Rabin's Murder Spotlights Religious Influence in Israeli Police and Army

By Dr. Israel Shahak

Since Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's murder, both Likud supporters and Israeli journalists who have supported Rabin and the Oslo accords have charged that the Israeli secret police (called GSS, the General Security Service or, in Hebrew, the Shabak), which is supposed to guard the prime minister, has at least failed in its duty if it did not actually facilitate the murder. On Nov. 6, barely two days after the murder, Sever Plotzker suggested in Yediot Ahronot the possibility of a conspiracy because "that murder was a well-planned act in all its details. It was seemingly based on reliable inside information...It looks as if it was not only by chance that the murderer was able to come as close to the prime minister as he did." Although Plotzker acknowledged that the likelihood of a conspiracy was low, he added that "nevertheless, we should not dismiss this probability offhand."

Subsequently some of the best-known commentators of the Hebrew press and some Israeli ministers became convinced of the probability that employees of the Israeli secret police either passively helped or actively participated in Rabin's murder. Respected journalist Shalom Yerushalmi, who is very close to the Labor Party, noted in the Nov. 15 Ma'ariv that as a result of "the terrible contradictions" apparent in the many announcements of the secret police, "several ministers are beginning to suspect that the murder resulted either from an internal conspiracy or from a conspiracy including both internal and external factors. The internal factors do not include persons in high levels of the secret police, well-known for their staunch support of the government's positions, but perhaps they include some at lower levels who operate in the field."

In the Nov. 22 Ma'ariv, Yerushalmi was more explicit. He described two detailed conspiracy theories, one held by "activists of the extreme right and the settlers" and the other by the "several ministers" who told him about their suspicions a week before. Both theories begin with two facts not doubted now by anyone in Israel except Rabin's successor as prime minister, Shimon Peres.

The first is that the secret police had employed extreme right-wing activist Avishai Raviv not only as an informant but also as an agent provocateur, licensed to commit such crimes as beating up Palestinians in Hebron and distributing photos of Rabin dressed in a Nazi SS uniform. The second fact is that the secret police had abundant information about Jews seriously intending to assassinate Rabin (including the intentions of the actual murderer), but not only did not warn the police or the organizers of the rally in which Rabin was killed about this possibility, but told them explicitly that the only threat to murder the prime minister came from Arabs.

This means that someone in the secret police stopped such information from reaching the appropriate persons on purpose. According to a story in Yediot Ahronot on Nov. 8, Rabin himself had refused to believe that "a Jew would try to assassinate a Jewish prime minister."

The first theory (which, in my view, should not be hastily discounted because of the nature of its supporters) holds that "the secret police conspired with Yigal Amir and allowed him to proceed with his insane plan to reach the prime minister and fire at him with blank bullets which it had put previously in his revolver. By this means persons in the secret police intended to besmirch the [Israeli] right wing. But a terrible mishap occurred, and the blank bullets were exchanged for real ones."

In Yerushalmi's view the second theory, held by "several ministers," is more probable. It postulates that "one or two secret police agents identified with murderous fascism and it is they who purposely blocked dissemination of the information about the intended murder. The chief of the secret police or his deputy, both of whom support the Labor Party's ideology, are not accused of this. But some low-level commander who can reach relevant information and has powers of issuing operative orders, is. It is enough if one such person, full of hatred and with no morality, exists in the secret police—and there are indeed such persons in it—and he will be able to identify with murder and help to accomplish it."

Accordingly, Yerushalmi calls on Israeli society "to fear the possibility of the penetration of the secret police by murderous fascism as has happened in some states." In this context he recalls that "as was unofficially leaked, the murderer had been trained in secret installations. Had he continued in his relations with the secret police it is not impossible that he would have advanced rather high in the ranks of the [Israeli] Security Services."

An "Unofficial Leak"

It is noteworthy that the "unofficial leak" published in the Hebrew press came from the highest ranks of the Israeli police, perhaps even from Police Minister Moshe Shahal, himself. There is no reason to doubt this leak about assassin Yigal Amir's training in secret government facilities.

Similar views were expressed by one of the most respected Hebrew press commentators, Nahum Barnea, in Yediot Ahronot of Nov. 19. Going into the past, Barnea attributes a part of the responsibility for what he terms "the collapse of the secret police" to its present chief, "K.," and even more to his predecessor, Ya'akov Peri, "the first [Israeli] secret police chief whose personal honesty and probity were doubted." (Israeli law forbids publication of the name of the serving head of the secret police, but not the names of past chiefs.)

Referring to the revelations of Raviv's connections with the secret police, Barnea opines that "this affair is raising disturbing questions: Has the [Israeli] secret police, like Okhrana, the secret police of Tsarist Russia, kept the enemies of the state and its murderers on the payroll?" Other commentators comparing the Israeli secret police with Okhrana hastened to tell their readers about the latter's habitual employment of agents provocateurs who acted in the ranks of revolutionary groups and organized crimes against functionaries of the Tsarist regime while simultaneously supplying some information to their employers.

One such crime by Okhrana informants was (perhaps for reasons of delicacy) overlooked. Okhrana is suspected of organizing in 1910 the murder of Russian Prime Minister Stolypin, a conservative reformer who angered the extreme right and religious fanatics. Even with this omission the comparison of Israel's internal secret police with the secret police of the decaying Tsarist regime is far from flattering.

In such circumstances it is not surprising that Barnea's view that "the secret police is collapsing" has been widely echoed. What may surprise non-Israeli readers is that the few current defenders of the secret police come exclusively from the Israeli left.

When the secret police complicity in Rabin's murder began to be widely suspected, its staunchest defenders came from the pro-peace Meretz party, principally from Environment Minister Yossi Sarid, a friend of the secret police for years. After a few days, when a rift, threatening to become a break, developed between Peres and Meretz, Sarid's defense of the secret police cooled. Then a new defender was found: Health Minister Efraim Sneh of the Labor Party, who is an ex-communist.

Tom Segev ( Ha'aretz, Nov. 22) commented that "perhaps the [Israeli] left used its past connections with the secret police in order to help individual Arabs, but at the same time it was remarkably reticent in attacking torture," which is widely practiced by the secret police. Segev's views were widely echoed.

Even more explicit was Avinoam Bar-Yosef, Ma'ariv correspondent in Washington, who in the Nov. 23 edition accused the secret police of using the left "for manipulative purposes," instead of mending secret police ways. Bar Yosef opined that "the secret police's failure in the matter of Rabin's murder is something worse than the [Israeli] failure in the Yom Kippur War, since in the latter case only the intelligence had collapsed, while the combat units of the army fought magnificently. In the secret police everything has collapsed: the illusion of being professional was ruined, the image of sophistication has faded and, especially, the credibility was lost."

Bar-Yosef expresses doubt whether Israel needs secret police such as it has now, and rebukes its left-wing defenders who have said that "the baby should not be poured out with the bath water." "We should be concerned even more," writes Bar-Yosef, "that our democracy should not be poured down the drain."

In my own view it is virtually certain that persons inside the Israeli secret police gave the murderer information about Rabin's route on the night of the murder and also cooperated with him in other ways, including sharing his murderous intentions. Persons who might be suspected of doing exactly that abound in the secret police which in the last 10 to 15 years has become filled with religious-nationalist Jews of extreme views.

Such persons, even if their views were much more extreme than those of former Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir and most other Likud leaders, were regarded by the secret police as completely reliable. In spite of the violent opposition among religious-nationalist Jews to the Oslo process and despite the many other signs pointing to rebellion brewing among them, the secret police, notoriously the most stupid of Israeli intelligence services, didn't pay attention to the probability that many potential and actual traitors of this particular kind were present in its ranks.

Religion in the Service of Espionage

But the other Israeli intelligence services also tend to trust and employ religious-nationalist Jews and to use Jewish religion in the service of Israeli espionage. The case of U.S. Naval counter-intelligence specialist Jonathan Pollard is a good example of this.

Before Pollard was put to work as a spy for Israel within the U.S. intelligence establishment, he was, according to what he told the Hebrew press, brought to Israel to spend time in a Yeshiva of Braslav Hassids, one of the most fanatical groups that exist.

Rabin's murderer, Yigal Amir, was employed in the middle of his army service, in 1992, by the "Netiv" intelligence organization. It was attached, like the secret police and Mossad, to the prime minister's office.

It was first said that Amir's job with "Netiv" was to teach Hebrew in Riga, the capital of Latvia, although he didn't know any Latvian, Russian or Yiddish, languages used by the Jews of Latvia. But, according to Rami Rosen and Ronen Bergman, writing in the Nov. 12 Ha'aretz supplement, since the early 1950s "Netiv" has been employed "to supply religious needs such as prayer books and to teach Hebrew" to Jews of the Soviet Union. Since the U.S.S.R. folded, "Netiv" has done the same in the states which were once a part of the Soviet Union, although all such activities now are perfectly legal.

Curiously, members of the organization are trained by the secret police before being sent "to distribute prayer books." All "Netiv" members sent with Amir were religious-nationalist Jews in the middle of their army service in "Hesder" Yeshivot* under the influence of the most extreme rabbis from among the West Bank settlements.

"Netiv" spokesmen admitted to Ha'aretz that they allowed their messengers "to use the journey to influence Jews to settle in the West Bank settlements." No wonder Ha'aretz asked "Netiv" whether the organization "also serves as a Trojan horse." The significant allegation was politely denied, at least for the time being.

The same tendency to employ and favor religious-nationalist Jews also exists in the elite units of the Israeli army. The Hebrew press, prevented by military censorship from giving statistics, quoted the New York Times which opined that 40 percent of elite units are composed of nationalist-religious Jews, who comprise about 10 percent of the Israeli Jewish population. Although the figure seems exaggerated to me, there is no doubt that, because of deliberate army policies, the percentage of religious-nationalist Jews in such units, from whose graduates the secret police and Mossad are in turn recruited to a large extent, is much greater than their share in the population.

Mikha Regev writes in the Nov. 23 Yediot Ahronot about the great number of "Hesder and pre-military Yeshivot,"¹ financed to a great extent by Israeli army and other state organs (many of them situated in the West Bank) in which the rabbis control their students totally and direct them to army careers specifically intended by the rabbis to establish rabbinic influence or control over specified elite units of the army.

Ideology inculcated in these institutions includes "deep contempt for any secular regime" and an assurance that with the coming of the Messiah, to be expected soon, secular Jews (and, of course, the Palestinians too) will just disappear and all Jews will be religious and live in a state conducted according to the rules of Jewish religion.

Prestigious scholar Emmanuel Sivan explained in the Nov. 10 Ha'aretz that similar ideology in Egypt led to the murder there of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. Also in that case, ideological developments were overlooked by the secret police concerned.

The Israeli secret police has been rendered both corrupt and inefficient by the absolute power it has wielded in the occupied territories. Lord Acton's dictum "power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely" has operated on no Israeli occupation organ more than on the secret police.

In addition to corruption, the Israeli secret police shares with some other Israeli institutions a particularly blatant form of racism: it is divided into two autonomous bodies that have very little contact with each other. The bulk of the secret police deals only with Arabs. However, the "Department for Jewish Affairs" deals only with Jewish suspects.

After Rabin's murder, the secret police has had to admit that in recent years most of this department's efforts were directed at Jewish "extreme leftists" or at those "active in human rights." Little effort, and that little of ludicrous nature, was spent investigating Jewish elements which for a long time have made no secret of their intention to rebel and to assassinate.

In conclusion let me express my full agreement with the above-mentioned views of Avinoam Bar-Yosef. The now visible collapse of the Israeli secret police is of considerably greater political significance even than the murder of an Israeli prime minister. It is the collapse which led to the murder, not vice versa. Just as all Israeli policies after the October War of 1973 were influenced by the relative Israeli failure in that war, so all Israeli policies from now on will be influenced by the visible collapse of the Israeli secret police.

*"Hesder" means in Hebrew "arrangement." The arrangement has been concluded between the Israeli army and a group of rabbis. According to it all students of their Yeshivot (religious schools) will serve in the army, but only for 18 months instead of 36 months, as does anyone else. Those 18 months are divided into several parts sandwiched between terms of Yeshiva studies so that the entire army service of those students takes five years. Hesder Yeshiva students serve in separate companies and are accompanied by their own rabbis during their service. Pre-military Yeshivot (all in the West Bank) take boys whose army service was deferred for the purpose, and give them a mixed military and Talmudic education, so that on their entrance into the army for the full 36 months of continuous service, they are able at once to proceed to the officer, NCO or other important courses.

Dr. Israel Shahak, a Holocaust survivor and retired professor of chemistry at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, is chairman of the Israeli League of Human and Civil Rights.