Was alleged assassin
Yigal Amir manipulated
into place by the
Shabak?
Who Murdered Yitzhak Rabin?
by Barry Chamish
Special to ParaScope
chamish@netmedia.net.il
The assassination of Yitzhak Rabin is a solvable crime. It begins not in Tel Aviv, but in Hebron. There, in March 1994, another horrid crime was perpetrated. Twenty nine Arabs were slaughtered in the Cave of the Patriarchs, and a commission of inquiry was set up to get to the truth. It was led by the former chief justice of the Israeli Supreme Court, Meir Shamgar, who would later head the commission of inquiry into Rabin's death. And like the latter case, the Hebron commission was a blatant whitewash.
The very day of the massacre, an Arab reporter for the weekly news magazine Yerushalaim visited 25 survivors in six separate hospitals. There was no time for these victims, some of them mere children, to organize a conspiracy or coordinate their testimony. One after another they reported that the man accused of the crime -- Baruch Goldstein -- had at least one, perhaps two, accomplices.
A dozen of these survivors testified to the Shamgar Commission that they saw an accomplice handing the shooter bullet clips as his ran out. And like the Rabin murder, strangely, nine of the soldiers who were supposed to guard the shrine were not on duty that morning. The three that were testified that they saw Goldstein enter followed a few minutes later by a civilian carrying a Galil assault weapon.
Shamgar ruled that Goldstein acted alone, that the soldiers who saw someone else follow him were mistaken and that all the Arab witnesses perjured themselves. The implication of his verdict was that Arabs lie and their testimony was worthless. No honest court in the world would have reached Shamgar's conclusion.
And like his later commission into Rabin's murder, a great deal of significance lay in which witnesses didn't testify and what evidence wasn't admitted. First, to this day, no one knows how Goldstein died. No autopsy was ordered, and the circumstances of his demise remain unknown.
Second, and more important, was who didn't prevent the massacre. Goldstein knew the slaughter was coming and he told friends, including Shmuel Cytryn, later arrested without charge and imprisoned for months, that two days before the event he received notice from the army "to prepare for a massacre."
That should have been enough warning for a division of the General Security Services (Shabak) called the Non-Arab Anti-Subversive Unit to go into preventative action. This most secret unit planted agents throughout the territories, supposedly to surveil radical Jews and restrict their activities. The massacre was a notable failure, yet the head of the unit, Carmi Gillon, was not called to testify at the Shamgar Commission. Perhaps this was because his brother, Ilan Gillon, was the registrar of the commission responsible for organizing testimony.
After the Shangar whitewash, Gillon was named head of the Shabak, a strange reward in the aftermath of the Hebron fiasco. Or was the slaughter actually not a fiasco at all, but a planned event? What is known for certain is that the unit continued to incite and entrap those territorial Jewish residents who opposed the Rabin peace process. The most publicized case was that of the Kahalani brothers, who are serving multi-decade prison terms for the attempted murder of Arabs. According to the Shabak they were caught in a sting operation in which the firing pin of their weapon was removed. They claim the weapon was planted in their vehicle. Either way, they were entrapped in a manner illegal in most democratic societies.
Of course, the unit's most famous agent was Avishai Raviv, whose duty was to provoke the murder of Yitzhak Rabin. He formed an organization called Eyal, which had no members but himself. He convinced Yigal Amir, a student at Bar Ilan University, to help him organize study groups in or near Hebron. Four teenage girls, students of Sarah Eliash, witnessed Raviv prodding Amir to kill Rabin in front of them, calling him a coward and a fake hero. This testimony was heard by the Shamgar Commission and was not included in the publicly released conclusions. (Notably, much of the commission's report was withheld from the public.)
Raviv was no minor provocateur. It was he who had posters of Rabin dressed in a Gestapo uniform printed and distributed at a large rally and it was he who organized a swearing-in ceremony broadcast on Israel television's Channel One a month and a half before Rabin's assassination. The so-called Eyal members vowed to kill anyone who betrayed the land of Israel. Later, participants in the performance testified that Raviv told them what to say, where to stand and the whole production was viewed as a put on. They did not realize they were setting up Amir as a patsy by creating a radical group for the public to identify him with.
Replacing Gillon as head of the anti-subversive unit was agent Kheshin, who appointed agent Eli Barak as his deputy. To this day very little is publicly known about Kheshin, even his first name. But Barak is a different matter. The week after Rabin's murder, the wide circulation newspaper Kol Ha'ir, without naming him, accused him of being responsible for the assassination.
Much is known about Barak. He is a convicted drunk driver, wife swapper and stalker. After a near fatal accident caused by his intoxication, he lied to the police about who was driving the car. His friend and fellow wife swapper died under mysterious circumstances. And in the most publicized incident of all, he terrorized and stalked a radio reporter, Carmela Menashe. Instead of firing this security hazard, Rabin sent him abroad on a mysterious assignment and later approved his appointment in Hebron.
In the most obvious coverup of the Shamgar Commission, seven Shabak agents and officers involved in the "snafu" that led to Rabin's death, including Kheshin, received notices that they were liable for criminal prosecution. Barak did not. Kheshin was later exonerated by the commission, despite being in charge of the Raviv operation. But Barak, who was apparently Raviv's immediate superior, was not even called to testify.
A few persistent reporters tried tracking Barak down at his home in Kochav Yair but were rudely turned away by Shabak officers surrounding his block. The key to uncovering the truth clearly lies with Eli Barak, but he has been "protected" by the government. And because of this glaring coverup of his activities, many people have speculated that he was the mystery man who closed the back door of Rabin's car from the inside before the "wounded" Rabin entered the backseat.
In February of 1996, the Jerusalem correspondent for the London Observor, Shay Batya, reported that he spoke with two Shabak agents who were fired after the assassination. They informed him that Amir was supposed to fire blanks and that Danny Yatom, Rabin's chief security aide, was involved in the preparations for the scam. His silence was bought by being appointed as chief of the Mossad, an incident eerily reminiscent of Carmi Gillon's rise to head of the Shabak after the Hebron massacre.
Of Gillon, it is well known that he was a far-leftist who despised the settlers and was heard refering to them as "neo-nazis." His attitude was revealed in his 1991 Masters thesis, completed at Haifa Unversity, which analysed the settler movement from a perspective of hatred.
Two days before the assassination, despite pleas from subordinates not to leave the country before the rally in light of the national mood, Gillon flew to Paris. A joke that made the rounds after the assassination has Gillon calling Leah Rabin on the night of the murder and offering his deep condolences. She asks him what for. He says, "Oops, sorry. I forgot about the time difference."
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Barry Chamish is the editor of Inside Israel, a political intelligence report on Israeli affairs. He can be reached at:
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E-Mail: chamish@netmedia.net.il
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