Which israeli prime minister assassinated

Agents of the Shin Bet, the internal-security service, were aware of ominous chatter in extremist circles, but they were not prepared for the threat. They should have been: little more than a year earlier, Baruch Goldstein, a resident of an isolated West Bank settlement called Kiryat Arba, walked into a mosque at the Cave of the Patriarchs, a contested holy site in the Palestinian city of Hebron, and killed twenty-nine worshippers and wounded a hundred and twenty-five before being beaten to death.

Goldstein became a folk hero to many people in the settler community. After the massacre, Rabin considered dismantling a nearby settlement, Tel Rumeida. But settler leaders warned him that such an action could provoke an armed reaction, and a former chief Ashkenazi rabbi commanded Israeli Army soldiers to disobey an evacuation order.

Rabin backed down. The Shin Bet kept a file on Amir that contained no more than a few sentences. In the months leading up to the assassination, Raviv heard Amir vow to kill Rabin several times, but apparently did not take him seriously. The rabbis based their justification on the concept of din rodef , a Hebrew term that describes a person who is stalking a defenseless man. Under certain interpretations of the Talmud, it is obligatory to kill a rodef in order to save the intended victim.

Amir later told his interrogators that he had consulted several rabbis in search of an official sanction but could never find one. His brother, Hagai, insisted that he had. As Ephron points out, it apparently never occurred to Amir that he himself was a rodef. As the Oslo Accords unfolded, and the terror attacks continued, Israeli public opinion began to shift from hope to fear.

Rabin and Arafat now saw themselves as partners in a perilous endeavor. Rabin believed that if Arafat did not prevail Hamas would. In Israel, the extreme wing of the anti-Oslo coalition capitalized on the rising insecurity to excoriate Rabin; some protesters began comparing him to Hitler. The crowd, at Kings of Israel Square, in Tel Aviv, was enormous—about a hundred thousand people—dwarfing anything the anti-Oslo camp had put together. The main fear among the security services was a Palestinian suicide bomber; Rabin himself could not imagine that he would be killed by a Jew.

Neither, apparently, could his bodyguards; when the moment came, Amir pushed through the crowd and shot Rabin twice in the back.

Arafat, hearing of the assassination, wept. Peres waited three months to call an election, figuring that he would first conclude a peace treaty with Syria. But a treaty never materialized, and Hamas kept attacking, while the Likud leader, Netanyahu, vowed to make Israelis safe. Under American pressure, Netanyahu paid lip service to Oslo during his first, three-year administration. But the peace process never really recovered. In four hundred-plus pages, there is almost no mention of the changes that have transformed the Israeli polity in the past six decades, and surprisingly little discussion of the steady growth in the settlement population, which now exceeds half a million.

The United Nations and most foreign governments consider them illegal, but for him they are a political difficulty to be finessed. There is no talk of justice. Ross describes a situation, in , when Mahmoud Abbas, the President of the Palestinian Authority, refused to negotiate with Netanyahu unless he agreed to extend a moratorium on settlement construction, and the Obama Administration tried and failed to broker a compromise. Ross is as impatient with Palestinian efforts to gain a more sympathetic hearing at the United Nations and elsewhere as he is sensitive to the political needs of Israeli Prime Ministers.

Yet he says almost nothing about the political realities that have shaped the situation, or how those realities might be changed. He evinces almost no sympathy for similar pressures on Abbas and others at the Palestinian Authority.

Only near the end of the book does he bring himself to criticize Israel. This may be true, but where does this leave American policy? And where does it leave Israel? His famous handshake with Palestine Liberation Organization chairman Yasser Arafat on the South Lawn of the White House unleashed a tide of support for Israel, paving the way for, among other things, the subsequent completion of a peace treaty between Israel and the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.

Dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians—the latter of whom broke off contact with the Trump White House in —could conceivably resume. The sticking point might become the influence of progressive Democrats over US mediation of the conflict.

The decision of Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez D-NY to cancel her participation in a recent memorial for Yitzhak Rabin, an event organized by the ultra-dovish Americans for Peace Now, could be the harbinger of a new epoch in which even the most liberal elements of Israel are in fundamental disconnect with some members of the incoming ruling party in the United States. Follow him on Twitter ShalomLipner. By Shalom Lipner.

By Jonathan H. Your opinion can help us make it better. We use cookies to improve our service for you. You can find more information in our data protection declaration. It left an indelible mark on Israeli politics and society still felt today. On the evening of November 4, , tens of thousands gathered in Tel Aviv for a rally on the Square of the Kings of Israel, now known as Rabin Square.

Then Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin had doubted whether enough people would turn out for the pro-peace rally planned for that evening. Palestinian terror attacks were a regular event and incitement from the right-wing camp against him and his politics had been simmering for weeks.

At the event, Rabin spoke about his plan to make peace with the Palestinians. The huge crowd cheered him. And then, as he walked down from the stage towards his waiting car, he was hit by two bullets. A young Israeli extremist, Yigal Amir, shot Rabin at close range.

He believed the prime minister was a traitor. Shortly afterwards, Rabin was pronounced dead at a hospital in Tel Aviv. Uri Dromi, then director at the government press office, was at the cinema in Jerusalem when the news broke.

He rushed back to Tel Aviv. From that moment on, I was like a machine, I didn't feel anything. I just thought that I had to take care of the all coverage of the funeral with hundreds of journalists.

Only at the funeral, two days later, did it really sink in: "Suddenly, the coffin is brought in. That was the moment that I understood that in this coffin lies my hero, Yitzhak Rabin. And then, like everybody else, I started to cry. It dawned on me this is it.