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

• Author: Brook, Joshua A.
• Position: Review

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...