20 Years after Rabin's Assassination, Those Who
Demonized Him Are Running Israel
Allan C. Brownfeld
Issues
Winter 2016
KILLING A KING: THE ASSASSINATION OF YITZHAK RABIN AND THE REMAKING OF
ISRAEL, By Dan Ephron
W.W. Norton and Co., 290 Pages, $27.95.
The assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin of Israel on Nov. 4, 1995
by an ultra-Orthodox religious zealot, Yigal Amir, brought the unknown and
unreported world of Israel's religious extremists under public scrutiny.
The assassin was not a lone psychotic gunman but, instead, was a young man
nurtured within Israel's far-right religious institutions. After the murder,
he was hailed as a hero by many, not only in Israel, but among kindred
spirits in the U.S. Now, 20 years later, those who demonized Rabin and
created the atmosphere in which the assassination became a reality are
running Israel.
This important book by Dan Ephron, who served as Jerusalem bureau chief for
Newsweek and the Daily Beast, relates the parallel stories of Rabin and his
stalker, Yigal Amir, over the two years leading up to the assassination, as
one of them planned political agreements he hoped would lead to peace, and
the other plotted murder. Dan Ephron covered both the rally where Rabin was
killed and the subsequent murder trial.
Curse of Death
It is instructive to review the events of those days. Two weeks before the
assassination, Victor Cygielman, the correspondent of the French weekly, Le
Nouvelle Observateur, summed up the developments of the past months. He
began by describing the eerie ceremony in which a small group of religious
fanatics had stood before Rabin's house on the eve of Yom Kippur and intoned
the mystical Pulsa da-Nura, a kabbalistic curse of death. He wrote of the
explicit 'contract' put out on Rabin's life by rabbis who invoked the
Talmudic concept of din rodef, the sentence pronounced on a Jewish traitor.
Cygielman cited the handbill passed out at a mass demonstration in Jerusalem
on Oct. 5 showing Rabin in an SS uniform. "The stage was set for the murder
of the prime minister," he said. Cygielman's article was delayed because of
technical problems and didn't appear until Nov. 2. Two days later Yitzhak
Rabin was dead.
In their book, Murder In The Name of God: The Plot To Kill Yitzhak Rabin,
Michael Karpin, one of Israel's leading journalists, and Ina Friedman, an
American-born translator and editor who has lived in Israel for many years,
write that Yigal Amir "believed that there is only one guideline for fixing
the borders of the Land of Israel: the Divine Promise made to the Patriarch
Abraham. 'To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to
the great River, the river Euphrates (Genesis 15:17). Today these borders
embrace a large part of the Middle East, from Egypt to Iraq … zealots read
this passage as God's Will and God's Will must be obeyed, whatever the cost.
No mortal has the right to settle for borders any narrower than these. Thus,
negotiating a peace settlement with Israel's neighbors is unthinkable."
The rhetoric of Israel's ultra-Orthodox groups preceding Rabin's
assassination, declare Karpin and Friedman, "made it clear that Rabin's
death was a legitimate, even a religious goal." Eyakem Ha'etzni, founder of
the Yesha Council, the voice of the West Bank settler movement, and a former
Knesset member, compared Rabin with the Vichy French regime which
collaborated with Hitler during World War II: "Those loyal to the Greater
Land of Israel have the right to declare a government that gives up
territory is an illegal one, just as De Gaulle declared the Vichy Government
illegal … We will treat the signing of the Oslo Agreement as collaboration
with the Nazis was treated in occupied France … This is an act of treason,
and it's unavoidable that the day will come when Rabin is tried for this act
as Petain was."
Netanyahu Accuses Rabin of "Murder"
Members of Likud, which now rules Israel, expressed similar views. The
ultra-Orthodox weekly Havashna published an interview with Ariel Sharon who
spoke of the Oslo peace policy as "graver than what Petain did … It's hard
to use the word 'treason' when speaking of Jews, but there's no substantive
difference. They are sitting with Arafat and planning how to deceive the
citizens of Israel." Havashna editor Asher Zuckerman wrote in March 1995 of
a talk he had with then-Likud chairman Benjamin Netanyahu. He quotes
Netanyahu as saying: "Rabin charges that he's called a terrible word,
'murderer.' But with all the unpleasantness (implied by that term) he has no
reason to complain. Whoever is aware of the fetters he placed on soldiers'
hands have led directly to the murder of a large number of Jews has
difficulty refraining from use of the terrible word 'murder.'"
By the critical summer of 1995, Havashna went so far as to charge that Rabin
and Peres "are leading the state and its citizens to annihilation and must
be placed before a firing squad." The World Likud, an extension of the
Israeli party, swamped Orthodox synagogues in the U.S. with leaflets
assailing the Israeli government. Rabbi Moshe Tendler, a professor at
Yeshiva University and respected authority on Jewish religious law, informed
the media that according to religious law anyone perceived as rodef should
be killed. Rabbi Abraham Hecht, head of the Rabbinical Alliance of America,
declared that surrendering any part of the biblical land of Israel is a
violation of Jewish religious law and, thus, assassinating Rabin and all who
assist him, is "both permissible and necessary." Hecht told New York
Magazine (Oct. 9, 1995) that, "Rabin is not a Jew any longer …. According to
Jewish law, it says very clearly, if a man kills him, he has done a good
deed."
Even in 1995, Yigal Amir was not part of a small, isolated fringe of Israeli
society. Hebrew University sociologist Moshe Lissak reported that, "Yigal
Amir grew out of the mainstream, not the margins'. What is referred to as
'the ideological fringe' is actually very broad." In Killing a King, Dan
Ephron places Benjamin Netanyahu at a rally about a month before Rabin's
assassination, where crowds spent two hours chanting "Death to Rabin."
Netanyahu did nothing to discourage them.
Oslo an Act of "Treason"
Dan Ephron shows how Yigal Amir evolves into the assassin he became. As
Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat shook hands in Washington, he writes, "Amir
watched the televised handshake between Rabin and Arafat. He decided
instantly that the Oslo deal was not just a calamity for Israel but an act
of treason by Rabin, the land he would be handing over to the Palestinians
having been promised by God to the Jews. Amir had been a supporter of
Moledet, an ultranationalist party whose leader Rehabim Ze'evi, advocated a
kind of self-deportation for Palestinians — with Israel providing both
negative and positive inducements. Among Israeli political figures, only the
late Meir Kahane, the American-born rabbi and agitator who preached a
xenophobic hatred toward Arabs, articulated more extreme positions. Amir
favored Kahane but a judicial panel had ruled his Kach Party too nakedly
racist to compete in elections."
Amir had volunteered for the Golani Brigade, a military unit with a
reputation for dealing harshly with Palestinians. Ephron reports that, "In
dispersing large protests, it was not uncommon for soldiers to separate
individuals from the crowd and dispense harsh beatings. Private Amir,
Company C, 13th Battalion, seemed to take special pleasure in it, as a
member of his unit, Boaz Nagar, would later recall. 'Yigal was the enforcer
with a capital E. He hit them hard, hit here, push there. Destroy stuff. He
enjoyed badgering them just for fun.' The behavior drew mostly praise from
Amir's officers."
Amir's regular evaluations were so positive that one of Israel's
intelligence agencies approached him about a mission overseas. The agency,
Nativ, had been sending Israelis to the Soviet Union for short periods of
time going back decades — to smuggle books to Zionist activists — who faced
government harassment, teach them Hebrew and lift their spirits. With the
Communist era now over and Jews free to leave, the mission evolved. Amir was
tasked with persuading those political emigrants to choose Israel over other
destinations, including Germany and the U.S. He spent several months in Riga
with a second emissary, Avinoam Ezer, who came to regard him as smart and
capable.
Fathoming "God's Will"
While Amir's upbringing taught him that God alone determined the destiny of
the Jews, he became impatient with the passiveness of this approach.
"Instead," writes Ephron, he embraced the idea that Jews 'must learn to
fathom God's Will' and act accordingly. Amir had read the line in an
introduction to a book of essays by Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, the spiritual
leader of the settlers in the West Bank and Gaza. While Kook seemed not
quite fiery enough for Amir, the author of the introduction, the far-right
politician Binyamin Elon, had captured something profoundly meaningful to
the young extremist. Contrary to … the passive (religious) approach, which
holds that Divine Will is the sole instrumentality, we must learn to fathom
God's Will and 'come to help the Lord' (Judges 5:23) and 'act with God,' he
wrote in his own essay. Elon meant the passage as an exhortation: Jews must
settle in the West Bank and Gaza rather than wait for God to secure their
sovereignty over the territory."
The religious among the settlers added a messianic element to the
enterprise. "For them," notes Ephron, "the incredible conquest of 1967 could
only have been the work of God and a sign that the messiah — the great
Jewish leader who would redeem the world from war and suffering and rebuild
the ancient Jewish Temple — would soon appear. Settling Judea and Samaria,
the heart of biblical Israel, was a way to hasten the coming of the
Messiah."
A terrorist group, which became known as the Jewish Underground, was
thwarted in its plan to blow up the venerable Muslim shrine known as the
Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem so that Judaism's ancient temple could be
rebuilt on its ruins. Yigal Amir, writes Ephron, "regarded the Jewish
Underground as a model … But he also had the grandiosity to think of himself
in historic terms — as a link in a chain of Jewish rebellion and zealotry,
from the Maccabees, who revolted against the Seleucid Empire in the 2nd
century BC, to the Jewish armed groups that operated in Palestine before
Israel's independence. He and (his brother) Hagai both read The Revolt, a
kind of manual for guerrilla warfare written by Menachem Begin, who headed
the pro-independence Irgun Zvzi Leuini (or Irgun, for short) in the 1940s
and later became Israel's prime minister. The group distinguished itself by
carrying out devastating attacks against both Palestinian civilians and
British administrators of Palestine, including the 1946 bombing of
Jerusalem's King David Hotel that killed 91 people. Amir viewed the Rabin
government much the way Begin regarded the British Mandate and the Maccabees
saw the Seleucids: as intruders, purveyors of a foreign culture and a threat
to Jewish existence. It mattered not that Rabin himself was Jewish, the hero
of 1967, and the elected prime minister of Israel."
Baruch Goldstein as a Hero
A particular hero of Yigal Amir and others in Israel's religious right-wing
was the American-born physician Baruch Goldstein who, on Feb. 25, 1994
murdered 29 Palestinians at prayer and injured 100 more. Goldstein, a
follower of extremist Rabbi Meir Kahane, lived in the West Bank settlement
of Kiryat Arba, adjacent to the Palestinian city of Hebron. He dressed in
the army uniform he kept as a reservist and used a military-issue assault
rifle.
Goldstein's anti-Arab views did not interfere with his role in the military
or as Kiryat Arba's doctor. "During his military service," writes Ephron,
"and later as a doctor in Kiryat Arba, Goldstein refused to treat Arabs, a
position that almost got him court-martialed. While running for Kiryat
Arba's local council in 1992 as a representative of Kahane's Kach Party, he
advocated 'transferring these hostile Arabs across the border.' He told a
journalist that Palestinians strove to inflict a second holocaust on the
Jews of Israel and that 'treasonous politicians were preventing the army
from operating effectively against them.' … 'After the signing of the Oslo
deal he seemed to have come unhinged."
Goldstein was embraced as a hero by far-right rabbis. Rabbi Yitzhak
Ginsburgh, who wrote a chapter in a book in praise of Goldstein and what he
did, was also an immigrant from the U.S. He speaks freely of Jews'
genetically-based spiritual superiority over non-Jews: "If you saw two
people drowning, a Jew and a non-Jew, the Torah says you save the Jewish
life first. If every simple cell in a Jewish body entails divinity, is a
part of God, then every strand of DNA is part of God. Therefore, there is
something special about Jewish DNA … If a Jew needs a liver, can you take
the liver of an innocent non-Jew passing by to save him? The Torah would
probably permit that. Jewish life has an infinite value."
Killing a Non-Jew Is Not "Murder"
When it comes to Goldstein's murder of 29 Palestinians at prayer, Jewish
fundamentalists refuse to acknowledge that such an act constitutes "murder,"
because in their view of Jewish law, the killing by a Jew of a non-Jew is
not regarded as murder. When asked if he was sorry about the murdered Arabs,
militant Rabbi Moshe Levinger declared: "I am sorry not only about dead
Arabs but about dead flies."
Military guards transported Goldstein's coffin to Kiryat Arba through
Palestinian villages. Rabbi Dov Lior, in his eulogy, stated that, "Goldstein
was full of love for fellow human beings. He dedicated himself to helping
others." In their book, "Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel," Norton Mezvinsky
and Israel Shahak point out that, "The term 'human beings' and 'others' in
the Halacha (religious law) refer solely to Jews."
According to the ideologies which underlie Gush Emunim, the West Bank
settler group, and Hasidism, non-Jews have "satanic souls." Shahak and
Mezvinsky note that, "The role of Satan, whose earthly embodiment according
to the Cabbala is every non-Jew, has been minimized or not mentioned by
authors who have not written about the Cabbala in Hebrew. Some authors,
therefore, have not conveyed to readers accurate accounts of general NRP
(National Religious Party) or its hardcore Gush Emunim politics."
Differentiation between Jews and Non-Jews
Common to both the Talmud and Halacha, Orthodox religious law, is a
differentiation between Jews and non-Jews. The late, highly revered Rabbi
Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the "Lubavitcher Rebbe," who headed the Chabad
movement and wielded great influence in Israel as well as the U.S.,
explained that, "The difference between a Jewish and a non-Jewish person
stems from the common expression: 'Let us differentiate.' Thus, we do not
have a case of profound change in which a person is merely on a superior
level. Rather, we have a case of 'let us differentiate' between totally
different species. This is what needs to be said about the body: the body of
a Jewish person is of a totally different quality from the body of (members)
of all nations of the world … A non-Jew's entirely reality is only vanity …
It Is written, 'And the strangers shall guard and feed your flocks' (Isaiah
61:5). The entire creation (of a non-Jew) exists only for the sake of the
Jews …"
The Jewish fundamentalists believe that God gave all of the Land of Israel
(including present-day Lebanon and other areas) to the Jews and that Arabs
living in Israel are viewed as thieves. Rabbi Israel Ariel, a fundamentalist
leader, published an atlas that designated all lands that were Jewish and
needed to be liberated. This included all areas west and south of the
Euphrates River, extending through most of Syria, much of Iraq, and present-
day Kuwait.
The Israeli government was warned about Baruch Goldstrin, but did nothing.
"In the months leading up to the shooting," Ephron reports, "Palestinians
had complained to Israeli authorities several times about a tall bearded man
named Baruch harassing worshippers at the Cave of the Patriarchs. On one
occasion, he poured acid on the carpets of the Ibrahimi Mosque. Police
buried the complaints. Though Israeli authorities responded aggressively to
any suspicion against Palestinians, they were notably slow about
investigating settlers."
Amir at Goldstein's Funeral
Yigal Amir attended Goldstein's funeral. "It would have been ungrateful of
me not to support him because he did it for all Jews."' His brother Hagai
would say years later. "You don't see a lot of people willing to sacrifice
their life in this country. A person who is willing to go against everyone
and give his own life, that's something."
Amir's outrage at Yitzhak Rabin and the Oslo agreement continued to grow, as
did his commitment to murdering the prime minister, Amir framed his
fanatical resistance to Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories in
almost entirely religious terms and specifically in the context of God's 613
commandments. "My own morality doesn't matter," he said. "It is determined
solely according to the Torah itself." To Amir, as to other Jewish
fundamentalists, the Bible was literal, word-for-word truth. "The Torah is
the brain. If the Torah tells you to do something that runs counter to your
emotions, you do what runs counter to your emotions."
In contemplating the religious justification for Rabin's murder, Amir
focused on a Talmudic principle known as rodef. "The concept," explains
Ephron, "referred to a person who pursues another person with the intent to
kill him — rodef meaning literally 'pursuer.' The law of the pursuer, or din
rodef, permitted a bystander to kill the aggressor in order to save the
innocent victim … Amir decided that Rabin fit the definition of rodef — he
was a pursuer — because his policies were undermining the safety of settlers
in the West Bank and Gaza. In his logic, Rabin was effectively chasing them
down with the intent to kill them. He also decided that Rabin was a moser, a
person who handed over Jews to a hostile power, in this case the newly
formed Palestinian Authority. In truth, of course, all the settlers remained
under Israeli rule, subject solely to Israeli law …"
Netanyahu Aligns Himself with Hardliners
During this period of growing tension, notes Ephron, "Benjamin Netanyahu
aligned himself with the hardliners and the rabble-rousers, speaking at
rallies around the country where crowds branded Rabin a traitor and a
murderer, and consorting with rabbis who'd urged soldiers to disobey
evacuation orders. At least once, Netanyahu gently scolded an audience for
its inflammatory rhetoric. 'We have an issue with political adversaries, not
enemies,' he said from the podium. But more often, he ignored it.
Occasionally he seemed swept up in it."
The idea of murdering Rabin for religious reasons was an idea Amir saw being
embraced by radical rabbis. "In a long letter full of references to the
government's 'collusion' with terrorists," writes Ephron, "three prominent
rabbis made the most explicit case that din rodef applied to Rabin. In a
long letter full of the government's 'collusion' with terrorists, the three
asked some forty Haredi sages around the world, the 'wise men of their
generation,' to rule on the matter one way or another. The letter's authors
included Dov Lior, the rabbi of Hebron who praised Baruch Goldstein as a
holy martyr at his funeral. They framed their text as an inquiry … But it
read more like an ecclesiastical putsch attempt: three religious figures
trying to have the elected government of Israel repudiated and its members
condemned to death, no less."
The letter was signed by the three rabbis — Eliezer Melamed, Daniel Shilo,
and Dov Lior. They included a phone and fax number for reply. How or whether
these religious "wise men" responded is not clear. But to people who
regarded the three as spiritual authorities, Ephron argues, "The letter
itself affirmed the Rabin government's apostate status and the importance of
toppling it by whatever means necessary. Shilo would confirm years later
that the questions were largely rhetorical and that the rabbis were hoping
with the letter to draw the Haredi community into the circle of resistance
against Rabin. Amir was already entrenched in that circle. But the ongoing
rabbinical fixation with the din rodef and din moser emboldened him. 'If I
did not get backing and I had not been representing many more people, I
would not have acted,' he would say."
Kabalistic Death Curse
At one point, a group of extremists led by former Kach activist Avigdor
Eskin gathered outside Rabin's official residence to pronounce a kind of
Kabalistic death curse against the prime minister. Ephron explains its
meaning: "Known by its Aramaic name Pulsa diNura (blaze of fire), the curse
involved a complicated series of procedures and carried certain risks for
its invokers; it would rebound against them if the target of the malediction
turned out to be innocent. But if guilty, he would die within 30 days. One
of the participants would say later that the ritual in Jerusalem had been
preceded by a more official ceremony in Safed with some 20 rabbis and
scholars, a sizable gathering of extremists … Eskin and the other
participants recited the curse from photocopied pages: 'Angels of
destruction will hit him. He is damned where he goes. His soul will
instantly leave his body … and he will not survive the month. Dark will be
his path and God's Angels will chase him. A disaster he has never
experienced will beget him and all curses known in the Torah will apply to
him.'"
Benjamin Netanyahu castigated Rabin for relying on the backing of Arab-
Israeli parliament members to get his agreement through parliament.
Lawmakers had yet to vote on the Oslo accords but it was clear that Rabin
would need the representatives of Israel's Arab minority to support it in
order for the deal to pass. "Though Arab-Israelis were full-fledged citizens
and made up one-sixth of the population," states Ephron, "Netanyahu and many
other rightists were now arguing, unblushingly, that an endorsement that
rested on the support of non-Jews would lack legitimacy. 'The Jewish
majority of the state of Israel has not approved the agreement,' he said.
'We will fight and we will bring down the government.'"
One of Rabin's cabinet ministers, Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, got caught up in a
protesting mob. A retired general who had served in an elite commando unit
and suffered war wounds, Ben-Eliezer told friends later that he felt more
threatened in the car than in his toughest moments on the battlefield. When
he reached the Knesset building, Ben-Eliezer tracked down Benjamin Netanyahu
in one of the corridors and told him, "You better restrain your people,
otherwise it will end in murder. They tried to kill me just now … If someone
is murdered, the blood will be on your hands."
Civil War
"To many Israelis," writes Ephron, "the murder of Yitzhak Rabin felt like an
assault by one political camp against the other, another step toward civil
war. Amir clearly stood on the margins of the right-wing camp. But its
mainstream leaders had goaded the extremists with their ugly rhetoric and
its rabbis had furnished the religious justification for violence. Even now,
as the horror of the country's first political assassination set in, some
Israelis celebrated."
Yigal Amir's murder of Yitzhak Rabin was, in the end, a success for Israel's
right-wing. The Oslo peace process came to an end, and Benjamin Netanyahu
defeated Shimon Peres in the election following the assassination. In fact,
Yigal Amir was able to cast his vote for Netanyahu from prison. "Israel's
election law allowed convicts to vote at polling stations in prison," notes
Ephron. "Around midmorning, five guards escorted Amir from his cell to a
booth at the Chalai Kedar penitentionary, where he was presently serving his
sentence in solitary confinement. The guards waited while he stuffed a
square of paper with Netanyahu's name on it into an envelope and then
slipped it into a cardboard box. Thomas L. Friedman, The New York Times
columnist, would refer to Amir later as the Israeli who voted twice — first
with a bullet and then with a ballot."
In early 2010, after he had been away from Israel for years, Dan Ephron
returned to serve as Newsweek's Jerusalem bureau chief. He writes that, "The
country I returned to was in many ways a more livable place. it felt safer,
more prosperous, and less troubled than it had been for years. But the
terrible violence and hostility of the second intifada had left even the
moderates among Israelis and Palestinians feeling alienated from each other
and simply fed up. the fact that life in Israel was good despite the absence
of peace meant that there was little incentive to revive the process … Many
Israelis felt they had nothing to gain from a resumption of negotiations …
Instead of pining for peace, they're now asking: who needs it?"
Settler Movement Doubled In Size
While Ephron was away from Israel, he points out, the settler movement,
which had viewed Rabin's Oslo Accord as an act of treachery, had more than
doubled in size since his assassination and greatly expanded its political
power. Its representatives in parliament would come to include Moshe
Feiglin, who had been convicted of sedition for organizing rowdy protests
during the Rabin era. Ephron writes that, "The parliament I was now covering
in Israel also included a record number of Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Jews
— who form the country's two fastest-growing communities and whose views on
the issues of war and peace are consistently hawkish. When Israelis
reelected Netanyahu in 2013 — for a third time in 18 years — I wrote in
Newsweek that the religious right-wing parties opposed to ceding substantial
portions of the West Bank might have something akin to a permanent
majority."
The assassination of Yitzhak Rabin was, some observers argue, unusual in its
impact. Writing in The New Yorker, Dexter Filkins notes that, "Assassination
is an unpredictable act. Historically speaking, high-profile political
killings have been as likely to produce backlashes and unintended
consequences as they have been to achieve the assassin's goal … Yet the
killing of Yitzhak Rabin … bids to be one of history's most effective
political murders. Two years earlier, Rabin, setting aside a lifetime of
enmity, appeared on the White House lawn with Yasir Arafat … to agree to a
framework for limited Palestinian self-rule in the occupied territories …
Within months of Rabin's death, Benjamin Netanyahu was the new prime
minister and the prospects for wider-ranging peace … were dead. Twenty years
later, Netanyahu is into his fourth term, and the kind of peace that Rabin
envisioned seems more distant than ever."
In a previously unpublished recording of a 1976 interview with Rabin, he can
be heard calling the still nascent West Bank settler movement "comparable to
a cancer," and warning that Israel risked becoming an "apartheid" state if
it annexed and absorbed the Arab population. This recording was publicized
for the first time in a documentary about the assassination. According to
The Times of Israel (Sept. 25, 2015), "Rabin's imperturbable monotone
betrays increasing anger as he complains about the settlements growing in
number and size … 'I see Gush ('The Bloc of the Faithful,') the
ideologically driven founders of the settlement movement) as one of the most
acute dangers in the whole phenomenon of the State of Israel. Gush Emunim is
not a settlement movement. it is comparable to a cancer on the tissue of
Israel's democratic society. It's a phenomenon of an organization that takes
the law into its own hands. I don't say with certainty that we won't reach
the (point of) evacuation, because of the (Palestinian) population. I don't
think it's possible to contain over the long term. If we don't want to get
to apartheid, a million and a half (more) Arabs inside a Jewish state.'"
Holding Netanyahu Responsible
Leah Rabin, the widow of the slain prime minister, continues to hold
Benjamin Netanyahu responsible for creating the atmosphere which led to the
assassination. The irony of Netanyahu leading commemorations of Rabin's
murder was clear to all. Writing in The Forward (Oct. 29, 2015), J.J.
Goldberg declares: "The assassination ultimately succeeded. It brought the
opposition to power and left Rabin's vision in shambles. They now write the
history, but they can't admit that the calamitous act was a result of
overzealous pursuit of their own cause. What they're left with is an
incoherent insistence that killing prime ministers is, well, very naughty."
Now, those who demonized Rabin and created the atmosphere in which his
murder became an acceptable Interpretation of Jewish law are running Israel.
Extremism is growing and the extremists are part of the government. A former
head of the Shin Bet Security Service says that the threat posed to Israel
at the present time by a terrorist underground of religious far-right
zealots has reached unprecedented levels, worse than in the lead-up to
Rabin's assassination. Carmi Gillon, who headed the agency when Rabin was
murdered, says, "We're at a worse point than before the assassination of
Rabin." He said that the far-right extremists, such as those currently in
detention for their suspected firebombing of a Palestinian family's home in
July, are "a professional underground in every regard."
In December, two young Israelis were charged with murder in the attack in
the West Bank village of Duma, which killed a Palestinian toddler and his
parents. Israeli police said that the two suspects were part of a group of
Jewish youths who have been involved in nationalistically motivated crimes
against Palestinians and other minorities. For some in Israel, those charged
with this terrorist attack have become heroes. In December, a widely viewed
video showed young Jewish extremists celebrating the death of the
Palestinians in Duma. A 25-second video filmed at a wedding shows a room of
jumping, dancing men wearing white skullcaps, many with the long sidelocks
of Orthodox Jews. Some of them are brandishing guns and knives.
Israeli Authorities Drag Their Feet
According to The New York Times, "Two of them appear to be stabbing pieces
of paper they held in their hands, which the t.v. station identified as
pictures of an 18-month old child. Ali Dawabsha, who was burned to death in
a July 31 arson attack … Palestinians and their supporters say the arson
attack and the celebratory video were inevitable, complaining that the
Israeli authorities have for years dragged their feet on finding and
prosecuting extremist Jews who have physically attacked them and their
property."
In an article, "Why Are Israelis So Shocked by the 'Wedding of Hate' Video,"
Amira Hass, writing in Haaretz (Dec. 28, 2015) notes that "The horror
expressed by the Israeli mainstream at the 'blood wedding' video is more
repulsive than the clip itself. The shock is at the messianic, disruptive
representation of the settlement enterprise, the handiwork of successive
generations of the Israeli mainstream. The police are shocked. Every month …
a 'sivur she'arim' is held in the Muslim quarter of Jerusalem's old city.
The ceremonial circling of the gates of the Temple Mount, accompanied by
shofar-blowing and reading of psalms, is organized by El Har Hamor, a
nonprofit association that seeks to rebuild the Temple. The Israel Police
provide security for the event, which takes place between shuttered
Palestinian stores. Men in white kippot dance, sidelocks bouncing, just like
in the video — and pound on closed doors. According to documentation from
October, they also sing songs similar to the ones in the video ('Burn Down
the Mosque' and 'We will avenge one of the two eyes of Palestinians, curse
them') and while the Arabs shut themselves into their homes, the dancers
chant, 'Death To Arabs.' Not only are the police there, they also try to
prevent leftists from recording the events."
In the Judea and Samaria district, the West Bank, police systematically
close investigations of Israeli violence against Palestinians. Out of 1,104
investigations opened after Palestinians complained of violent injury or
property damage over a 10-year period, from 2005 to August 2015, 940 or
91.6% were closed without charges being filed, according to Yesh Din, a
legal defense NGO. In 85% of the cases, the closure was due to failure of
the police to investigate.
Case Closed Despite Witnesses
In one typical case, reports Haaretz, in October 2012, a few Israeli Jews
from Combatants for Peace accompanied Palestinians from the village of Jalud
on their first olive harvest in ten years. In all those years the IDF had
kept them from working their land to avoid friction with the messianic
settlers from local outposts such as Esh Kadesh. Masked Israelis,
accompanied by an armed, unmasked Israeli in civilian clothes, came, threw a
stun grenade, fired into the air, and attacked the harvesters with clubs,
injuring three Israelis and two Palestinians. Soldiers and Border Police
officers who were there fired tear gas and stun grenades at Palestinians.
The case was closed despite the wounded Israelis and the presence of
soldiers who were witnesses.
In Amira Hass's view, "The culture of 'unknown offenders,' 'insufficient
evidence' and do-nothing soldiers nurtured the atmosphere of 'we can run
riot and no one will touch us' seen in the wedding video … Thanks to the
mainstream, the West Bank has become the land of unlimited possibilities for
the average Israeli Jew … This is the soil that gave rise to those young
dancers … The messianism was born of the incessant secular Israeli disregard
for international law and justice, which prohibit settlements in occupied
territory. Their deranged messianism is fed by the consistent deranged
political objective of the settlement enterprise: to thwart the possibility
of living in equality and peace with the Palestinian people."
Israeli commentators have begun to compare the rising Jewish extremism to
ISIS. Liberal Zionist and Haaretz columnist Asher Schechter wrote a piece
entitled "Meet Judeo-ISIS: The Inevitable Result of Israel's Presence in the
West Bank." Even so mainstream a figure as former Israeli Defense Minister
Moshe Arens wrote an article, "The Jewish Equivalent of ISIS."
Anti-Christian Activity
In recent days, there has been an escalation of anti-Christian activity from
Israeli Jewish extremists. The Galilee's symbolically and religiously
significant Church of the Multiplication of the Loaves and Fish was
firebombed by militants who scrawled on its wall, "False idols will be
destroyed." The anti-Arab group, Lehava, which opposes the presence of both
Muslims and Christians in the country, has stepped up its activism,
including a protest at a Christmas celebration in front of the Jerusalem
YMCA. "The Arabs won't defeat us with knives, and the Christians won't buy
us with presents," the Lehava protestors chanted. In December, Bentzi
Gopstein, the head of Lehava, wrote an opinion piece in Kooker, an ultra-
Orthodox online publication, calling for the outright removal of Christians
from Israel.
He wrote: "Missionary work must not be given a foothold. Let's throw the
vampires out of our land before they drink blood again." The Israel
Religious Action Center, a religious rights group affiliated with the
country's Reform Judaism movement, has called on legal authorities to launch
a criminal investigation into what it views as Lehava's incitement to
violence. Orly Erez-Likhovski, the center's legal director, says that,
"Unfortunately, against this blatant incitement, accompanied by unruly
violence, there's deafening silence by law enforcement."
Many believe that Judaism's moral and ethical values lie in tatters. Rabbi
Jeremy Kalmanofsky of Ansche Chesed Congregation in Manhattan, declares: "I
feel ashamed, appalled and heartsick, watching Judaism slouch toward
Bethlehem. Yigal Amir was not the first fanatic in whom Torah teachings
nurtures a murderous hatred. But he represents an early bellwether of
Judaism transformed before our eyes, from an ennobling path of wisdom,
devotion, and ethics to an angry, bloody weapon … Jews must recognize that
there are places in the Palestinian Territories that are basically
Mississippi in 1963 — places where the powerful may kill the powerless
without fear of prosecution … Before our very eyes, Judaism and the Torah
are increasingly captured by those with hatred in their hearts and blood on
their hands. What we need above all is a religion of Chesed, of agape, of
love. The Torah of Israel depends on it."
A Savage, Unrepairable Society
There are Israelis who share this view, although their numbers seem to be
declining. Assaf Gavrom, a novelist who was an IDF soldier in Gaza 27 years
ago, during the first intifada, writes that, "We seem to be in a fast and
alarming downward swirl into a savage, unrepairable society. There is only
one way to respond to what's happening in Israel today. We must stop the
occupation. Not for peace with the Palestinians or for their sake (though
they have surely suffered at our hands for too long) … No, we must stop the
occupation for ourselves. So that we can look ourselves in the eyes … So
that we can return to being human."
In his book, Killing a King, Dan Ephron has written an epic story which
helps the reader to understand Israel's troubled past and precarious future.
"Had Rabin lived," he writes, "he might plausibly have re-shaped Israel
broadly and permanently. In killing the Israeli leader, Amir had done better
than the assassins of Lincoln, Kennedy, and King, whose policies had gained
momentum as a result of their murders. During the years of his imprisonment,
he had the satisfaction of watching Rabin's legacy steadily evaporate …
(Dalia, Rabin's daughter) has come to view the last twenty years as the
story of a power shift from the likes of her father — secular, pragmatic and
moderate — to the advocates of the settler movement: ethnically chauvinist,
uncompromising, often messianic. That the assassination would mark the birth
of this new Israel is nothing short of horrifying to her. When a foreign
correspondent asked Dalia at a small gathering of journalists a few years
ago whether she and the Israeli mainstream had diverged at some point, she
nodded without hesitation. 'I don't feel I'm part of what most people in
this country are willing to do.'"
Many View Amir as a Hero
The family of Yigal Amir are viewed as heroes in many sectors of Israeli
society. Amir's brother Hagai, who served time in prison for his role in the
assassination plot, is already free and is comfortably back in Israeli
society. Ephron reports that, "The Amirs seemed to lead something close to
normal lives. On one of the evenings I interviewed Hagai, he and the family
had just returned from an outing with friends at the beach in Herzliya. On
another night, they came from a wedding in Jerusalem. They were invited by
the bride's father, a prominent right-wing activist. 'We have a lot of
support,' Hagai told me. 'People come up to us on the street and say it
clearly … If I had any reason to doubt it, Hagai's Facebook page seemed to
bear it out. He created it soon after his release to post his own political
observations and advocate on his brother's behalf. In a typical comment on
his wall, one supporter wrote, 'We're all with you, Hagai Amir. We hope your
brother will be freed soon.' Another wrote: 'The drinks will be on me.'
Within a few months he had more than 600 friends … The fact that fully a
quarter of Israelis now supports commuting of Yigal Amir's sentence make it
not quite unimaginable."
In Ephron's view, "Through the lens of the murder, much can be gleaned about
Israel today … Rabin probably stood a better chance of forging a durable
reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians than any leader before or
since. That we'll never know how close he would have come is one of the
exasperating consequences of the assassination."
Killing a King causes the reader to wonder what Israel would look like today
had Yitzhak Rabin lived. The Israel it portrays is one few Americans
understand or recognize. Israel is widely considered to share Western values
of democracy. But Israel's right-wing, as Dan Ephron shows us, has an
entirely different agenda. And at the present time, it seems to be in
charge. Sadly, the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, rather than discrediting
it, has propelled it to power.
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