mother teaches nursery school. Thrown up against the wall by police after firing the fatal shots, Yigal Amir told them, “I acted alone on God’s orders and I have no regrets.”
Thus Rabin shared the fate of peacemakers who have been killed by their own kind. After leading India from colonialism, Mohandas Gandhi was killed in 1948 by a fellow Hindu who believed he was giving away too much to the Muslims. In Egypt, Anwar Sadat brought peace and respect to a vanquished nation and was slaughtered for his efforts by some of his own soldiers in 1981. For Rabin, the most apt analogy may be Abraham Lincoln. He was a war leader whose personal strength held together a divided nation.
There was as much shock as sorrow among ordinary Israelis. The fight has become increasingly strident and menacing in Israel, and Israeli commentators and citizens alike have worried aloud that the zealots’ rhetoric was an incitement to violence. But most didn’t believe such a thing could really happen, that a Jew would kill an Israeli prime minister. After all, as divisive as Israeli politics is, the last political assassination took place before the founding of the state. Israel has always been bound by its common enemies, willing to be brutal in its own defense. Assassination was a weapon to be used against terrorists, not Israeli heads of state. It was also the kind of thing that Arabs did to each other. When Arafat returned to Gaza last year, Israeli analysts warned of his vulnerability; the Palestinians, after all, had no shortage of extremists and a history of violent infighting.
Though horrified by the assassination, some government officials could see it coming. Extremist rallies have been increasingly virulent. Hanging Rabin in effigy in a Nazi uniform– recently a common protest – is an incendiary act in Israel. Ultra-right-wing Jews, perhaps mindful of the ancient taboos against killing other Jews, have been derisively referring to Rabin and his allies as “non-Jewish Jews.” The new head of Shin Bet, the internal security service, is said to have been chosen for his expertise on Jewish extremists; normally, Shin Bet concentrates on Arab and Palestinian suspects.
Celebrating self-rule: The shots that hit Rabin weren’t fired at the man alone; they were aimed at the peace process itself. The negotiations have moved far toward granting Palestinians autonomy in return for security guarantees. Only last September, Rabin and Yasir Arafat were shaking hands in the White House, celebrating an agreement to remove Israeli troops from Arab towns and cities in the occupied West Bank and to grant significant self-rule by the middle of next year.
The assassination also laid bare Israel’s own wrenching soul-struggle. It was easier for the country when the battle was Arab against Jew; the peace process has pitted Israel against itself. Roughly half of the Israelis are willing to trade land for peace, even to accept a Palestinian state. But half are opposed, sometimes bitterly. The religious settlers in the occupied territories believe that God gave them the West Bank–which they call by the Biblical names Judea and Samaria-and that no temporal leader can give the Promised Land away. Rabin was able to hold the middle ground, appealing to Israelis who think land for peace is inevitable but fear for the nation’s security. It is by no means certain than anyone else can play this centrist role. “Only Rabin had the ability and the will to make peace and sell peace to Israel,” says Richard Haas, former national-security adviser on the Middle East in the Bush administration.
In the short term, Rabin’s martyrdom may actually strengthen the peace process. It will isolate the zealots. Only a tiny fraction of Israelis support the religious extremists, some of whom are Americans who combine their Old Testament zeal with a gun-toting pioneer spirit that holds that “the only good Arab is a dead one.” Conservative politicians in the Likud bloc, accused of stirring up hate, will be chastened. “I am intimidated, I admit it,” said a former adviser to former prime minister Yitzhak Shamir. “Already there is a blood libel. Whoever had a word of criticism against the peace process, it’s as if he murdered Rabin.” Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu wearily declared after the shooting that “Israel is a different country today.” Rabin’s assassin, he said, broke the first commandment. “We debate, we shout, we don’t shoot,” said Netanyahu. Said Itamar Rabinovich, Israeli ambassador to the United States, “While not turning a blind eye to the violence that occurred, we’ll try to consolidate, unify and heal. Will there be healing? It depends not just on the government but on the opposition as well.”
But in the long term, the loss of Rabin may well hurt the prospects for peace. Because Rabin was a proven warrior, Israelis believed they could trust him not to concede too much. Just as only Nixon could go to China, only Rabin could barter with Israel’s ancient enemies. Rabin could inspire: “No longer are we necessarily ‘a people that dwell alone,’ and no longer is it true that ’the whole world is against us’,” he said after winning office in 1992. But he was not particularly smooth, and many Israelis were reassured by his gruff, prickly manner. Rabin shook the hand of Yasir Arafat in the first ceremony at the White House to celebrate the peace process in the summer of 1993–but he didn’t look very enthusiastic about it. During the intifada uprising by Palestinian youths in the late ’80s, Rabin urged a brutal crackdown. “We should break their bones,” he said. Rabin was a forceful presence across the negotiating table. He was close to Jordan’s King Hussein, with whom he had long conducted secret talks, and he even won grudging respect from Syria’s Hafez Assad.
Israelis are not so confident about Rabin’s successor, Shimon Peres. He is seen as a visionary by some, but as a shifty diplomat by others. Far more doveish than Rabin, he is regarded as a less trustworthy bargainer for Israel. It is not entirely clear that Peres,who had expressed fatigue with politics, will even run for prime minister in the next elections, which are scheduled for next year but could be called sooner. Peres vowed last week to “continue a great road paved by a great leader.”
If the conservative Likud wins. the effect on the peace talks will be very dicey. The process has gone too far for the Likud to simply roll back the existing agreements. Already, there is a 20,000-man Palestinian police force in Gaza, and elections for Palestinian chief executive and the legislative council are scheduled to be held in Gaza and the West Bank within the next six months. Netanyahu has said he will abide by the existing agreements unless the Palestinians violate them. But it may not take much more than a few rock-throwing Palestinian youths to convince the Likud that the Palestinians have gone back on their word.
Rabin’s partner in the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize, Yasir Arafat, seemed stunned by what he called “this awful, terrible crime.” His own legitimacy depends on having continued progress in the peace talks. If negotiations falter, Arafat’s chances of becoming a true head of state collapse with them. Rather, he will be more like a small-town mayor with a motley police force and services not worthy of the name. A Palestine in limbo, neither state nor occupied territory, is likely to breed further frustration in its people. That, of course, is a prescription for violence.
President Clinton, Rabin’s most important backer, was badly shaken by the Israeli prime minister’s death. In the Rose Garden on Saturday night President Clinton teared up as he said, in Hebrew and then in English, “Goodbye, friend.” On Sunday, he was scheduled to fly to Israel for Rabin’s state funeral. Jews are customarily buried within 24 hours of death, but the funeral was postponed to allow world leaders to attend. King Hussein of Jordan was among those who planned to go.
A lone gunman? Was the assassin acting alone? Shin Bet is searching for a larger conspiracy. Israeli authorities had broken up an underground ring on the West Bank late last year, possibly thwarting an earlier assassination attempt against Rabin. The alleged shooter, Amir, claimed that he had made two earlier attempts to kill Rabin, but authorities noted that he didn’t fit the normal profile of an extremist. He was not a settler, like Baruch Goldstein, the New York doctor who gunned down 29 Palestinians in a mosque in the West Bank town of Hebron last year. Although an extremist group calling itself INE claimed responsibility for the shooting, Israeli authorities suspected that the claim was made by right-wing opportunists trying to make the crime seem like a broader terrorist plot. Amir may well turn out to be a lone gunman, whatever the rhetoric that inspired him.
Amir fired three times at Rabin, stepping from the crowd as the Israeli prime minister walked toward his car after the rally. One bullet pierced the spinal cord of Rabin, who refused to wear a bulletproof vest despite the urgings of his security guards. That night, thousands of Israelis who had attended the peace rally in Kings’ Square held candies and wept. They sang the “Song of Peace,” a ballad in which Rabin had joined happily on the stage a few minutes before he was struck down. As he left the rally, he carefully folded the paper with the lyrics of the ballad and stuck them into his breast pocket. Surgeons at Ichilov Hospital found the song as they cut away Rabin’s clothing in the emergency room. It was soaked with blood.
