Nancy Updike Dan Ephron Ira Glass

Nancy Updike | Dan Ephron | Ira Glass

Why the Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin Still Divides Israelis 20 Years Later

November 4, 2015

LIVE from the New York Public Library

Celeste Bartos Forum

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER:Good evening. Good evening.My name is Paul Holdengräber. I’m the Director of Public Programs here at the New York Public Library, known as LIVE from the New York Public Library. As all of you know, my goal here is to make the lions roar, to make a heavy institution dance, and when successful to make it levitate.

It is a pleasure to welcome back Ira Glass to be LIVE from the New York Public Library for I believe the third time. Once he was here with Etgar Keret, once with Nico Muhly, and tonight he will be joined by Dan Ephron and Nancy Updike. (applause) Thank you.

Upcoming still in November we have Mary-Louise Parker with Mary Karr and I will be interviewing Edmund de Waal on the 16th of November. In December, the Robert Silvers Lecture will be delivered this year by Helen Vendler.

I would like to say a big thank-you to the Ford Foundation for their fantastic support of LIVE from the New York Public Library for its tenth anniversary. To celebrate, the Ford Foundation will match your contribution to LIVE dollar for dollar when you give. You’ll help make sure we continue to engage New Yorkers in conversations that contribute to and enrich the cultural discourse. Please consider giving with the pledge cards which are at the door. Additionally, I would like to thank the continuing generosity of Celeste Bartos and Mahnaz and Adam Bartos.

After this event, Dan Ephron will sign his new book Killing a King: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel. Thanks go as always to our independent bookstore, 192 Books, for being on hand.

On the twentieth anniversary of the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, tonight Ira Glass speaks with longtime contributor and producer Nancy Updike to This American Life and her husband Dan Ephron, former Jerusalem bureau chief for Newsweek. Both have covered Israel for years. Ephron was at the rally where Rabin was killed and has written a new book just out about the murder called Killing a King: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel while Updike just created an episode about the assassination for This American Life. Incorporating historical footage from the time of the murder and audio from Updike’s program, Ira tonight will lead a discussion about why the assassination still spawns conspiracy theories, public shouting matches, and fierce political divisions.

As many of you know, for the last seven or eight years, I’ve asked my guests to give me a biography of themselves in seven words, a haiku of sorts or if you’re very modern, a tweet. (laughter) Dan’s bio reads as follows: “I wrote book. Now I need glasses.” (laughter) Nancy’s bio: “Grew up WASP, had questions, became reporter.” (laughter) And Ira Glass submitted to me quite a few and then settled on one, but I will read two: He writes, “I may revise but for now here’s this: ‘Good editor, producer. Still doesn’t enunciate properly.’” (laughter) Then he gave me as I said quite a few, but I really love this one, so I have to read it before I bring them onstage to your cheers. “I considered this but I guess it’s not really a bio: ‘Only visits the library for Paul’s events.’” (laughter) Please welcome them.

(applause)

IRA GLASS: All right. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to talk about the assassination, which was twenty years ago today. We’re going to talk about the book and also the radio story. We have video and other things, and images that were not on the radio and just to review just the basic facts for those of you who aren’t super familiar with what happened twenty years ago: Yitzhak Rabin was the prime minister of Israel. He was assassinated by a fellow Israeli who opposed the peace process that Rabin was at that point trying to make happen, the Oslo peace process. So I’m Ira, this is Dan, this is Nancy.

NANCY UPDIKE: Just a quick question. How many of you out there heard the radio show that we did about the Rabin assassination? Good, good, you get special treats afterward—a book! Just to say we wanted to do this radio story because here’s this tremendous event in this country and we knew from the reporting that Danny, I’m going to call him Danny, I just can’t call him Dan for an hour, did for his book that here was this event that lingered in the country and we wanted to kind of go in depth and see how is that happening now twenty years later? How is it happening in the lives of the people? How does it exist in the lives of the people that were there that night and how does it exist in sort of the larger political conversation?

IRA GLASS: Why don’t you talk about how you got involved, why you decided to write a book about this story.

DAN EPHRON: Let me just say by the way I wrote parts of this book in this building in the Reading Room upstairs. In New York we live on a studio on the East Side and when it just got too cramped, I would come here before the Reading Room came to be under renovation. So it’s a nice homecoming, it’s nice to be here. The kernel for this book started in 2012. I was the bureau chief for Newsweek in Jerusalem, and I was doing that thing that you do when you want to be really productive, I was clicking on YouTube, you know, click and then click and then click, and eventually several hours into it I came across this clip of the interrogation of Yigal Amir, the twenty-five-year-old Jewish extremist, Jewish Israeli young man, who had killed Rabin. So this is 2012, this was about seventeen years later, and I found it gripping, and the quality was terrible, the audio was so-so but the clip was gripping, in part because I had been in Israel in the nineties, I’d reported from the rally or at the rally where he was killed.

IRA GLASS: So twenty years ago tonight you were at that rally.

DAN EPHRON: That’s right, yeah. It was a peace rally and it was huge. There were a hundred thousand people there. And then I covered the trial of Yigal Amir over the course of several months. So seventeen years later, eighteen years later, it felt very relevant and watching Yigal Amir talk to policemen. You know, Yigal Amir sort of disappears into the prison system in Israel. He gets convicted a few months after the assassination. Israelis don’t allow journalists into prison to interview him. So, you know, seeing him on a computer screen I found very interesting and from there I thought if there’s twenty seconds of it in the world, if that exists, if police went to the trouble—thank you—of taping twenty seconds they probably taped many hours of it and I made it my mission to find that tape and to watch it, and eventually I did. And we’re going to show you a short clip, this is not the one that I initially saw on YouTube.

NANCY UPDIKE: And just to say you watched I mean, eight, ten, twelve hours, am I getting that right?

DAN EPHRON: Right, exactly, yeah, all over the course of a long weekend where Nancy thought I was insane and you’ll see why when we see this.

[Video plays]

NANCY UPDIKE: That’s Yigal Amir on the right.

IRA GLASS: So wait, what did you get from seeing that?

(laughter)

DAN EPHRON: Thank you, yes.

IRA GLASS: Well, also I just have to say, that, you know, here in the United States, we think of the Israeli security apparatus as this like super high tech, state of the art. This is it? It’s like they have the camera hidden in a box, you know what I mean? Like with a little hole in it, like no one will ever think that there’s a camera in this box with a hole in it.

DAN EPHRON: This is the good quality, by the way. This is the better one. Seriously, you’ll see the other stuff. So here’s what—so, well, first of all let me say, right, so the technique is a little cumbersome, because the interrogator who is on your left, he’s taking down every word, he’s writing down every word that Yigal Amir says.

IRA GLASS: By hand.

DAN EPHRON: By hand, yeah, and in fact there was a point where the documents came my way as well and so I had a chance—my Hebrew’s pretty good, I had a chance to read through them.

IRA GLASS: You mean the transcript of this interrogation.

DAN EPHRON: Right, but it’s the handwritten transcript, so it took a very long time to get through it and to try to understand it. But what you get is—I mean, you’re asking what you get. You get the story, the whole story, of Yigal Amir stalking Rabin over two years and eventually catching up to him and, you know, this interrogator is asking questions that are a lot like what a journalist would want to know. I said that journalists can’t get into the prison system to talk to Yigal Amir but he asking, you know, the what and the when. He wants to know exactly what Yigal Amir did, when he left his home that night, what he was carrying with him, but he also wants to establish motive and the frame of mind of the suspect, so he’s asking, “What were you thinking at that moment? When was the first moment that the idea of killing Rabin came to your mind?”

NANCY UPDIKE: And Yigal Amir is in these hours and hours of interrogation, he wants to tell the story, he wants to talk about here’s what I did, here’s why I did it.

IRA GLASS: He’s proud.

NANCY UPDIKE: He is proud. He is proud. This was what he wanted to do.

IRA GLASS: It’s a patriotic act in his view.

NANCY UPDIKE: Absolutely. Yeah, yeah.

DAN EPHRON: And let’s just talk for a minute about what he did, what happened that night. So Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli prime minister, two years earlier had signed a peace deal with the Palestinians. This is that awkward moment that you probably remember of Arafat and Rabin being kind of coaxed together by Clinton for that handshake.

IRA GLASS: On the White House lawn.

DAN EPHRON: On the White House lawn. This is September 1993. And Yigal Amir who is a I think first-year law student at the time watches this on TV and tells himself right away, this is a betrayal of Israel, it’s a betrayal of Judaism. Amir is a Jewish extremist, he’s religious, he has studied in ultra-Orthodox schools, every word of the Torah for him is literal truth, and the fact that this involves giving up parts of the West Bank and Gaza, Biblical Israel to him, is a betrayal of Judaism. And then he spends two years stalking Rabin. Looking in the paper for places that Rabin will be appearing, will be speaking publicly, going to these places, seeing if he can get close enough, and then eventually he does it, and he does it at this peace rally, this very large peace rally, where Amir gets there, he sees Rabin’s Cadillac in the parking lot, this armored Cadillac that in fact the security service had just bought a few months earlier because they sensed there was a growing threat to Rabin’s life. Rabin had driven around in a Chevy Caprice up until then. And he’s resisting the idea, by the way, that he needs protection, he’s resisting wearing a bulletproof vest. And Amir gets into this parking lot that’s supposed to be secure, he waits for Rabin to come down off the stage after the rally, he watches him come down with his bodyguards, he circles around him, there’s an opening behind him between the two bodyguards, behind Rabin, and Amir reaches for his Beretta. He’s got a 9mm Beretta that he keeps with him everywhere, he keeps wedged in his pants. And manages to let off three shots. Two bullets hit Rabin in the back and the third bullet hits the bodyguard.

Let’s watch the other interrogation. This is the first one I saw, this is the one on YouTube, and you’re not, it’s hard to see, but look for Amir on the left side in the shadow, and there’s three or four policemen interrogating him on the right side.

[Video plays]

DAN EPHRON: What Amir is saying is, “I did the things that I did because of my religious obligation,” and there’s this moment here where he says to the interrogator, to the police interrogator, “did you take that down, did you get that?” And the guy on the right who’s in the white shirt, he’s sort of balding, he’s the guy who’s taking everything down by hand.

NANCY UPDIKE: And one of the things that made us want to do a radio story about this is because—because so much of what happened is documented, you know, there are these, you know, primary source materials to go to like these hours and hours of video and audio, and also because this happened only twenty years ago.

IRA GLASS: Everybody’s alive.

NANCY UPDIKE: Well, most people are alive. Yeah, Yeah. Yeah. And it’s rare that you can have that. You can have all of this documentation, you can go to the people who said this at the time and they’re still alive and go talk to them about,“Well what do you think now?” And also Israel as some of you may know, it’s a very small country, it’s a very informal country, people are listed, you can just kind of look people up in 411 and get their number and, you know, call them up and they’ll say, “Hey, yeah, come over, I’m in my shorts,” this actually happened to us. So we found the guy in the white shirt who’s doing this interrogation. And this by the way is the interrogation that is happening right after the assassination. This is in the hours after it’s just happened and so Danny found, found this guy because you can’t really see it in this part of the video, but in other parts of the video he’s smoking a pipe and just not a lot of pipe smokers in Israel. I mean I think he’s the only one either of us had ever met.

DAN EPHRON: Never met a pipe smoker.

NANCY UPDIKE: So he went back and talked to people.

IRA GLASS: And his name was Holmes, Sherlock Holmes.

NANCY UPDIKE: Exactly, exactly, and he wore a watch cap. Hmm. So Danny went back to, you know, to people who were policemen, security at the time, and said, “hey, you know there was this interrogator who smoked a pipe,” and everybody said, “Oh, well, that’s Motti Naftali,” because he’s the only one any of them had ever met, too.

DAN EPHRON: He’s also a windsurfer by the way.

NANCY UPDIKE: Also a windsurfer.

DAN EPHRON: We learned that and I think on the first time we called him and said, “Can we come over?,” he said, “Not today, because the wind is good and I’m going to be windsurfing today.”

NANCY UPDIKE: “The wind is good.” Also speaks many languages. He’s a very interesting guy. So talking to him was completely fascinating. He’d been a policeman for a while when Rabin was shot, and when he starts interrogating Yigal Amir, neither one of them knows yet that Rabin has died. They know that he’s been hit but they don’t know that he’s dead. And in the video, Motti looks very calm. You know, he’s an experienced interrogator. He’s talked to murderers before, that’s not new. But he—as he told us in the interview, he is very much struggling to keep his cool. He is talking to this man who just shot the prime minister, and he— even though he’s a policeman, is in shock just like many other people in the country and he’s also struggling to keep his cool because the person he’s interrogating is so pleased with himself. He’s almost giddy with the triumph of even just having hit Rabin.

DAN EPHRON: And incredibly calm.

NANCY UPDIKE: And calm.

DAN EPHRON: And I think this is the thing that stood out. You asked about you know what was interesting. Just in these twenty seconds you see just how calm he is. When outside, you know, think of the Kennedy assassination. The country is in a state of trauma and shock. There is no tradition of political assassination in Israel until that point. And to the extent that anyone imagined it would ever happen, I think people thought about a Palestinian gunman, not a fellow Israeli and a fellow Jew.

NANCY UPDIKE: So Naftali is trying to keep his cool during this interrogation, to be calm and polite and this is what he told us.

MOTTI NAFTALI: A—one of my police came in and brought me a cup of tea, in a white cup, you know—