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

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    Rabin had an icy relationship with the settlers going back decades. The conquests of the Six-Day War had inspired a kind of rapture even among members of the Labor Party, a secular version of the messianism that infected religious Israelis. Officially, the Labor-led government stood ready to trade the territories for peace treaties with the Arab states. But some prominent Laborites, including Rabin’s former Palmach commander, Yigal Allon, quietly encouraged Israelis to settle beyond the “green line” that marked the border before the war—and not just in areas they deemed vital for Israel’s security. Eliezer Waldman, a prominent rabbi, recalled approaching Allon for help when the latter was a cabinet minister in 1968 and getting what could only be interpreted as implied consent. “He said, ‘You’re waiting for permission from the government? That’s not how Zionism works.’ ” Waldman and his wife checked into a Palestinian-owned hotel in Hebron, along with two other families, and refused to leave until the government promised to create a settlement just outside the city. Allon helped get the measure passed, giving birth to Kiryat Arba—where Baruch Goldstein would eventually make his home.
    Rabin seemed to be immune to this territorial fixation (except with regards to Jerusalem’s Old City, with the Jewish shrine in its heart, the Western Wall). He had no trouble arguing that Israel needed parts of the West Bank for security, but Rabin regarded the notion that every inch of the territory was sacred as obnoxious and reckless. It threatened to turn Israel into a second Lebanon, where competing religious groups fought one another relentlessly, nearly destroying the country. In the memoir he published in 1979, Rabin wrote that the settlers had undermined Israel’s long-term well-being by deliberately planting themselves in Palestinian-populated areas. He described them as a “cancer in the body of Israeli democracy.”
    The settlers came to see Rabin as a dangerous opponent, a political figure with no religious or romantic attachment to the territorythey saw as sacred. Their fears about him materialized when, as prime minister in 1992, Rabin froze government housing projects in the settlements. The move would signal to the Palestinians that he intended to negotiate more earnestly than his Likud Party predecessor, Yitzhak Shamir. But it also conveyed Rabin’s determination to change Israel’s priorities—from security and settlements to infrastructure inside Israel and to education. Spending on education doubled during his first year in office. Previous governments had enticed Israelis to move to the settlements with tax breaks and lower-interest mortgages, incentives that helped swell the communities with people who sought a better standard of living, not some ideological fulfillment. Now the settlers complained that Rabin was hanging them out to dry.
    To placate the settlers, Rabin appointed his deputy defense minister, Mordechai “Motta” Gur, as an informal liaison to the YESHA Council. A retired general, Gur had commanded the division that conquered Jerusalem’s Old City during the Six-Day War. The settlers viewed him as an ally in the otherwise hostile Labor Party and trusted him to notify them before the government took any significant steps regarding the West Bank and Gaza. Rabin also maintained a direct dialogue with some of the more pragmatic settler leaders. One of them, Yoel Bin-Nun, took it upon himself to explain the settler position in long, handwritten letters he sent Rabin every month or two beginning in 1992 and in occasional meetings with the prime minister. Bin-Nun had been one of the founders of the settlement Ofra and a member of the YESHA Council. A former paratrooper, he served under Gur in the battle for Jerusalem in 1967.
    His letters during the first year of Rabin’s term were short and friendly enough. Bin-Nun wanted Rabin to invite the National Religious Party, a