Murder in the Name of God: the plot to kill Yitzhak Rabin By Michael Karpin and Ina Karpin Friedman Granta, 352pp, £13.99 in UK
The failure of Israel's Shin Bet domestic security service to prevent the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 almost defies belief. On the night of the murder, November 4th, the assassin, Yigal Amir, was allowed to loiter unhindered in what was supposed to be the "sterile" area in which Rabin's Cadillac was parked, at the rear of the central Tel Aviv square where the prime minister was addressing a huge pro-peace rally. And when the rally was over, and Rabin walked to his car, Amir was able to march up to his unprotected back and fire from point-blank range.
But Amir should have been intercepted long before that terrible night. As Karpin and Friedman document in this tightly-written, authoritative and profoundly troubling book, the Shin Bet had a substantial file on the "extremist" Amir, replete with details of the demonstrations he attended and his various anti-government statements. Moreover, Amir had spoken at large gatherings of the need to kill the prime minister - and the security services had been given a description of him by an acquaintance who fully believed he'd carry out the crime.
That the once purportedly-world class Israeli intelligence network failed to put two and two together during the long months when Amir was hatching the assassination plan and, on several occasions, attempting unsuccessfully to carry it out, derived from an intolerable unwillingness to face a deeply unpleasant fact: that Rabin's reconciliation policies with the Palestinians were moving hundreds of right-wing extremist Israelis to the point of readiness to gun him down.
The Shin Bet simply refused to believe this, and thus refused to try and thwart the looming murder, despite its own information on the extremists' activities, catalogued unerringly in this volume: despite the package of dead doves sent to Rabin, the mystical death sentence publicly invoked against him, the murderous threats shouted by protesters outside his house, the brandishing of placards at demonstrations bearing his features overlaid with the sights of a gun, the attempt to physically attack him at an outdoor fair by a rabbi from the Hebrew University, the participation of opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu in a rally where a coffin bearing his name was carried aloft, the solicitation by West Bank settler rabbis of learned opinions from their rabbinical peers world-wide as to whether he merited the death penalty for the crime of turning over sacred Jewish land to the enemy.
Appallingly for Israel, as the authors make clear, the failures did not end with Amir's gunfire. In the aftermath of the killing, the leaders of the right-wing Orthodox community, from whose ranks Amir sprang, declined to countenance that their ideology was flawed, and rose up against the few voices from within who urged a change of course. The politicians who had addressed the demonstrations where Rabin was screamingly denounced as a criminal, a traitor, a murderer, chose not to hang their heads in shame, but to bluster that they didn't know, they couldn't hear. (Netanyahu, now Prime Minister, of course, insists to this day that he owes no apology.) And the Israeli police and legal establishment shrank back from confronting, let alone indicting, the rabbis they suspected had sanctioned Amir's killing, green-lighted the murder.
The murderous opponents of peace for Israel through territorial compromise with the Arabs have not been cowed by the killing. Far from it. They have been emboldened. They have no need to act now, because Netanyahu is making no compromises. But if a more moderate leader replaces him, they will strike again. The authors quote settler ideologue Elyakim Ha'etzni's remark that, were Netanyahu, "heaven forbid," to turn over parts of the West Bank to Yasser Arafat, "we will fight him as we did his predecessor."
In the meantime, it is the looser-lipped spiritual leaders of Israel's ultra-Orthodox community, those who want to see the country turned into a theocracy, who are employing the vitriol, denouncing Supreme Court justices as wicked Jew-haters, sowing the seeds of the next waves of protest and violence. And now, as then, the police, the security services and the courts are failing to tackle them.
The Israeli mainstream is decent, honorable, and committed to democracy. But its survival depends on how it handles the extremists. Its institutions failed to prevent the killing of Prime Minister Rabin. They failed to bring all those who played a role to justice. And thus they legitimised similar violent Jewish extremism now and in the future.
David Horovitz edited The Jerusalem Report's biography of Yitzhak Rabin, Soldier of Peace, published by Halban Books.