MURDER IN THE NAME OF GOD: The Plot to Kill Yitzhak Rabin. - Review - book reviews

Washington Monthly, Dec, 1998 by Joshua A. Brook

Yitzhak Rabin's murder revealed a lethal rift in Israeli society

MURDER IN THE NAME OF GOD: The Plot to Kill Yitzhak Rabin

By Michael Karpin and Ina Friedman Metropolitan Books, $24.95

In October 1995, on the eve of Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement, a group of Israelis led by Avigdor Eskin gathered outside the home of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Wrapped in prayer shawls, they intoned the ancient Aramaic chant Pulsa da-Nura ("Lashes of Fire"), a Kabbalistic curse: "I deliver to you, the angels of wrath and ire, Yitzhak, the son of Rosa Rabin, that you may smother him and the specter of him, and cast him into bed, and dry up his wealth, and plague his thoughts, and scatter his mind that he may be steadily diminished until he reaches his death. Put to death the cursed Yitzhak. May [he] be damned, damned, damned!" After Rabin's assassination one month later--as Israel and the world mourned a great statesman--Eskin boasted of his prowess on Israeli television. The curse worked.

The "lethal potential of words" is the foremost theme of Murder in the Name of God, an account of the Rabin assassination, its aftermath, and the campaign of incitement that precipitated it. Israeli journalists Michael Karpin and Ina Friedman paint a chilling portrait of the killer, Yigal Amir, and the ideology of radical religious nationalism that motivated him. They elucidate the twisted logic of rabbis in Israel and the United States who distorted ancient Jewish legal concepts to give religious sanction to political murder; and they recount how the mainstream opponents of the Oslo accords collaborated with violent extremists in a campaign to wreck the peace process by vilifying Rabin.

While the signing of the Wye Memorandum by Rabin's nemesis Benjamin Netanyahu, on the third anniversary of the assassination, is an ironic vindication of Rabin's policy of territorial compromise, the bitter right-wing protests that greeted the agreement were sad reminders that violent rhetoric still poisons Israeli political debate. (One public opinion poll indicated that 60 percent of Israelis consider another assassination to be a distinct possibility.) And the divisions seen at the memorial ceremonies for Rabin reveal Israelis' inability to establish a shared collective memory. Some commentators noted the paucity of Orthodox Israelis at memorial events; while another right-wing commentator deplored the left for expropriating Rabin's memory, "as if only they were capable of mourning his tragic death" Karpin and Friedman are unabashed partisans in Israel's ongoing Kulturkampf and sometimes indulge in the irresponsible rhetoric of the far left--referring, for instance, to the Six-Day War as a "blitzkrieg" (technically correct in the sense of "lightning war" but evoking a morally odious parallel). Also problematic is the authors' technique of reconstructing conversations to which they could not possibly have been privy, without adequate footnotes or other documentation. While faithful to the facts, Karpin and Friedman sometimes omit information unhelpful to their case. For example, their portrayal of Orthodoxy as almost monolithically opposed to the peace process belies a more complicated reality. Despite these flaws, Murder in the Name of God will ensure that the history of one of Israel's greatest tragedies will not fall victim to willful nationalist revisionism.

While the authors debunk the many conspiracy theories surrounding the Rabin assassination, they conclude that Yigal Amir did not act alone. Rabin's murder by a religious nationalist extremist was the natural result of a long-standing sickness in the Israeli body politic. The penultimate chapter, titled simply, "Failure," decries the decision by the Shamgar Commission, which conducted Israel's official inquiry into the assassination, not to examine the campaign of anti-Rabin incitement. "Failure" could just as easily be the title of the entire book: a catalogue of failure on the part of virtually every segment of Israeli society to check the rising legitimacy and violent tendencies of religio-nationalist extremism.

With their party demoralized and indebted after losing the 1992 election, Likud leaders were incapable of mobilizing opposition to Oslo. To mount an effective campaign, the Likud affiliated itself with an adhoc umbrella group coordinating the activities of right-wing politicians, radical activists, and settler leaders. The coalition linked establishment figures such as Knesset members and prominent settlers with a motley crew of cranks and racists. Israel's political leaders--never known for their reasoned tones--failed to halt the escalation of vitriolic rhetoric and physical violence by the most radical foes of Rabin's Oslo policy.

Early in the anti-Oslo campaign, organizers abandoned the strategy of exposing the perceived flaws of the agreement itself, in favor of a personal attack on the Prime Minister. They sought to break him psychologically and drive him from office, just as, in their view, the left had done to Menachem Begin during the Lebanon war. One participant recalls a planning session at which a "select group of psychologists, public opinion analysts, an advertising executive, and a public relations expert [participated] in a closed, professional, detailed discussion [entitled] `How to Break Yitzhak Rabin.'" Anti-Oslo rallies soon featured large photomontages of Rabin wearing Yasser Arafat's headdress or Adolf Eichmann's Gestapo uniform.