Killing a King: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel by Dan Ephron
https://www.amazon.com/Killing-King-Assassination-Yitzhak-Remaking/dp/0393242099
This book is an excellent chronicle of how a Israeli leader was killed and why and how the assassin did it.
The assassination of Israeli Prime Minister by a radical orthodox Jewish settler named Yigal Amir is perhaps the most or second most important event in Israel’s history. A book of this monument would probably be hard to follow along especially with it’s vast cast of foreign politicians that most people won’t know, but author Dan Ephron masterfully manages to introduce and explain each character without the reader losing track of them. I never lost track of who was who, what relationship they had with Rabin, and their occupation and importance to the assassination story.
It is interesting to see how despite being on an almost half century war with the Palestinians, security was very lax to the Prime Minister. Despite the condemnation that the Jewish radicals faced both in society and the Israeli parliament, Rabin’s successors failed to rally support for coexistence with the P.L.O. even though international support for such plans were at an all time high, which climaxed with a lackluster Oslo Accords.
Ephron’s book is very successful in telling how the assassination occurred and why but it does not do such a good job at explaining the consequences of the event. Modern Israeli international politics today are almost the same as they were those years ago, with settler settlements still an issue, Israeli Palestinians facing discrimination and second class citizenship, and radical Jewish fundamentalists attacking Palestinians civilians and calling for genocide. I personally saw parallels with the United States, with two sides against each other with one aligning themselves with far right groups, fascists, and Nazi sympathizers. The leader of the nation being an old man who still believes in unity despite the concerns of both sides and the active threats from one specific side being brushed aside. In fact I’ll say it, Rabin this cover above looks too much like President Biden. Look out Biden, you don’t seem to be taking the threats against you seriously, don’t get assassinated!
I read this book in audiobook form. It was simple to follow and I didn’t seem to miss anything that text reading could have only given me besides seeing colored pictures. The narrator seem to pronounce Hebrew and Arabic words very well. But the funny thing about the narrator is the voices that he made when there was women’s dialogue, as he intimated their voices to such a degree that it was laughable. Also funny was when Bill Clinton had dialogue, the narrator also tired to copy his memorable voice. Laugh out loud moments.
Programs such podcast as NPR or history related ones might better details on how the assassination affected today’s Israel with a mute Palestinian resistance and pro-settler society that the Jewish state still has today. Ephron throws in the end of the book a weird story of him following a conspiracy theory that is akin to JFK’s assassination in that someone else or something like that killed Rabin instead of Amir. Instead of putting this overlong story of him explaining the various theories and his personal story of going to American labs to test out Rabin’s blood stained clothes, a section explaining Israeli guilt over the assassination and it’s results would have been better. Despite the thin ending and crazy end chapters, this book is very good and I would place it along the best books on contemporary Israel.
