This is not the end of the story
The assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was almost a murder that was known in advance, at least to the Shin Bet security service. The head of the Shin Bet gave advance warning of the assassination, and even predicted that the killer would come from the Jewish settlements beyond the Green Line. Therefore, the Shin Bet conducted undercover operations at Bar-Ilan University
| The assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was almost a murder that was known in advance, at least to the Shin Bet security service. The head of the Shin Bet gave advance warning of the assassination, and even predicted that the killer would come from the Jewish settlements beyond the Green Line. Therefore, the Shin Bet conducted undercover operations at Bar-Ilan University. The Shin Bet also planted an agent on the right, in exactly the right place, and the agent got as far as the murderer, and was even his good friend. What more could you ask for? If in such a perfect intelligence situation the Shin Bet did not succeed in preventing the assassination, then it seems that the organization is not as successful as we had been told. People who find it hard to believe that the Shin Bet is pitiful prefer to think that the Shin Bet purposely wants to look pitiful. It is far more pleasant to assume that the Shin Bet itself planted Yigal Amir at City Hall Plaza, and also applied some sort of brainwashing technique to him to get him to agree to take on the role of the assassin. Our total faith in our Jewish genius, not to mention our security genius, gives birth to imaginative alternative explanations for Rabin's murder. According to one theory, the Shin Bet wanted to sling mud on the settlers so that the government would be able to carry out mass arrests of opponents to the Oslo agreements. Therefore, they pressed Yigal Amir (by means of Avishai Raviv) to murder Rabin, they put blank bullets in his pistol, and they intended to nab him a moment before the murder, the way they nabbed the Kahalani brothers and the members of the Jewish underground. Then somebody exploited the situation to kill Rabin, really, and the real murderer has not yet been caught. This theory explains why so many people heard the cry "It's a blank, it's a blank" during the murder. In the book "Who Murdered Yitzhak Rabin?" by Barry Chamish, it is possible to read truly astonishing things. Chamish even links Motta Gur's suicide to Rabin's assassination, as well as the death from cancer of Professor Ariel Rosen Zvi, who was a member of the Shamgar commission that investigated the murder. But even though the book is mostly ridiculous, there is no reason to demand that it be taken from the shelves, as MK Ophir Pines (One Israel) has done. Possibly, some day new information will crop up, and it will crop by chance, and then it will turn out that the picture is a bit different from what we thought. This is not impossible. Even Meir Shamgar has said that not everything has been solved. He even said that it is quite possible that there was another accomplice in the murder. There is, for example, an approach that says that Avishai Raviv is more responsible than Yigal Amir for Rabin's assassination. Perhaps he even wanted this to happen and therefore did not report Amir's intentions to his controllers in the Shin Bet. Raviv's contribution to the assassination cannot be measured and the question of whether Amir would have murdered Rabin had he not been acquainted with Raviv will remain unsolved forever. On the right, they want to believe that Raviv was such a successful agent provocateur that he managed to lure Yigal Amir into going all the way. On the left they think that Amir was the product of an immoral world view according to which it is permissible to murder for the sake of the wholeness of the land. In this case, perhaps both sides are right. The argument between left and right need not detract from the fact that the failure of the Shin Bet was very great, and went beyond its failure on the guarding procedures. The questions being asked by MK Michael Eitan (Likud) are not silly questions. He has also never claimed that he suspects a conspiracy, even though in the leftist camp they keep accusing him of this. Eitan does not think that the Shin Bet, or that someone in the Shin Bet, killed Rabin. He says that of all the versions he has heard until now, the Shamgar commission's version sounds most reasonable, even if it has some holes in it. Eitan thinks that the way the Shin Bet ran Avishai Raviv was irresponsible, and he is blaming the State Prosecutor of having backed this. Eitan is demanding that the state reveal whatever criminal deeds this organization has done, so that the criminal blame can be removed from others. It is untenable, he says, that all kinds of young people be brought to trial for belonging to the Eyal organization, when this organization was an invention of the Shin Bet. The desire to know more about the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin is a good thing. Perhaps the Shamgar commission did not have all the information, and perhaps in a few years there will be more people who will want to reveal information that is as yet unknown. The Nafsu affair also came to light only after many years. Therefore, information must be allowed to flow, even stupid information and ridiculous information, and especially leaked information. Therefore, the media must make a great effort to know what is happening in the trial of Avishai Raviv, even if the trial is conducted behind closed doors. The continuing debate about Rabin's assassination does not detract from the honor of the victim, nor does it subtract a single gram of responsibility from the right. Even if the Shin Bet failed even more than we thought in the prevention of the murder, and even if there was a second murderer who has not yet been discovered, the assassination was committed in order to stop the Oslo peace process and preserve the greater land of Israel - and only someone who had been educated on the right could have done it |
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| Publication date - 19/11/1999 |
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