Killing a King: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel by Dan Ephron

Shabak was that certain rabbis held more sway with the ideological core of the community than the state itself with its laws and institutions—that their theological rulings stood above the decisions of the democratically elected government. The Rabin government’s willingness to cede land to the Palestinians had put these two competing authorities, the state and the rabbis (at least a segment of them), on a collision course.
    The massacre presented an opportunity to address this Kulturkampf, though it wasn’t clear to people around the table whether Rabin recognized the extent of the challenge it posed to the country’s civilian authority. His Labor Party and the people it represented—secular, largely Ashkenazi liberals—had been hegemonic throughmost of his lifetime. Rabin, the scion of Palmach and the army’s chief of staff during the 1967 war, was the very embodiment of Israeliness. That the settlement movement, with its redemption fixations and its rabbinical authorities, was anything more than a fringe phenomenon seemed difficult for Rabin to grasp. And yet, for years now, the tide had been shifting in their favor.
    With the hours ticking down until the start of the Sabbath, the ministers made two decisions. The first was to initiate the legal procedure for outlawing Kach and its offshoot, Kahane Chai. Both groups espoused racist ideologies and preached violence against the Palestinians. Banning them would make it easier to go after their top activists, several of whom lived in Hebron and Kiryat Arba. They also decided to form a commission of inquiry to probe the circumstances of the massacre, including how Goldstein managed to get past the soldiers at the entrance to the Cave of the Patriarchs and whether new arrangements for sharing the shrine were necessary. Rabin opposed a commission. He felt its very formation would imply that the government shared the blame for the massacre. But around the table, he was outnumbered.
    At some point the cabinet ministers took up a more ambitious idea: evacuating the settlers from Hebron. Some five hundred Jews lived in several enclaves of Hebron’s city center—the radical fringe of the settler population. They tangled regularly with Palestinians in the city and with Israeli soldiers as well. The army regularly stationed three battalions in Hebron to safeguard the Jews—meaning soldiers outnumbered settlers by at least two to one—a huge toll on the military. How they had come to live in the city was the story of the settler enterprise itself: They squatted there illegally and eventually won retroactive approval from authorities. Even dovish governments had a habit of yielding to the settlers, often on the heels of a Palestinian terrorist attack.
    The Oslo Accord did not require Rabin to evacuate a single settlement. The fate of the 140 or so Jewish communities scattered across the West Bank and Gaza would be determined in the final negotiations between the two sides, which were set to begin in 1996. But Rabin did commit to handing Arafat control of all Palestinian cities in theWest Bank in the second stage of the agreement, including Hebron. The fact that Jews lived in the heart of the city would complicate the endeavor. The massacre, which revealed to Israelis more starkly than ever the fanatic undergrowth of the settlement enterprise, seemed to offer an opportunity to dismantle the Hebron communities.
    The ministers debated the idea for much of the afternoon without arriving at a decision. Hours later, Rabin raised the issue with a smaller group he convened at the Defense Ministry—Perry, Yatom, and the army’s chief of staff, Ehud Barak. But all three worried that a large-scale eviction would prompt violent confrontations with the settlers of Hebron. Perry, the Shabak chief, offered an alternative: evacuating Tel Rumeida, a single enclave isolated from the rest of the Jewish clusters in the city and home to some twenty settlers. The eviction would signal to Jewish