CONFIRMED
The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin
On the night of Saturday, November 4, 1995, the Prime Minister of Israel, Yitzhak Rabin — soldier, chief of staff in the Six-Day War, and a year earlier a Nobel Peace laureate for the Oslo Accords — stood on a stage above a crowd of more than a hundred thousand people in Kings of Israel Square in Tel Aviv and sang 'Shir LaShalom,' the Song for Peace. He folded the printed lyrics and put them in his breast pocket. A little after half past nine he came down the stairs at the side of the city hall toward his waiting car, and a 25-year-old law student named Yigal Amir, who had been loitering in the supposedly sterile parking area for some forty minutes, stepped forward and fired a semi-automatic pistol loaded with hollow-point bullets into his back. Rabin was driven to the Ichilov hospital a few hundred metres away and died on the operating table; the song sheet in his pocket came back soaked in his blood, and his aide read its scorched, stained words aloud to the world. Amir did not run. He was seized on the spot, and he confessed at once, calmly, explaining that he had acted alone and on what he understood to be the command of Jewish religious law, to stop a prime minister he regarded as a traitor handing the Land of Israel to its enemies. None of the central facts of the case has ever been in doubt. And yet Rabin's killing has generated, in the decades since, both a thriving undergrowth of conspiracy theory — that the bullets were blanks, that the Shin Bet staged it, that Rabin was killed elsewhere — and a set of genuinely uncomfortable questions that have nothing to do with those fantasies: how the country's security service failed so completely; what its own agent provocateur, embedded in the violent fringe and personally acquainted with the assassin, knew and when; and how a year of placards depicting a sitting prime minister in an SS uniform curdled into a gunshot. This article separates the two — the established murder from the manufactured mystery, and both from the failures that were real.
Assassinations & Disappearances
1995
