On the Front Line. Marie Colvin
he wore a bullet-proof vest or I would, that I could not protect him without it. Such a firm stand would have got through to Rabin.’
Error was compounded by error. Shin Bet’s rules require the prime minister to be in a ‘sterile zone’ at all times, surrounded by a minimum of three Shin Bet bodyguards, preferably six. Last Saturday there were only two near him as he took his place on the stage with Shimon Peres.
By that time a vital breach in security had already taken place. The original plan had been for Rabin to arrive at a nearby municipal building and go to the rally via a basement door through a secure area not open to the public.
Instead, the premier’s car was parked next to the stage and he climbed to it up an open flight of stairs. ‘I don’t know why the change was made, but it cost Rabin his life. Under the original plan, he would not have been exposed to the public at all,’ said a security official.
Just after 8pm, Rabin took the microphone to address the cheering crowd. ‘Allow me to say that I am excited. I was a military man for 27 years. I fought as long as there was no chance for peace. I believe there is now a chance for peace that must be taken.’
Surprisingly, since he was awkward in public and usually fled after speaking, he stayed with Peres and other Israeli personalities to sing the Song of Peace, an anthem that was banned in Israel when it was released in 1969. Nobody had ever seen Rabin sing in public. It was a sign of his joy that after all the criticism of his policies he felt that the unprecedented numbers at the rally validated his decisions.
Then, 15 minutes before Rabin took his fatal walk down the stairs from the podium, two more security lapses gave Amir his chance. Shin Bet should have been guarding the car parking area beneath the stage. They were not. When an officer noticed that this area had not been secured, he ordered police to do so. By then, Amir was already inside, explaining to the police that he was a VIP driver called up for extra duties. Nobody challenged his story. As he waited behind a barrier for the right moment to strike, the Beretta lay hidden in his clothes.
By now, the Shin Bet officer in charge had reason to be distracted. Over his radio he received a tip-off that a shooting was imminent. ‘The tension was immense, and he wanted to get Rabin off the stage as fast as possible. But he was convinced that the main threat was from Palestinians,’ said a security official.
At the end of the demonstration, Rabin came down the stairs to his car, failing to make sure the bodyguards were around him. Another blunder. The police unit in the parking area had not received a message that Rabin was arriving, so no safe channel was formed. ‘We let down our guard,’ said the security official. ‘We felt that the rally had passed peaceably and that we had done our job.’
At 9.44, as Rabin was getting into his armoured Cadillac, Amir stepped forward. From 5 feet away he drew his pistol and fired. Ingeniously, he shouted to the police that it was ‘only an exercise’ and he was firing blanks. They believed him.
Rabin’s bodyguard, hit in the shoulder, knew otherwise. He bundled the prime minister, a bullet in his stomach, another in his back, into the car and they sped off. At the hospital, there was the final blunder: nobody was ready to receive them. In the confusion nobody had radioed ahead. The chief surgeon, summoned to an emergency on a badly wounded man, found he was treating the dying prime minister.
One top Jewish counter-terrorist expert said of the colossal foul-up: ‘It is beyond negligence of the most simple basic procedures. Rabin was abandoned.’
Amir told security officials who surrounded him immediately after the killing, the gun still in his hand: ‘God told me to do it. I have no regrets.’ The fact that he believed he had a religious mandate shocked Israelis.
So did the crass statements by supporters. One student at Bar Ilan sent a message on the Internet: ‘Happy holiday everyone. The witch is dead; the wicked witch is dead.’ The West Bank settlement of Maale Amos hung out a sign: ‘We are all Yigal Amir.’
‘I am very happy that the dictator Rabin is dead,’ said Aryeh Bar Yosef, a resident of Kiryat Arba, a radical settlement outside Hebron, which has made a shrine of the grave of Baruch Goldstein, who gunned down 29 Palestinians at the Hebron mosque last year.
‘I hope that the Nazi Arafat and his friend Peres will die like Rabin. Rabin, the head of the traitors, got what he deserved. Praise be to God. Yigal Amir redeemed us from the terrible situation we were in.’
Such statements have forced Israelis to face the dark netherworld of Jewish extremist groups. Eyal follows the teachings of Meir Kahane, a Brooklyn-based rabbi who moved to Israel and founded the extremist Kach movement.
Kahane was assassinated five years ago – eerily, on exactly the same day as Rabin – while making a speech in New York and his movement was outlawed last year by the Israeli government after Goldstein’s massacre. With Kach banned, groups such as Eyal, with the same ideology and many of the same members, have become increasingly active.
Even more disturbing for Israelis is the realisation that these groups flourish among young people from comfortable, ordinary homes. When police searched the Amir family house and the kindergarten run by his mother they found a cache of ammunition and explosives. Car tyres that were used as swings for children were packed with explosives. One of those arrested as part of the alleged conspiracy to kill Rabin, Ohad Skornik, is the son of Yehuda Skornik, an eminent surgeon at Ichilov hospital, where Rabin died. It has made parents all over Israel wonder what their children are up to.
Last week, the issue confronting Israel was the allegation of a conspiracy to kill Rabin. There is no doubt Amir was a member of an extreme right-wing group that considered Rabin a traitor.
Eyal, founded in 1991 by Raviv, good-looking, arrogant and, like Amir, a student at Bar Ilan, is fanatical, albeit in an immature way. Members are given a Hebrew code word, and go through a dramatic swearing-in ceremony at the graveside of Avraham Stern, the leader of the Stern Gang terror group that fought the British mandate.
It is believed to take orders from Baruch Marzel, a Boston-born settler based in Hebron who is a former member of Kach but resigned when it became illegal. Last week, he would not support the killing, but blamed Rabin for his own death. ‘When you force people underground, when you shut their mouths, their hands work and you have violence. There will be more, I am sure. Israel is heading to civil war.’
Before last Saturday, though, Eyal was ‘known for words rather than actions’, said one security official. That is indeed what Raviv said when he denied all knowledge of Amir’s plans to kill Rabin. ‘Yes, he was very close to us, but we knew nothing of his intentions,’ Raviv said after his arrest. ‘I am in complete shock. The guy ruined his life. We knew he said that Rabin must be killed but he didn’t speak more than anyone else here. We all shouted all kinds of things at demonstrations.’
In fact, Raviv was shouting those very things the night of Rabin’s assassination, with a few dozen right-wingers who staged a counter-demonstration in a side street at the peace rally in Kings of Israel Square. Amir was seen to join them briefly, then leave after talking to Raviv.
Was there a conspiracy? A total of six people are now in police custody, charged with complicity in the killing. All are religious men in their twenties.
Along with Amir, his brother Haggai, Skornik and Raviv, police also have in custody two other students, Dror Hadani and Michael Epstein. All deny any connection.*
The signs are that Amir acted alone on the day. He took a bus to the rally and later told investigators: ‘I never believed it would be so easy.’ Investigators believe Amir would have aborted his plan had the opportunity not been there. ‘He didn’t know he was going to do it until he pulled the trigger,’ said one.
But while he may have acted alone on that night, police believe the others helped him procure weapons, and did not report the possibility of his plans to police. ‘We think there was a connection between a group of persons … who established a form of organisation to assassinate the prime minister and other political persons based on their ideology to try to prevent the peace process,’ Moshe Shahal, the police minister, said.
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