Assassin's creed.

• Author: Pillar, Paul R.
• Position: Killing a King: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel - Book review

Dan Ephron, Killing a King: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel (New York: W. W. Norton, 2015), 304 pp., $27.95.

The best chance for a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict appeared to arrive in the early 1990s. A combination of deft international diplomacy and political evolution in the two sides' leadership led in 1993 to a secretly negotiated agreement--the Oslo accord--between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization that established a partially autonomous transitional mechanism known as the Palestinian Authority. The accord was supposed to lead within five years to the establishment of a Palestinian state recognized by Israel. It didn't. Instead, the two sides remain locked in a deadly embrace.

A central figure in the hopeful developments of the 1990s was the prime minister of Israel, Yitzhak Rabin. He had several attributes that qualified him well to play this role. He was the first sabra, or native son, to become prime minister of Israel, having been born in Jerusalem when it was part of the British mandate of Palestine. Rabin's successful military career, including fighting in Israel's war for independence, culminated in service as chief of the general staff, a position in which he oversaw Israel's rout of Arab armies in the Six Day War in 1967. He remained a military officer at heart even after entering politics, always more comfortable talking with generals about security matters than in the other interactions political leaders have to endure.

Succeeding Golda Meir as leader of the Labor Party, Rabin served a first stint as prime minister in the 1970s, when by his own later admission he was insufficiently experienced to do the job well. In 1977, he left office under the cloud of a minor financial scandal dating from earlier service as ambassador in Washington. Then in 1992, more seasoned at age seventy, he led his party to victory over Likud prime minister Yitzhak Shamir, the former Stern Gang terrorist whose electoral defeat was preceded by enough acrimony with the United States that the George H. W. Bush administration withheld loan guarantees to Israel. Over the next three years Rabin led his country through the first steps of implementing the Oslo agreement.

Rabin, whom U.S. envoy Dennis Ross described as the most secular Israeli he had ever met, shared none of the belief held by many Israelis that possession of the territory conquered in 1967 was a fulfillment of Jewish destiny. He could argue that Israel would need parts of the West Bank for security purposes but not because of any sacred status of the land itself. He said that clinging to the territories would mean

Israel losing its Jewish majority and--using a term few Israelis dared to speak at the time--turn it into an apartheid state. Rabin had little patience for the settlers, who in turn saw him as a threat. Rabin's role as peacemaker, and possibly with him any real prospect for completing the process envisioned at Oslo, came to an abrupt end on the evening of November 4, 1995, when a young right-wing Jewish fanatic murdered him after the prime minister addressed a massive pro-peace rally in Tel Aviv.

Journalist Dan Ephron has written a gripping account of the assassination and the political and social currents in Israel surrounding it. A former Newsweek correspondent who reported from Israel at the time, including covering the rally that would be Rabin's last public appearance, his story has been enriched by voluminous interviews in the subsequent years. Killing a King is an objective and persuasive description of moods as well as facts. As the dual narratives of prime minister and assassin roll toward their convergence point at the site of the shooting, the book becomes a real page-turner.

Ephron begins with Rabin's trip to Washington for the signing of the Oslo accord, a ceremony featuring a carefully choreographed handshake with PLO leader Yasser Arafat. Ephron continues his story until six months past the assassination, when an Israeli election returned Likud to power. The story thus is not just of a single event, but also of a period of less than three years that marked the high tide of hopes for Israeli-Palestinian peace. The assassination itself was an inflection point: the end of the most significant progress there has ever been toward resolving the conflict (including completion of a detailed implementation...