Adventures in Correspondentland (4 page)

Even for a novice, it was easy to see how the details of Yitzhak Rabin's assassination would lend themselves to immediate legend and nourish the belief that his death was somehow preordained. On that balmy November night in 1995, the Israeli prime minister had attended a peace rally in front of the City Hall in Tel Aviv, where 100,000 people had gathered in placid rebuttal to the Jewish nationalists and extreme right-wing Zionists who in the weeks before had held a string of protests at which they brandished placards depicting Rabin wearing an Arab headdress and, worse still, a Nazi uniform.

‘I have always believed that the majority of people want peace and are ready to take the chance for peace,' said the former general, who two years earlier had shaken the hand of the Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, on the South Lawn of the White House.

As they stood together on stage, looking out over the largest rally that Tel Aviv had witnessed for more than a decade, the Israeli foreign minister Shimon Peres raised the possibility of an assassin lurking in the crowd. Ever the soldier, Rabin did not seem perturbed. Nor did his wife, Leah, who was asked by a radio reporter if her husband had taken the precaution of wearing a
bullet-proof vest. ‘Have you gone crazy?' she scoffed. ‘What are we – in Africa?'

The rally reached its climax with Rabin mumbling his way through an unfamiliar peace song, the words and music of which had been handed to him beforehand by a diligent aide. Then, as he got down from the stage and walked towards his prime-ministerial limousine, he spoke briefly to a radio reporter, not knowing that this would become his valedictory interview: ‘I always believed that the majority of the people are against violence.'

Moments later, a young assassin stepped forward and fired four times from a Beretta semi-automatic pistol. By the time the 73-year-old reached the hospital, the doctors could not detect any blood pressure or heart beat. Still inside his jacket pocket was the music of the peace song, now spattered with his blood.

When work called late that Saturday night, I did not even bother asking who was the assassin. Here, I repeated the same mistake as Rabin's Shin Bet bodyguards, who had not been prepared psychologically for anyone other than an Arab gunman carrying out the killing. Yet the murderer was a 25-year-old student named Yigal Amir, a former Israeli soldier who lived with his strictly Orthodox parents and claimed to be acting ‘on God's orders'.

Later, the Israeli police discovered that he had been ejected from a Rabin rally in September for screaming about the abandonment of over a hundred thousand West Bank settlers. They found on his bookshelf at home a copy of
The Day of the Jackal
. Proudly, Amir told police that he had tried on two previous occasions to get close enough to the prime minister to kill him, and now, unlike Frederick Forsyth's failed assassin, he had finally achieved his goal. Israel's favourite son, the great hero of the Six Day War,
had been slain by a fellow Jew – an act of fratricide immediately comprehensible in the frenzied aftermath, given the fury aroused by the peace process, but unthinkable just a few seconds earlier.

By now, our Jerusalem bureau had been fully mobilised, and, as ever in these circumstances, the BBC newsdesk at base bolstered its numbers with fly-ins from London. By happy chance, I was fully sober and, in the days before mobile phones were standard issue, close to an old-fashioned landline. It helped, too, that more senior colleagues of Nokia ranking were too drunk to notice their phones were ringing and vibrating, then ringing and vibrating again. Hard though it is to recall in this age of hyper-connectivity, it was possible back then as a journalist to be spectacularly out of the loop, and to remain so for many hours. As a result, I suddenly found myself leapfrogging others on the call list who simply could not be raised, such was the rush to get anyone on a plane to the Middle East who could wield a microphone.

Violent deaths of beloved leaders always resonate in the national imagination, inviting not only mass mourning but also mass hysteria. Yet as soon as we touched down at Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv, it became immediately clear that there was something very solid about the emotional response. It was almost as if the mourners themselves were aware that Rabin, the cranky chain-smoker, would have frowned upon any sentimental excess.

By far the biggest vigils were held outside Rabin's home, and at the Kings of Israel Square in Tel Aviv, where his final peace rally had been held. But all across Jewish Jerusalem, Israelis sat in small huddles, young people especially, clutching peace candles, praying and intoning psalms so quietly that our intruding microphones struggled to register any sound. The lines outside the Knesset, where Rabin's body lay in rest in a simple coffin draped
with the Israeli flag, stretched for miles down a road lined with Cyprus trees and pines, and within 36 hours a million Israelis had filed solemnly past. When his remains were borne on a military command vehicle through the streets to the burial site, again tens of thousands stood weeping.

Breaking with the Jewish tradition of burial before sundown the day after death, the funeral had been pushed back until Monday so that international leaders could make the journey to Jerusalem, and not since the funeral of the Japanese emperor Hirohito had so many gathered in one place. Heading a delegation that included two former presidents, Jimmy Carter and George Herbert Walker Bush, and 40 members of Congress, Bill Clinton traced a line back to the assassinations of Lincoln, the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King, who in Memphis also appeared to have a rendezvous with death. He characterised Rabin as a ‘martyr for peace'.

For once, the American president was completely upstaged by Arab leaders, who were making their first visit to Jerusalem since it had been conquered by Israeli forces in 1967. King Hussein of Jordan, wearing his red-and-white-checked headdress and regularly wiping away tears, called Rabin a ‘friend' and ‘brother', and sighed, ‘You lived as a soldier. You died as a soldier for peace.' The Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, who had shunned Israel since taking office, was less generous, but prepared still to don a blue baseball cap handed to him by Israeli officials when Rabin was laid to rest, in deference to the Jewish tradition of covering the scalp at religious ceremonies.

The emotional punch, meanwhile, came from Rabin's 17-year-old granddaughter, Noa Ben-Artzi, whose freckled beauty and fierce determination that this solemn national occasion should
also have the character of a more intimate family farewell made her its unlikely star. ‘Forgive me, for I do not want to talk about peace,' she said. ‘I want to talk about my grandfather.'

Alas, everyone else
did
want to talk about peace, and the possibility that Yigal Amir had succeeded in his aim of sabotaging the Oslo Accords. Rabin was not just a central character but also its indispensable character. The standard cliché that week was also a truism: only the man who won the West Bank could hand it back.

But the fact that Rabin had been the chief of staff of the Israeli Defence Forces who orchestrated victory over Egypt, Syria and Jordan in the Six Day War only partly explained his towering authority. Nor did it stem from the accident of birth that made him Israel's first native-born prime minister. Just as important was the simple fact that Rabin was so gruff, irritable and of his generation. So it was not just as an Israeli soldier that he could stand before his nation, in defiance of the Jewish nationalists, to make the case for a historic compromise trading land for security. It was, as his friend the
New York Times
columnist Thomas Friedman pointed out at the time, as an Israeli Sabra.

As the years progressed, I covered various peace initiatives involving the Palestinians and a succession of Israeli prime ministers, from Shimon Peres to Ehud Barak, from Ariel Sharon to Ehud Olmert, but Rabin was matchless. It is tempting to think he could have delivered lasting peace to the region, but that is to tread territory usually best avoided: the land of might-have-been.

As a cub reporter on my first foreign assignment, that week in the Middle East felt like correspondent boot camp. It was the first time I ever had a loaded weapon cocked towards me, when a Palestinian policeman took umbrage at me for wandering onto a
prohibited section of the beach next to Yasser Arafat's shoreline headquarters in Gaza. Holding me at gunpoint in a briefly threatening manner, he suggested I should leave with a couple of twitches and flicks of his AK-47.

That same day, I also had my first encounter with an Islamic militant, when a bearded 20-something slipped, almost unnoticed, into the back seat of our car, in true cloak-and-dagger fashion, to outline in more detail how Hamas had reacted to Rabin's assassination. Needless to say, Hamas was delighted, because the killing had the twin benefits of eliminating such a long-time opponent of Palestinian nationalism and of undercutting Arafat, whom it cast as a traitor for dealing with the Israelis.

Nor had I visited the Gaza Strip, the slum-like slither of land that hugged a 25-mile stretch of Mediterranean coastline, where Arafat had made his triumphant return from exile the previous year in the hope that a scruffy fiefdom, over which he enjoyed only partial control, could blossom into a fully functional Palestinian state. And never before had I cast eyes on the Palestinian leader himself. Fearing it would inflame passions on both sides, he had avoided Rabin's funeral, but in the days afterwards he welcomed a string of Western diplomats to the one-time beach club that was now the headquarters of the newly established Palestinian National Authority.

For all the trappings of pseudo-statehood, and for all his dressy flourishes – he reportedly spent an hour each morning sculpting his black-and-white-checked kafiya into something closely resembling the map of Palestine and then fastening it with a brooch in the shape of a phoenix – Arafat already looked a lesser figure. His bulbous lips trembled, his hands shook, as if an ice chill were coming off the Mediterranean, and in his shaky
pronouncements he displayed precisely the kind of hesitancy that would encumber the peace process for years to come. Even then, there was a feeling that he preferred the pretence of an ongoing peace process rather than ever reaching its endpoint: a fully negotiated settlement. Better to remain a victim, the theory went, than sue for a peace deal that would never fully satisfy his Palestinian followers.

Back in Jerusalem, as Israeli politicians shuttled between television studios offering on-air assessments of Rabin's legacy, I also came into contact with many of the leaders who over the coming years would face Arafat across the negotiating table – or not, as the case may be. There was the Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu, proud, angry and touchy, who throughout the week ran the gauntlet of reporters asking him if his rhetoric in support of the Jewish settlers had contributed to the venomous climate in which Rabin was killed. There was the mayor of Jerusalem, Ehud Olmert, another future prime minister, and a hate-figure among Palestinians for advancing the Judaisation of a city whose eastern half they viewed still as their capital.

With Olmert, I thought myself fiendishly clever at scoring a one-on-one interview by persuading him to let me dive into the back of his armour-plated limousine as he sped to his next engagement across town. Unfortunately, I rather dumped on my own scoop, by constantly putting my Olmerts before my Ehuds. Perhaps sensing I was a novice, he was generous enough to overlook being called ‘Mr Ehud' the first three times, but not the fourth. ‘It's Ehud Olmert,' he snapped, as the car drew to the side of the road, and I was cast out onto the gravel verge like a hostage who had suddenly outlived his usefulness. Then, having wound up on Jerusalem's desert fringes, I had to figure out how
to get back in time to edit – heavily edit – my botched report.

Throughout the week, my fumbling efforts seemed even more pathetic when compared with those of the BBC's foreign-correspondent corps, the elite of the elite. But at least there were occasional morale-lifting moments, when I realised that this illustrious band of brothers, as it largely was in those days, could stumble too.

Early one morning, a correspondent drafted in from a neighbouring bureau was slated to perform what is called a two-way, a straightforward question-and-answer session involving a reporter on the ground and a presenter in London designed to provide a quick update of any overnight developments. In this instance, there had been a crucial development: an arrest in the assassination investigation pointing towards a more elaborate right-wing conspiracy. The problem was that the correspondent, who had not yet cast his eyes over the early-morning news wires, was completely in the dark. The general rule of thumb in two-ways is for the correspondent to inform the presenter what is happening. Here, the roles were inadvertently reversed. What followed, then, was a masterclass in the art of generic correspondent doggerel.

Was this a significant development, asked the presenter, having laid out the bare details of the overnight arrest in the introduction. Indeed it was, replied the panicky correspondent as his eyes searched for the nearest computer screen. It was clearly a major development in the investigation, and the police would be treating it as a significant breakthrough. Follow-up questions yielded more answers completely devoid of enlightening information. The suspect would be held in custody under tight security, the correspondent ventured. The police would look to glean as much information as possible in the hope of furthering
their inquiry. Then they would decide whether or not to mount a prosecution.

Nothing about the two-way was factually incorrect, but neither, in all its non-specific artfulness, could any of it have been described as being of factual use. Declaring himself ‘a complete pilchard', the correspondent left the radio booth and hunted down the latest piece of Reuters copy, knowing that another two-way loomed at the top of the next hour.

In his defence, at least he had the bravado to battle on. Years earlier, a correspondent dispatched at late notice to Moscow at a particularly chilly phase of the Cold War was bowled such a tricky googly from a presenter in London on the latest machinations at the Kremlin that he remained completely silent, gently took off his headphones, placed them down on the desk in front of him and tiptoed out of the radio studio. The presenter explained the dead air by saying there was a problem with the line, but the problem was with the correspondent, who had simply done a runner.