In two weeks, it's going to be the 20th anniversary of the assassination of the Prime Minister of Israel. It's like we're being, this is a shocking event in Israel, basically their Kennedy assassination. We're being in the middle of working through a peace deal with the Palestinians. You may remember a famous picture of him and Yasser Arafat outside the White House, with President Clinton kind of awkwardly nudging them both to shake hands.
Two brothers were convicted in the murder, Israelis, Jews, religious Jews. The one of which the trigger is still in prison, but the other got out a few years ago. His name is Haggai. Haggai and his brother are still unapologetic about what they did.
They got the Prime Minister because they didn't like his peace deal. We wanted to do what he's saying. They didn't have it by accident. We did it to save Jews, to stop this process that was killing Jews.
Haggai talked to one of our producers, Nancy Uptag, and to another journalist, Dan Efron, who's also her husband. He's the former Jerusalem bureau chief for Newsweek. They've been reported in Israel for years. Dan and Nancy not join me in the studio.
Hi, guys. Hello. Hi, Ara. So where was this interview?
We visited him at his house, the one he grew up in. It's a small house on a quiet street. He's back there living at home with his parents. It's the same house where Haggai and his brother spent hours together discussing the murder, plotting it in their room up on the second floor.
And we got there and we asked him to give us a tour, and we ended up around back in the backyard, and Dan, I call him Danny, speaks Hebrew, so he was translating. We're all talking quietly to lead at night. This is where he hid some of the ammunition that night before the police came. So the ammunition he's talking about, Haggai and his brother had stockpiled weapons before the assassination.
Haggai made some of the munitions himself. He's a ticker. Yeah. And he was completely open about it.
He was kind of proud about it. And he had given us this tour, and as he did, he said, look, I hid the weapons from the police over here in the chicken coop in a bag. It was a bag I built a little homemade grenades. Part of the silencer that I was working on.
How long does it take to make a grenade? It's actually a little bit different. You have to think a lot about it. Yeah, it's a little bit different.
You can make one in an hour, but you have to plan it. Haggai took us over to a little prefab shed in a corner of the backyard. This will have tools and boxes of bolts and wing nuts and all that. And this is the shed where he spent months experimenting with and perfecting a kind of bullet that was found in his brother's gun, the night of the murder.
This is the exact bullet mold that you used? Okay, so Ken means yes in Hebrew. That's one of the few Hebrew words I remember from Hebrew school. Right, right.
And he's showing us this bar of metal that can fit a bunch of bullets in it. And then a second bar fits on top of it and it kind of clamps on top. He used all this gear to drill into these bullets and drop a ball bearing inside. And I asked him, what's the ball bearing for?
And he said, ah, that was our project. That was our innovation. The ball bearing, so the idea was that this would penetrate a vest. A bullet proof vest.
And the way it does it is that the bullet itself would lodge in the vest, but the ball bearing would continue through it. And it's hard enough and deadly enough to kill, just the ball bearing once it penetrates to kill. I mean, did you make this mold in order to make the bullets for that purpose, to shoot, Brubby? Shall we get your killer?
I think you could say yes, the answer is yes. So this was the exact equipment he used to modify the bullets to kill the Prime Minister. And he's happy to show it to us. And because he and his brother both had this attitude, they were both proud of what they'd done.
As a murder case, this assassination was open and shut. The shooter, the guy's brother, his name is the Gallimir. He was grabbed right on the spot. The bullets matched his gun.
There were several witnesses within a few feet of the shooter when he pulled the trigger. There was an amateur film that captured key parts of the scene. The killer confessed immediately into tale. He reenacted the incident with police.
That's on video, too. And he's never expressed remorse. He's never canted any part of his confession. Okay, but I can feel the butt that you're about to say.
Right, so there is a butt. So in spite of all this, in spite of all the evidence, lots of people don't believe it's true. They don't believe that a Gallimir and his brother killed Brubby. He got on the other side.
That's me, what's up? He says a Gallimir did not murder Brubby. And I said, who did? He said that she backed it.
The Shabak is really equivalent of the FBI. Plus they have a bodyguard division, so it's sort of a combination of the FBI and the Secret Service. So even though, there's all this evidence that could not seem like more clear. There's witnesses, there's video, there's a confession.
They're conspiracy theories. Yeah, and they're popular. These are just random people on the street in Jerusalem. One night this past summer.
He says that there was a Shabak that killed Brubby. He knows that because the bullets were in the front, and you got a mirror headshot from behind. Okay, so what she's saying is, I'm absolutely not sure that a mirror actually killed Brubby. There were all kinds of machinations, all kinds of intrigue going on at the time, and maybe the state was involved.
So according to polls, fully a third of Israelis doubt that a Gallimir pulled a trigger. They think there was a conspiracy or a major cover-up. Among Israelis who identify as right-wing, the doubters' number at least 50%. 55-0.
50. Yeah, it's a big number. And I've been researching and reporting on the assassination for several years now. And as I got deeper, I felt like I was in this weird loop, where on the one hand all the documents I'd read, and all the people who were there that I spoke to, police investigators, bodyguards, witnesses, all that pointed to the fact that the Gallimir killed the Prime Minister.
And then alongside that, sometimes at interviews or conversations with Israelis, I get this look like, do you really believe that? And I just wanted to understand why. Why are the conspiracy theories plausible to so much of the country? And the fact that this assassination seems so differently by different people in Israel, has real implications for politics there today, right now.
Well, from WBC Chicago, it's this American life on our class. We hear so much about Israel here in our country, and I should say over the months that we have worked on today's program, it has made me understand these about Israel that I never understood before. Robene's death is a very helpful prism to understand Israel and Israelis today. Even the news this last few weeks, this new round of violence.
Robene was assassinated in the middle of a peace deal that the United States had thrown all of its weight behind. Every president since then has tried and failed to broke a peace. Today in our program, we're telling the story of what happened that night that Robene was killed, and we're telling the story of how Israelis see that moment today, and what that tells us about Israel is really politics, and the chances for peace, and stay with us. And with that, our handings over to Nancy and Dan.
Here's what happened tonight at the assassination. Robene was speaking at a political rally, and I actually attended that rally. I was a young reporter covering the event, later I covered the murder trial, and the rally was huge. There were speeches and songs, where the 100,000 people showed up.
They filled the main plaza in Tel Aviv and packed the side streets. Most of them were left wing or center left like Robene. He was the head of the labor party. So the slogan of the rally was yes to peace, no to violence.
And it turned out was important, because the point of the rally had been to gauge how much support Robene had for the peace deals he was pursuing with the Palestinians that called the Oslo Accords. And here's what also called for Israel to gradually withdraw from parts of the West Bank and Gaza, so that Palestinians could govern themselves. And a lot of right wing Israelis saw Oslo as a terrible thing, as a security threat. And because it involved giving back land, God promised to the Jews a betrayal of Judaism.
They'd been protesting against Oslo and against the Libyan government for months. There was even a small right wing counter demonstration that night held near the rally. One of the people at the counter-demo, and this isn't a story I wrote that night, one of them held up a sign that said, a rope for the traitors. I've read through dozens of police reports filed on the night of the murder.
One that caught my eye was written by Chief Superintendent, Moti Naftali. He helped drop the security plan for the rally, along with the Israeli equivalent of the FBI, the Shabakh. Here were the Shabakh. Over here on the left.
On the left and we were here. A few months ago we went with Moti, up onto the stage where we were being stood. It looks out of the plaza where the rally was held. Moti was also on stage the night of the assassination.
There was a police command center off to one side. He's pointing out where that was, where other people were. Moti is a pipe smoker, the only one I've ever met in Israel. He also speaks German.
I'll throw an word of that sometimes. And today is the first time he's come up here since that night 20 years ago. He's not a sentimental man. You know, it's like when I go into my high school, I look forward.
The mission for law enforcement, that evening of the rally was to maintain order, and of course, to protect the Prime Minister. Moti remembers preparing for just one scenario. That the Palestinians, they will commit a terror operation. Nobody, in all the work before, nobody talked about an Israeli or a Jewish assassin.
When it was finished from here, I called my wife and I said, what's I done? Thanks, thanks God, it's finished. Thank God, in German, yeah. I've always loved.
Nothing happened. It went fine. The rally went fine. It ended for being left the stage, and then after Moti called his wife.
I heard people running and noise, and I ran with them as well. Was it clear that these were shot? No, no. But Moti heard, but didn't see, was captured on an amateur video.
There's no TV news footage of the assassination because the rally was over. The news was over. This moment when the shooting happened was a nothing moment. Just the Prime Minister, Rabin walking down the stairs behind the stage, and back to his car.
In the amateur footage, we found this copy on YouTube. We see Rabin's car off to the side with his driver, Manacham Damty standing next to it. There's a small crowd at the bottom of the stairs as he comes down. People are plotting.
They're mostly just a bunch of dark, human-sized shapes. Rabin is pretty easy to spot because he's in the middle and his glasses are glinting. And then one of the shapes, who's been sitting off to the side, stands up, walks through a few people till he's just behind Rabin, lifts his right arm, and there flashes and a sound of three gunshots. The camera drops seemingly in shock, and then recovers.
All of this has happened only a few feet from the car that Rabin was about to get into. And we see Rabin's driver bend over Rabin, and then jump into the driver's seat. The film ends there. Rabin, his bodyguard, and the driver speed off to the hospital.
The assassin, Igalamir, the brother of a guy we heard from earlier, is tackled and taken to police headquarters to be interrogated by Moti Nftali. Moti was the first person to interrogate Igalamir in the hours after the assassination. This was a few blocks away at the Tel Aviv police headquarters. He was in Ophoria, we say in Hebrew.
I will say in Uphoria, in Uphoria, because he had the mission and he did it. There's video of Moti interrogating Amir. The sound quality is terrible in parts of the tape, but it's mesmerizing to watch. Amir talks in small bites, and he repeats himself because Moti, sitting across the table from him, is writing down every word by hand.
At one point Amir stops what he's saying to make sure Moti is getting everything down. He says, did you write that down? Remember, Ken and Hebrew means yes. At the start of the interrogation, it's not clear yet that Rabin is dead.
Moti is just focused on Amir. Who is this guy? Moti, like the rest of the police in the Shabak, is stunned by the fact that Amir is Jewish and Israeli, not Palestinian. He finds out he's 25 years old, he's a law student, a devout Jew, and Amir to him is just baffling.
I see a guy, normal guy, from a good family, student, and a murderer. I deal with murder. They were criminal. It wasn't criminal.
It's the first time that I deal with the ideological increment. I say he's a wet dream of every woman that she will have such a guy for her daughter. So the man every one wants for her first time law? Yeah, he was educated.
All right, good manners. Amir in the video is calm, he's measured, there's no rambly incoherent manifesto. He's not even raising his voice. He seems sane, he's just very smug.
He says to multi at one point, your questions are an insult to my intelligence. But Amir is happy to tell him everything. He'd been developing the idea of killing Rabin for two years. He used his own gun, a nine millimeter Beretta.
He'd loaded it with bullets from a fresh box before leaving the house. Then he took bus number 247 from his home, in Herzlia to the rally. Amir said he'd read the Oslo Accords, the complete version, not the summary that was in the newspapers. And he felt it was his obligation to stop Rabin from going ahead with Oslo, his religious duty under Jewish laws known as Dean Rodef and Dean Moser.
He said he had to protect the land of Israel. At the rally, Amir told himself that if God wanted him to kill Rabin, he would give him an opportunity to do it. And the opportunity came. Multi, you see this in the video, he's losing patience, but he wants a full confession.
So he remains polite. One of my police came in and brought me a cup of tea, with a white calcare, you know, this... Styrofoam cup. Yeah.
And I told him, would you also like a cup of tea? I said, yes. And I told him, bring another one please. And he brought him the cup of tea.
And he says, don't you have cookies? And I told him, oh, you are pushing your luck. I don't remember his reaction when I told him when I killed him. And I told him, I made a multi-noftali that you shot the prime minister and your ghost is dead.
And he was shocked to hear it. He said, what? Did he die? Wow.
And he jumped. Like your team, make a goal. Like your team scored a goal in a soccer game. Yeah, yeah, and at this moment, you want to come and punch him in the face.
But he wants to sit down. Sit down, bigger. He wants to do like a cup of tea. Let me make a toast.
Let's make a toast. Let's make a toast. Yeah. A little high means to life.
To make a toast to life. Yeah, to life, to life that he took. This is the crowd outside the hospital where Ravine was taken after he was shot. It's from a radio report.
I had left the rally before the shooting along with other journalists. And I got a beeper message. This was the 90s, a lot of beepers, saying shots fired near Ravine. So I turned around and ran.
I really ran back to the square. And then from the square to the hospital nearby. I saw this crowd and I heard these shouts. The crowd is furious.
You can hear it. They're Ravine supporters. And what they're chanting is, Bibi Rotsaiach, meaning, Bibi is a murderer. Bibi is a murderer.
Bibi, and maybe you know this, is the nickname for Benjamin Netanyahu. He's the Prime Minister of Israel today. At the time, he headed the right-wing opposition, the side opposed to Ravine, and to the Oslo deal. Israeli politics is always fierce.
I went on TV, a lawmaker in the Israeli parliament, throw a glass of water into another parliament member's face. And in the months before the assassination, the rhetoric against Ravine had been relentless. There were posters with his face in the crosshairs of McGahn. There were posters of him dressed as Yasser Arafat, the leader of the PLO, wearing a kafiya on his head.
A poster of him dressed as a Nazi SS officer. People chanted murderer and traitor at rallies, and outside Ravine's apartment in Tel Aviv. People chanted death to Ravine. Palestinian groups who opposed the Oslo Accords had killed dozens of Israelis in suicide attacks, since the start of the peace process.
And many Israelis blamed Ravine for those deaths. It was pure rage. The right was enraged at Oslo, and at Ravine. But the night of the assassination, it was the left that became enraged.
The feeling was one man pulled the trigger, but a much larger group bore the blame for stoking hatred and violence against Ravine. I left wing slogan would emerge. We will not forgive, and we will not forget. When Ravine's chief of staff comes out of the hospital to make the announcement that the prime minister is dead, it takes him more than a minute of yelling at people to keep quiet before he can make himself hurt.
Take it! Take it! Take it! Take it!
Take it! Take it! Take it! Take it!
Take it! Take it! Take it! By now, the country's chief pathologist, Professor Yohuda Hiss, heads to the hospital to perform the autopsy.
Look, I was raised on the investigation into the death of President Kennedy. Into the death of President Kennedy. Hiss did some of his medical training in the United States at Case Western Reserve in the years after the Kennedy assassination, and he says the autopsy on Kennedy was discussed a lot, mainly as a cautionary tale, as a lesson on what not to do when performing a postmortem. The autopsy became one more thing that stoked the conspiracy theories.
So I promised myself that it will never happen in Israel, that if there is some hyperfiber case, I would call to perform autopsy, I will do the most accurate thing. And I tried to do it in the Prime Minister case, and said I don't want the same claims that the autopsy was not accurate, that there were no photographs and so on, and I tried to do everything, you know, regular things to act regular. Regular meant Hiss insisted on having both his assistants with him during the routine autopsy. One of them was a photographer.
It also meant that Hiss described a loud, every step he took, dictating it into a tape recorder. His assistant transcribed the notes later that morning. Hiss found two bullets in routine, one in the lung and the other in the chest, and no exit wounds. The third bullet fired by Amir went through the arm of a bodyguard.
There was nothing mysterious, you know, there's nothing complicated. The bullets that Hiss found in Cyber Bean were standard holopoints, not the ones a guy had modified in his shed with the ball bearings, after all. Those ended up at the bottom of his brother's magazine. Do the conspiracy theorists contact you?
Do they ever try to? They call him, do you know that we know that there's nothing to end? But it's crazy, it's amazing, what happened? He's where he believed it was some kind of conspiracy regarding his death.
We're asking the questions, very, very simple questions. This is Hill L. Weiss. He's a political columnist and one of the early adopters and proselytizers of the conspiracy theories.
Also a literature professor Emeritus. He's in his 70s, he's got a white beard, very jolly. In the Rabin era, he was on TV a lot, and he's cheerful about why. When the television went to see a crazy one from the right wing, they called Hill Weiss.
You? Yes, and I supplies them the goods. He lives in the West Bank in a settlement he helped found nearly 40 years ago. It's called Elkhana.
He also helped found something else, a group that calls itself the public committee for the re-investigation of the Rabin murder. What do you think that Rabin itself and his party and all the people that were in the inside circle, they wanted to turn public opinion, therefore they make this fake event to defame the right wing? This is the core of Hill L's theory. Rabin himself orchestrated what was supposed to be an attempt on his own life by the right.
It was supposed to be a thwarted attempt. The event would create sympathy for Rabin and for Oslo and boost his approval ratings, and it would make the right look bad. In the fake assassination, as Hill L lays it out, Igal Amir is either a collaborator or a patsy, and what the country saw on video was a mere firing blanks, not real bullets. Rabin then pretended to fall and was helped into the car in a driven way.
But then in the car, somehow Rabin dies anyway. And here the theories get hazy. It's not clear what happened in the car, but whatever happened, it wasn't part of the plan. Inside the car, that's when someone or somebody takes charge.
You ask me, who are they? And you ask me if they are Shabak. Shabak, again, Israel's FBI. I cannot give any precise answer.
The major claim is that Rabin died from a shot to the chest, and not from his back. Hill L has some thoughts about what might have led to that shot. Maybe there was a conspiracy within the conspiracy, or maybe Rabin just had a stroke in the car. Maybe it was as simple as that, because even a stroke, if that's what happened, would have sabotaged the whole story the left was trying to sell.
With a stroke, the left would get none of the political advantages of a thwarted assassination, just a guy in a hospital bed who might not even be able to talk. The only way to salvage the story at that point would be to really kill Rabin, to shoot him in the chest. They have a choice, because he destroyed all the slowly. So you're saying Rabin decided to be a possibility, or that a possibility that might be the one that you believe in is that Rabin staged his own assassination in order to improve his popularity and the popularity of the peace process.
And then got into the car on his own. On his own feet. And then maybe in the car, he had a stroke, you're saying? Can be, can be, can be.
This was the question full of the conversation. Some parts of his theory, Hillel, would deliver in the most emphatic tone, you can imagine. About other parts, he would say, maybe, I don't know, I'm just asking questions. It's a prerogative of conspiracy theories not to have to answer questions, but just to raise them and keep raising them.
But what gives the theories traction, what makes a lot of people ready to believe them, is the way Hillel and the other conspiracists connect their story to some real loose ends about the murder that have never been resolved. Details every one in the country knows. Of course, loose ends happen in murder cases. I've heard that from investigators.
Those details, they just take on more significance when it's an assassination. One famous loose end in this case. At the moment of the assassination, someone in the parking lot yelled blanks. Or maybe he yelled fake, or it's not real.
Witnesses heard all three. Who yelled it and why? That's never been fully resolved. For Hillel, it's evidence that a mere fired blanks.
A prime minister staging his own assassination. All that cloak and dagger artifice. Hillel believes that's how committed Rabin was to forcing the Oslo deal. At the time of the assassination, the country was split almost exactly in half between Oslo opponents and Oslo supporters.
Hillel was one of the many Israelis who hated Oslo. He thought the slogan from the pro-Oslo political rally, yes to peace, was a farce. We fed. He said Oslo is a total disaster.
Because it's not peace. It's a mask of peace to annihilate the Jewish state and the Jewish people. Like in Holocaust. He says annihilate the state because Oslo meant giving up parts of the West Bank and Gaza to the Palestinians.
That's land Hillel considered sacred to the Jews. And he wrote hundreds of articles against Oslo by his own estimation. And in the articles, he went after Rabin. I want to say to you something that when I wrote the articles, I thought that I'm aiming bullets to the head of Rabin.
Because those words were so sharp. It was these sorts of articles, plus the posters, the chance of death through being the whole ugly pile of rhetoric, that after the assassination turned public opinion against the right, especially the religious right, and caused a spike in support for the Oslo deal. Hillel and the others on the right watched this, and a logic took cold. The who benefits logic that's common conspiracy theories.
If the left benefited from the assassination, maybe the left engineered the assassination. But the benefit was temporary. Within six months, the left was out of power, the right was in power, and Oslo was on its way to being gutted. And that's when the arguments really began.
Today, and for the last 20 years, the Rabinus assassination is a club that the right and left continue to beat each other with, in a fight over two radically different interpretations of the country's history, its future, two visions that are irreconcilable. This is a Rabinus assassination-related shouting match in the debate right before the most recent election. I need to accept it. I need to accept it.
I need to dole. From the left's perspective, Rabin's assassination is the moment that completely reshaped his real history. It killed off the last best chance for peace between Israelis and Palestinians, and he got a mirror has got to be one of the most successful assassins anywhere. One person told us, Look, when Lincoln was murdered, it didn't bring back slavery.
When Martin Luther King Jr. was killed, civil rights continue. But after Rabin's murder, Oslo unraveled, settlements expanded, and the right has been in power for most of the past 20 years. I've heard people on the left call the assassination a coup.
The right is incensed by that version of events. They tell a very different story. That the peace process had no chance anyway. Arafat was never going to do what he promised.
A wave of Palestinian suicide bombings after Rabin's death turned the country against the peace process. In short, Oslo was a fantasy, and leftists have been sore losers ever since. They've lost almost every election for the past 20 years, and to make themselves feel better, they bring up the Rabin assassination and try to stay the entire right with that horrible act. A lot of people on the right are offended by the suggestion that Igalomir acted on their behalf.
We heard again and again in interviews with Israelis on the right, and devout Israelis. Igalomir was not from our camp. He was a loner. He lived in Herzylia.
He's not a settler. He wore a different kind of kipah, kipah, meaning yamaka or skullcap. We don't condone what he did. He is not one of us.
That's why we were taken aback when an Orthodox man named Minacham Lazar, who comes from a very right-wing background, told us a mirror didn't seem foreign to him at all. Just the opposite. At the moment I heard in the TV about the assassination, my first instinct was to take off my kipah. To take it off your head.
Yeah, because I knew the religious origins of the murder, the religious justification of the assassination. And I told myself I can't be part of it. I don't want to be part of it. Minacham is tall and soft-spoken.
He says after the assassination, he heard things in private in the synagogue he attends and the gatherings with friends that disturbed him, and that most Israelis would never say publicly. I remember people saying, well, that's good. That he was assassinated. He had it coming.
That's good. I saw people that were glad that he was assassinated. Minacham didn't take off his kipah in the end. He had young kids and he knew it would confuse them.
We were interviewing Minacham because he's a pollster, and we wanted to talk to him about the numbers, the fact that a third of Israelis believe there was some kind of conspiracy or cover-up around the assassination. And among people who don't advise right-wing, at least 50% doubt a Galamir did it. Minacham is a psychologist by training. He was working as a psychologist for the army when we were being assassinated, and he said he's never been surprised by the high number of Israelis who believe in the conspiracy theories.
Yeah, most of this part comes from the Orthodox Israelis, and the Orthodox Jews in Israel were blamed for the murder. I'm only saying that when reality is too threatening or too, it's hard for you to accept what happened. So you come up with the conspiracy theories about JFK, about September 11, and about Trumpy. The Prime Minister was killed, he was killed by a religious Jew.
I can't accept it, so I have to find alternative explanation. And they came up with a conspiracy. It's probably clear by now, I've always been skeptical of the conspiracy theories. There's just so much evidence proving a Galamir killed Rabin.
But in reporting on the assassination, I did have one moment when I thought, Yikes, maybe. It was during an interview with Rabin's daughter, Dalia, who is not a conspiracyist and not from the right side of the political map. And yet, there was this thing that made even her wonder, and she agreed to talk about it, but she didn't want to be recorded. It had to do with the idea that what killed Rabin was a bullet to the front.
Most of the conspiracy theories hinge on that idea. Remember, you got a Lemir shot Rabin from behind. The pathologist concluded that he was hit by just two bullets, both in the back, no exit wounds. But when I met Dalia in her office, she told me that even she'd be going to have some doubts.
She got a box brought up to her office that contained everything her father was wearing on the night of the assassination, down to the socks and shoes. She opened the box and pulled out the shirt her father wore. She held it in that way that you hold something that you don't want to touch with the tips of her fingers. It's a white collared shirt entirely encrusted in blood and ripped in several places.
Doctors tore it in the emergency room. Dalia showed me the two bullet holes in the back of the shirt. And then she flipped the shirt over and pointed to a hole in the front as well. It was perfectly round, smaller than a dime, on the lower left side near the buttons.
The undershirt Rabin wore that night also had a hole in the front. On her desk, Dalia carefully laid the undershirt inside the shirt the way it would hang on her father and the holes lined up. And I have to say, there in her office with these bloody shirts on the table, it stopped me short. It's a lot harder to dismiss something you see with your own eyes, something the daughter of the murdered man worries about.
We just stood there and stared at it. Dalia told me the clothes sat in Israel's National Archive for a decade after the murder. Then in 2005, there was an Israeli TV documentary about the hole in the front of the shirt. It's inconclusive, but it ends with ominous music and a voiceover about how this third hole quote raises the possibility of an additional bullet.
The TV show popularized the notion that Rabin was actually shot in the front. You hear that a lot now in Israel. And it turned the shirt into Exhibit A for the conspiracists. Maybe their single most important piece of proof.
Dalia did not want to have the clothes examine herself. She's a public figure. And she worried that just the act of her getting them tested would fuel the conspiracy theories. So I asked her if she would let me take the shirt to the US away from the politics to have it tested.
And she said yes. I flew to Phoenix and then drove to Carefree, Arizona, a town of about 3,000 people in the desert. Big, open sky, rock formations, lots of cacti. I pulled up to a one-story house early in the morning.
On the right place? Lucian Haig, he goes by Luke, came out to greet me. He's in his 70s and brown pants and a short-sleeved dress shirt and glasses. He works from an office attached to his house.
His wife, Sandy, is there. Direct team? Luke is kind of famous among forensic examiners. He's written a book that's a go-to manual in the profession.
And he's worked on some big cases over the years, including the shoot out at Ruby Ridge and the murder of Rabbi Mary Kahana. He also reexamined the ballistics of the Kennedy assassination for an episode of Nova, not too long ago. He has a lab and an indoor firing range. He collects all kinds of things.
There's a periodic table in Russian on one of the walls. And he's got bullets from all kinds of guns. He picks out one to show me. That's the kind of bullet that killed Kennedy.
And he sees very, very long. It's basically a cylinder, very atypical. He says Lee Harvey Oswald bought the rifle he used in the assassination for $13. And he concludes, it's not a great gun, but it will kill you, as we know.
Luke places my wheelie bag on the countertop in the lab and begins unpacking the clothes, starting with the jacket. All right. It's really a paramedic, even worse or more thorough. I guess I should say that hours.
Cut the bajeebers out of this. I'm going to condense the six hours of forensic testing into about three minutes. But just so you know how thorough he was, Luke tested every garment for being wore on his upper body the night of the assassination. He looked at all the holes.
And he did comparison tests on other parts of the garment. But I had come for the shirt, and specifically the hole in the front. Whoa. Under his surprise.
Whoa doesn't mean, oh my god, it's a bullet hole. Whoa just means, that's a very clean, sharply defined hole. It almost looks like a hole punch. Well, you certainly brought something different and very interesting.
I have no judgments or pronouncements to make, but then this is different. Luke is looking for three things, traces of soot, copper, and lead. Bullets leave particles as they pass through fabric. They tend to cling for decades or more, especially with polyester.
And Rabin's shirt was 55 cotton, 45% polyester. He photographs the hole with an infrared filter and looks at it through a microscope. He sprays the area and does chemical tests. Everything is negative.
No soot, no copper, no lead. And along the way, Luke has ruled out another possibility. A cigarette burn. Rabin was a heavy smoker.
Luke suggests one last thing. He wants to fire a new bullet into a swath of Rabin's shirt to see if the hole it makes, a genuine bullet hole, looks anything like the mystery hole. He gets out the scissors. So for the record, I'm with a pair of sharp scissors and putting out about a three inch square from the Luke, then, to the sentence I've never heard before.
I think I've got a fresh block of tissue cinelet in the garage. He left the lab and came back with a big, brown rectangle of something that was both squishy and firm. This behaves similar to soft tissue. If you push into it, if I push into you or that guy like me, it's going to feel about the same.
So the block is a stand-in for human flesh. Luke taped the patch of shirt to the block. He went to his ranch and then he fired a bullet at the patch. I didn't record the sound because I worried it would blow out the recording equipment, which I don't own.
Luke shot from up close. As we figured it, just about any scenario where Rabin was shot in the front, would mean he was shot at close range. Luke then examined the new hole under the microscope. He compared the patch to the mystery hole, looked up from the lens, and that was it.
The two looked nothing alike. But it just can't be a bullet. I mean, there's just nothing there to support that notion. I've been looking at bullet holes for 47 years so I shoot things for a living.
I mean, almost daily I'm shooting something. Everything I see says it's something other than a bullet. So it's not a bullet hole. That's the important part.
Rabin was not shot in the front. Dahlia was relieved when I let her know. The cause of the hole will probably remain one of those loose ends, maybe someone tampering with the shirt while it sat for years in the archives. Luke speculated that the hole was created by a doctor during the chaos at the hospital, maybe with some medical instrument while they were trying to save his life.
I ran down all sorts of other disputed facts from the night of the assassination. I talked to Shabak officers, the investigators, the prosecutor. The only other thing I want to report to you is the conversation I had with Rabin's driver from that night. Remember that most of the conspiracy theories say Rabin was actually killed in the car, possibly by a mysterious, additional person, not the driver, not the bodyguard, someone else.
The driver, Minacham Damti, is listed in the country directory. So we called him up one morning and he said, sure come over this afternoon. How's it going? It's good.
He's 66 years old, very fit, a few months away from his pension. He was in gym shorts when we went over. A large percentage of Israelis at any given moment are dressed like they're about to go to the beach or just got back from the beach. He lives in a modest apartment.
He was a driver for three decades for political leaders from both parties. He's got a wall in his kitchen covered in frame photos of him with the people he drove for, several Israeli prime ministers, also Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, Anwar Sadat. Minacham does a pretty spot-on impression of Rabin telling him from the back seat in his taciturn way, Minacham, nice maneuver. Minacham, Barakta, yes, yes.
What Minacham remembers about that night after jumping into the driver's seat is Rabin's bodyguard, Yoram Ruben, lifting Rabin into the back seat, diving in after him, and then he yells to Minacham, go to the hospital quickly. Next, Minacham does a quick move he's been taught to make the car doors slam shut. The drill is, in order to close the doors, you press on the gas and then quickly press on the brakes, and then give gas, and the force of the sudden acceleration closes the doors, slams the doors. Minacham is mentioning this because he himself has heard about these conspiracy theories.
One of them is who shut the door, ostensibly, mysteriously, because there is no one, and this was kind of the evidence that there was someone inside the car in addition to Rabin and Ruben. Then Minacham makes a left, which is the wrong way to go to the hospital. There were people in police barricades all around, he was in shock, and he went left. This is another part of the conspiracy theory, that he intentionally delayed getting to the hospital so that whoever else was supposedly in the car had time to kill Rabin.
It's clear as Minacham is talking that going left that night, his mistake, galles him. I asked Minacham what was happening in the car as he drove, was it chaotic, was it loud? Were he in the bodyguard, Jorm Ruben shouting or talking to each other, was Rabin making any noise? He said it was horribly, horribly quiet.
I remember hearing a little bit from Rabin, maybe it was a sigh, maybe it was a word, but mostly nothing, and whatever he did here was mostly Ruben, the bodyguard for the vaccine. Minacham said, is he okay, resuscitate him, make sure, and occasionally asking him what's his condition? And then at some point Ruben says, I'm also wounded, and from that point on it felt like utter despair. Minacham felt like he was alone in the car.
He was the only one who was actually capable of doing something. What a moment to realize, it's just you. For 30 years, Minacham had been a driver, and the drill was always that there was a bodyguard sitting next to him, and the bodyguard would say, you go right here, you go left there, take this road, do this. Because everyone had pounced on the shooter, and everyone was focused on him, there was no one to come into the car and sit next to Minacham.
And it's exactly the way he described it, he's saying he felt utterly alone, utterly alone. I got a very visceral sense of who Rabin was, what he was in Israel, and what his death meant in the country. When we talked to one of his most vocal enemies, this is an activist named Daniela Weiss, no relation to Hillel Weiss. She is right-wing, like Hillel, and her single-minded drive in the last 40 years has been to settle as many Jews as possible in the West Bank as quickly as possible.
She helped build one of the early settlements, named Khadubim. Now she has a group that sets up outposts, new settlements built without formal permission from the government. She showed us a map she made when she was mayor of the town. And I did this with my secretary.
We actually pasted all these dots, so that we see all the 250 settlements and outposts. Daniela was considered fringe for a long time. When the steady drift of Israeli politics, the mainstream has come to her. She organized the main election rally of the right-wing a few months ago in Tel Aviv.
When it was time for Prime Minister Netanyahu to speak, Daniela is the one who took the stage to introduce him. She's a firm believer in conspiracy theories, by the way. Talking to Daniela, she's so media savvy, it was like talking to a mind reader sometimes. Before I could even say, hey, can you please start that sentence over?
A loud truck was going by. She would pause and start the sentence over. We asked her about the Rabina assassination, and Daniela was blunt. She knew exactly what it meant for her and her movement, and for the Oslo deal.
The major thought that, of course, my mind was, okay, it's a new time, it's a new era. We will continue, continue to build the land. I was thinking in historical and political terms. Right away, that night?
Right away, when I heard about the murder. I thought the mystery changed. That Rabina's plan of withdrawal from here, from Judea and Samaria. Judea and Samaria are what religious Jews called the northern and southern parts of the West Bank.
From Judea and Samaria came to a stop, and a new era opened for us. And from the day to day, the chances of removing us from here, get lower and lower. We were talking to Daniela in her living room, and she told us she had a plaque outside, built into the wall around her house, commemorating the founding of Qudumim. And it quotes Rabina.
Can we go look at this plaque right now? Right now, naturally. We walked out her front door, down the path of her yard, around to the right, down the hill a bit. Qudumim is a lush, well-tended, sunny suburban-looking place, like a lot of the oldest settlements.
The plaque says the quote is from the minutes of a cabinet meeting, back from when Rabina was prime minister the first time in 1975. And he had to decide what to do about Daniela Weiss and others who had taken over this hill in West Bank, this hill in front of us. It was pretty well-surrounded by Palestinian towns. Every time the Israeli army removed them, they went back eight times, the plaque says.
I like to show this quotation from its acrobine, because I find it very much encouraging for the future. Because people tell us, OK, you'll see, for instance, today, the world will boycott you. Nobody will buy things that are produced in the settlements. And there is one, this obstacle and that obstacle.
So I always refer people to Rabina's declaration. She reads from the plaque. The words of its acrobine, the prime minister, to the members of the government. Bonne, cher la heme.
But go to short. Rabina said about Daniela and the others, let them enter Camp Qadum. And after three weeks, they'll all go home. His thinking was, no houses, no electricity, no water, no toilets.
If we call their bluff and leave them there, these people are not going to stick it out. The dismissiveness was typical of Rabina dealing with settlers. He didn't like them, and he didn't hide it. He called them a cancer in the body of Israeli democracy.
He saw them as fringe, especially compared to him. His political party had held power for decades. They founded the country. Rabina was a general.
He'd won the Six-Day War. He was Israel. And he was utterly secular, completely unmoved by the spiritual attachment religious Jews feel toward the West Bank. To him, settlers were an irritant.
It was a big mistake. On his side, from my point of view, it was, I'm glad he made this mistake. That he underestimated the settlers, the settlement movement. He estimated it properly.
He would have blocked it. Oslo was Rabina's do-over. His attempt to block the settlements the way he'd failed to do in 1975. And Daniela is one of the few right-wing Israelis we talk to who says openly, we won.
After Rabina died, the path toward our vision of the future was clearer than it ever was before. And we've been building settlements since then. We won the land, and we won the politics. Today, only 15% of the country identifies as left-wing.
The left is the fringe. Here in America, lots of us think, it's a tough, complicated situation over there. There's violence, there's anger, there's mistrust. But somehow, this is gonna work out.
Eventually, in the end, the Israelis will give up land. In the end, Palestinian violence will subside. They will have their own state. Somehow, this is all gonna happen.
But in the 20 years since Rabina's death, it hasn't happened. And it's not getting more likely. It's getting less likely. There's a letter of the guy, the assassin's brother, wrote from prison sometime after the assassination.
It's a letter where he explains why he and his brother decided to kill Rabina. And he puts the assassination in the context of a long arc of Jewish history. He already knows what it means for Israel. He writes, according to Judaism, killing a king is profoundly significant.
It affects the entire nation and alters its destiny. A guy has no patience for the conspiracists. They attribute the murder to someone else, which means they deny him and his brother the credit for an act the Amir brothers knew at the time would save Israel. Now, 20 years later, they feel vindicated.
As we were interviewing a guy sitting in his front yard, we had a moment that made us realize, what a weird disconnect he and his brother live every day. We're sitting there talking and we noticed that something was up with his mother, Gula. She was sort of hovering nearby. She offered us water, asked if we wanted to sit inside.
She was very welcoming. And then she just stayed outside. Within Earshot, clearly listening, doing what seemed like make work in the yard. It was after nine at night.
And at some point, she jumped into the conversation from the sidelines and said to her son, and you, tell the truth, don't hide anything. Tell the truth. She's saying that to her son. Even his own mother believes the conspiracy theories.
Maybe someone else killed her being. Maybe they set up her sons to take the fall. Maybe her own sons aren't telling her the full truth. Gula doesn't come over.
She just stays off to the side, but she starts arguing with a guy about what happened on the night of assassination. Danny and I are barely in the conversation at all. It's just the two of them talking to each other with Danny sometimes translating. And they get into the nitty gritty of the night.
She starts talking about the bust he got the mirror took to the rally where he shot her being. She's saying how hard would it have been for a pickpocket to have taken the gun and switch the bullets for blanks? My dad and I are going to have a gun and I'm going to have a gun. I'm going to have a gun.
My guy says it would have been very hard. He says, you got used to keep his gun between his belt and his body the same way I do. You'd feel it if someone tried to take it out. I'm going to take it out.
I'm going to take it out. Gula says, not if it's a professional pickpocket, their skill is stunning. It's unimaginable. They can take your ear from here and put it over there.
She says she talked about all of this to Gao, and he got mad at her. He said, conspiracy this, conspiracy that. You're my mother. You're my mother.
You're my mother. She said to him, yes, I'm your mother, but I'm not dumb. We have to understand what's going on here. She goes on.
Of course, he Gao confessed. They put you in a position where you have to confess. The guy says, the confession has nothing to do with it. He fired his gun.
Let's say that if Rabin hadn't died, if he'd only been crippled, then OK. But he galloped into a cow that Rabin might die. He shot him in the back. He said, come on, Rabin, come on.
Gula eventually went back inside. The guy told us that the problem with the conspiracy theories is that they take away the whole ideological statement they were trying to make by killing Rabin. The clear message that Oslo was terrible and that he gallimere acted on what he saw as religious obligation to stop Rabin. He gallimere in his interrogation with policeman Mochin of Tali said he felt he had to kill Rabin before a crazy person did it.
He said if a crazy person killed Rabin, it wouldn't have the right impact. The message would have been lost. Nancy Opdike is one of the producers of our show. The Nefron is the author of the book Killing a King, The Assassination of Yitzlak Rabin, and the Remaking of Israel, which comes out this week.
Yigalimere and Haggai, I'm here have recently come around to the idea that maybe the conspiracy theorists are correct about one thing. Maybe there are loose ends out there that might exonerate Yigal who's still in prison. They're looking at these now and considering petitioning for a retrial. Here is Shadi Min the Backseat, all the link can never see.
Was a great great leader by the name of Kinanti. He spoke for right at Freedom Tribe. Keep this nation clean. There is Shadi Min the Backseat, all the link can never see.
We're brothers from this day, but Jonathan and Hevar was in a chase on cold and we're drumming stuff in food, connage offy, walt, meeky, meek, brine, reground, and semi-enalistic ship, and Nancy Opdike, editors, Joel Glovell, Julie Snyder, director of consultant, and other editing help today from Susan Burton, production help from Glilly Sullivan. Second is our operations director and the conduct of production manager, at least Berbersom, is our business operations manager, and Baker Scout stories for our show, Kimberly Henderson is our office coordinator, research help today from Christopher Sotala, original music used as scoring all this hour by Mural and Tony, other musical help today from Damien Gray from Rob Guinness, special thanks today to Daniel Estrin, David Blumenfeld, and Shomo Harnoy of the Sedayman Group. Our website, thisamericanlife.org, this American life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the public radio exchange. It's worth this American life comes from Sion, introducing new Sion IA and IM.
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Here they shot him in the backseat of a link that he'll ever see. Well, it's a great way to lead her by looking at a gene. They walk all right in this nation's queen, but they shot him in the backseat of the link that he'll ever see. And this man, he did not die, fall apart.
It's been showed. He died in Dallas, Texas. A place not known for war.