[The Guardian] A sacred killing? Did rabbis bless Rabin's murder, asks Colin Shindler Saturday April 17, 1999 Murder in the Name of God: The Plot to Kill Yitzhak Rabin by Michael Karpin and Ina Friedman 292pp, Granta, �13.99. On November 4, 1995, at the end of a jubilant rally for peace, Yigal Amir, a religious student, pumped two bullets into Yitzhak Rabin and a third into his bodyguard. The shots ruptured his spleen, severed major arteries in his chest and shattered his spinal cord. An hour and a half later, the Israeli Prime Minister died on the operating table. The object of the act was to politically wreck the Oslo Accords and reverse the rapprochement with the historic enemy, the Palestinians. A few months later, in the wake of a bombing campaign by Islamicists, bent on martyrdom and opposed to Arafat, the leader of the right-wing Likud party, Benjamin Netanyahu, claimed a slender victory over Rabin's ill-fated successor, Shimon Peres. Land was now placed before peace and when Netanyahu visited London at the end of 1997, several hundred Jews, claiming to speak for a probable majority of the British community, accused him in an open letter of 'emptying the peace process of all content'. It would seem therefore that, so far, Yigal Amir has been more than successful in his strategy. Amir was a braggart who boasted to several student acquaintances that he intended to kill Rabin. In 1995, he had tried on four separate occasions to get within firing range of the Prime Minister, each time he either received a 'sign' that the time had not come or he simply bottled out. Amir was neither an habitual loner nor a deranged fanatic. He was a far-right activist who was known to the Shabak (General Security Services). What then pushed Amir to cross the threshold to murder? Karpin and Friedman argue convincingly that he was the instrument of a rising tide of unprincipled incitement by the mainstream opponents of the Oslo Accord which included Netanyahu himself. Indeed some right-wing leaders such as Benny Begin and Dan Meridor condemned Netanyahu for his opportunism and refused to mount this bandwagon. Amir, the authors claim, stood in the centre of three concentric circles. The innermost consisted of nine students none of whom were known to the Shabak. The second circle consisted of hundreds of religious nationalists and sections of the ultra-orthodox who had declared their willingness to commit acts of violence against left-wing politicians. The outermost circle embraced a wide network of right-wing activists, which in turn drew tens of thousands of sympathisers. The authors suggest [Image] that 'together they created an atmosphere which legitimised the act secretly planned by Yigal Amir'. Full-time activists and settlers operated a network which was targeted on breaking Rabin mentally. Their operations were approved by representatives of four political parties, including Netanyahu on behalf of the Likud, and whose costs were defrayed by funds originally allocated to the parties by the national treasury. Thus the epithets flew in a rising tide of paranoia: traitor, Nazi, dog, antisemite, collaborator, schizoid, alcoholic. The ultra-orthodox Hashavua succinctly commented: 'The day will come when the Israeli public will bring Rabin and Peres into court, with the alternatives being the gallows or the insane asylum.' In a private poll carried out for him a few weeks before his death, Rabin was informed that an estimated 800 Israelis were willing to commit murder to halt the peace process and some 6,000 were prepared to take up arms against the army and the police. Yet Rabin was anxious to avoid overt confrontation which might spark off a wider conflict amongst the Jews. He overruled two Chiefs-of-Staff Ehud Barak, now the Labour Party candidate for prime minister and Amnon Lipkin-Shahak, a leading member of the recently established Centre party who wanted to evacuate some settlements. Did Amir receive rabbinical authorisation to commit the murder? While Amir provided any information that his interrogators required, he refused to clarify this point, although initially he stated that he had secured rabbinical approval. Significantly, in a letter to a hostile rabbi from prison, Amir's brother wrote: 'Your eminence attacks my brother and calls him wicked. Does your eminence know why he did what he did? My brother did it for the sake of the Lord, in the purest possible way. He received a halachic (Jewish law) ruling from a rabbi, and he acted according to halacha, and with sanctity, knowing that he was probably going to die for it.' Although some eminent settler rabbis were called in, the police were clearly out of their depth in dealing with such venerable personalities and their Talmudic interpretations. This line of investigation was soon dropped. This journalistic account would have been improved with less stereotyping of the religious way of life, but it is undoubtedly a well argued, factual and highly disturbing investigation into the political cesspool of Israeli extremism and its rationalisation of incitement and cold-blooded murder. * Colin Shindler is a Research Fellow in Hebrew and Israeli Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. � Copyright Guardian Media Group plc. 1999
