Status Updates From Killing a King: The Assassi...

The novelist Amos Oz captured the feeling of peace's inevitability in a piece he wrote a week after the murder. "The peace process between Israel and the Palestinians and the rest of the Arab world will continue,” Oz wrote. “There is no alternative to a historic compromise between Jews and Arabs." In reality, the murder did not make peace inevitable, and neither did it settle the great debate in Israel.

Tracking Rabin’s assassin day by day, week by week, heading towards the terrible climax, makes this book feel like I’m reading Capote’s In Cold Blood again and it creeps like a horror story.

“In Shabak's Jewish Affairs Department, Kalo [the leader] was now wondering how long it would take before some hothead interpreted the verbal assaults on Rabin as a green light for a physical assault.”

The mind of the assassin:

“My own morality doesn’t matter. It is determined solely according to the Torah itself,” Amir would eventually explain. To Amir, as to other Jewish fundamentalists, the Old Testament was literal, word-for-word truth. “The Torah is the brain. If the Torah tells you to do something that runs counter to your emotions, you do what runs counter to your emotions.”

Amir watched the televised handshake between Rabin and Arafat. He decided that the Oslo deal was an act of treason by Rabin, the land he would be handing over to the Palestinians having been promised by God to the Jews.

Hamas issued a statement calling the Oslo deal a disgrace and a sellout and urging Palestinians to oppose it. The group would devote itself in the coming years to scuttling the reconciliation.

The signing itself [between Rabin and Arafat] took place around a long wooden table dragged out from one of the White House offices—the same table Israeli and Egyptian leaders had used to seal their peace treaty in 1979.

Two of the more progressive Israeli leaders, imo, have been Ehud Barak and Yitzhak Rabin who truly sought to bring peace between Israel and her enemies. I give credit to Menachem Begin for helping secure peace with Egypt.

I want to understand who worked against Rabin. Amir was the trigger man. He wasn’t the whole movement. I agree with Rabin’s widow at this point and assign blame to right wing politicians.

Amazing read. Couldn’t put it down