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.
All week, mourners visited Rabin’s grave side at Mount Herzl cemetery and his widow’s home, leaving flowers, candles in makeshift cans or just a handwritten note. Tonight, at the end of seven days of mourning, hundreds of thousands, the largest crowd ever seen in Israel, are expected to gather at the Kings of Israel Square in Tel Aviv for a ceremony renaming the plaza where Rabin died in his honour.
Peres, the acting prime minister, will try to move on. He plans to push forward the peace process, which he helped broker and which cost Rabin his life. It will be a difficult task. Rabin, a gruff old soldier, was trusted by Israelis to look out for their security. Peres’s language is visionary, but he lacks his predecessor’s credibility.
The process is too far advanced, however, to be easily derailed. Arafat has ruled Gaza for more than a year and, starting this week with the Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank town of Jenin, will take over the West Bank in a phased process that will culminate in elections in January. The hard decisions have been pushed through. Rabin’s death may help move along the peace process that he came to reluctantly but once converted pursued like one of his military campaigns. A poll released on Friday showed the proportion of Israelis supporting the peace process had risen by 31%.
And the outrage Israelis feel at the assassination of Rabin by a Jewish fundamentalist may win Peres support from those who now see the right as tainted because it provided fertile soil for such an extremist as Amir. With the death of Yitzhak Rabin, Israelis may no longer see a peacemaker as a defeatist, but as a hero.
Israel’s peace hopes wither: Netanyahu victory gives voice to the hardliners
2 June 1996
Marie Colvin, Gaza; Andy Goldberg, Tel Aviv
It was a mournful gathering. Meeting for lunch in Gaza yesterday, Palestinian politicians mulled over the results of Israel’s election with an air of grieving relatives at a wake. The surprise election of Binyamin Netanyahu as prime minister, they grimly concurred, could prove a mortal blow to peace. Even the menu seemed to symbolise their worst fears. They were eating roast dove.
The Likud leader, they recalled, had vowed his first act would be to close Orient House, the Palestinians’ diplomatic outpost in Jerusalem.
What is more, he plans to ignore Shimon Peres’s promise to withdraw Israeli troops from the West Bank city of Hebron, which was to be the next step on the road to a permanent peace. ‘We feel the Israelis have voted against peace,’ sighed Um Jihad, a Palestinian minister. ‘There are difficult days for us ahead.’
The shock at the rise of Netanyahu was not limited to the Palestinian camp. President Bill Clinton congratulated him, as did Peres, his defeated rival and Labour leader. Yet they were stunned. Clinton had urged Israelis to vote for peace, in a thinly disguised endorsement of Peres.
Another worried man was Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader. He had stayed awake until 7am on Thursday after the previous day’s voting. He watched the returns on television in anxious disbelief. Netanyahu won the vote by just one percentage point. Yesterday an adviser said the Palestinian leader was ‘in a state of shock’. Israel’s political status quo had been turned on its head.
The man responsible relaxed yesterday with his wife and children at their home in Jerusalem. Within hours of his victory he had begun to look as if he had been a prime minister all his life. He waved regally to a crowd before stepping into a chauffeur-driven Cadillac for a trip to the Wailing Wall, where he slipped a thank you note to God into a crack. To the delight of cameramen, he ruffled the blond locks of his two young sons as they arrived home.
He has never even held a cabinet post and at 46 is a beginner by contrast with Peres, who had counted on five decades of experience and a Nobel prize for peace to secure him victory. Yet Netanyahu espouses an old idea: Israel’s paramount need, he believes, is for strong government that can provide security for Jews. He has consequently ruled out an Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights, effectively scuttling any chance of a peace deal with Syria. He has promised to resume Jewish settlement in the West Bank and said he would send the army and Shin Bet, the Israeli intelligence service,