Marie Colvin - On the Front Line

By now, the Shin Bet officer in charge had reason to be distracted. Over his radio he received a tip-off that a shooting was imminent. ‘The tension was immense, and he wanted to get Rabin off the stage as fast as possible. But he was convinced that the main threat was from Palestinians,’ said a security official.

At the end of the demonstration, Rabin came down the stairs to his car, failing to make sure the bodyguards were around him. Another blunder. The police unit in the parking area had not received a message that Rabin was arriving, so no safe channel was formed. ‘We let down our guard,’ said the security official. ‘We felt that the rally had passed peaceably and that we had done our job.’

At 9.44, as Rabin was getting into his armoured Cadillac, Amir stepped forward. From 5 feet away he drew his pistol and fired. Ingeniously, he shouted to the police that it was ‘only an exercise’ and he was firing blanks. They believed him.

Rabin’s bodyguard, hit in the shoulder, knew otherwise. He bundled the prime minister, a bullet in his stomach, another in his back, into the car and they sped off. At the hospital, there was the final blunder: nobody was ready to receive them. In the confusion nobody had radioed ahead. The chief surgeon, summoned to an emergency on a badly wounded man, found he was treating the dying prime minister.

One top Jewish counter-terrorist expert said of the colossal foul-up: ‘It is beyond negligence of the most simple basic procedures. Rabin was abandoned.’

Amir told security officials who surrounded him immediately after the killing, the gun still in his hand: ‘God told me to do it. I have no regrets.’ The fact that he believed he had a religious mandate shocked Israelis.

So did the crass statements by supporters. One student at Bar Ilan sent a message on the Internet: ‘Happy holiday everyone. The witch is dead; the wicked witch is dead.’ The West Bank settlement of Maale Amos hung out a sign: ‘We are all Yigal Amir.’

‘I am very happy that the dictator Rabin is dead,’ said Aryeh Bar Yosef, a resident of Kiryat Arba, a radical settlement outside Hebron, which has made a shrine of the grave of Baruch Goldstein, who gunned down 29 Palestinians at the Hebron mosque last year.

‘I hope that the Nazi Arafat and his friend Peres will die like Rabin. Rabin, the head of the traitors, got what he deserved. Praise be to God. Yigal Amir redeemed us from the terrible situation we were in.’

Such statements have forced Israelis to face the dark netherworld of Jewish extremist groups. Eyal follows the teachings of Meir Kahane, a Brooklyn-based rabbi who moved to Israel and founded the extremist Kach movement.

Kahane was assassinated five years ago – eerily, on exactly the same day as Rabin – while making a speech in New York and his movement was outlawed last year by the Israeli government after Goldstein’s massacre. With Kach banned, groups such as Eyal, with the same ideology and many of the same members, have become increasingly active.

Even more disturbing for Israelis is the realisation that these groups flourish among young people from comfortable, ordinary homes. When police searched the Amir family house and the kindergarten run by his mother they found a cache of ammunition and explosives. Car tyres that were used as swings for children were packed with explosives. One of those arrested as part of the alleged conspiracy to kill Rabin, Ohad Skornik, is the son of Yehuda Skornik, an eminent surgeon at Ichilov hospital, where Rabin died. It has made parents all over Israel wonder what their children are up to.

Last week, the issue confronting Israel was the allegation of a conspiracy to kill Rabin. There is no doubt Amir was a member of an extreme right-wing group that considered Rabin a traitor.

Eyal, founded in 1991 by Raviv, good-looking, arrogant and, like Amir, a student at Bar Ilan, is fanatical, albeit in an immature way. Members are given a Hebrew code word, and go through a dramatic swearing-in ceremony at the graveside of Avraham Stern, the leader of the Stern Gang terror group that fought the British mandate.

It is believed to take orders from Baruch Marzel, a Boston-born settler based in Hebron who is a former member of Kach but resigned when it became illegal. Last week, he would not support the killing, but blamed Rabin for his own death. ‘When you force people underground, when you shut their mouths, their hands work and you have violence. There will be more, I am sure. Israel is heading to civil war.’

Before last Saturday, though, Eyal was ‘known for words rather than actions’, said one security official. That is indeed what Raviv said when he denied all knowledge of Amir’s plans to kill Rabin. ‘Yes, he was very close to us, but we knew nothing of his intentions,’ Raviv said after his arrest. ‘I am in complete shock. The guy ruined his life. We knew he said that Rabin must be killed but he didn’t speak more than anyone else here. We all shouted all kinds of things at demonstrations.’

In fact, Raviv was shouting those very things the night of Rabin’s assassination, with a few dozen right-wingers who staged a counter-demonstration in a side street at the peace rally in Kings of Israel Square. Amir was seen to join them briefly, then leave after talking to Raviv.

Was there a conspiracy? A total of six people are now in police custody, charged with complicity in the killing. All are religious men in their twenties.

Along with Amir, his brother Haggai, Skornik and Raviv, police also have in custody two other students, Dror Hadani and Michael Epstein. All deny any connection. *

The signs are that Amir acted alone on the day. He took a bus to the rally and later told investigators: ‘I never believed it would be so easy.’ Investigators believe Amir would have aborted his plan had the opportunity not been there. ‘He didn’t know he was going to do it until he pulled the trigger,’ said one.

But while he may have acted alone on that night, police believe the others helped him procure weapons, and did not report the possibility of his plans to police. ‘We think there was a connection between a group of persons … who established a form of organisation to assassinate the prime minister and other political persons based on their ideology to try to prevent the peace process,’ Moshe Shahal, the police minister, said.

All week, mourners visited Rabin’s grave side at Mount Herzl cemetery and his widow’s home, leaving flowers, candles in makeshift cans or just a handwritten note. Tonight, at the end of seven days of mourning, hundreds of thousands, the largest crowd ever seen in Israel, are expected to gather at the Kings of Israel Square in Tel Aviv for a ceremony renaming the plaza where Rabin died in his honour.

Peres, the acting prime minister, will try to move on. He plans to push forward the peace process, which he helped broker and which cost Rabin his life. It will be a difficult task. Rabin, a gruff old soldier, was trusted by Israelis to look out for their security. Peres’s language is visionary, but he lacks his predecessor’s credibility.

The process is too far advanced, however, to be easily derailed. Arafat has ruled Gaza for more than a year and, starting this week with the Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank town of Jenin, will take over the West Bank in a phased process that will culminate in elections in January. The hard decisions have been pushed through. Rabin’s death may help move along the peace process that he came to reluctantly but once converted pursued like one of his military campaigns. A poll released on Friday showed the proportion of Israelis supporting the peace process had risen by 31%.

And the outrage Israelis feel at the assassination of Rabin by a Jewish fundamentalist may win Peres support from those who now see the right as tainted because it provided fertile soil for such an extremist as Amir. With the death of Yitzhak Rabin, Israelis may no longer see a peacemaker as a defeatist, but as a hero.