The assassination of Yitzhak Rabin: ‘He never knew it was one of his people who shot him in the back’- 3

“It was like slow motion,” he says. “I remember these seconds like they were minutes.” A moment later, Agent A would make a reflexive decision not to shoot Amir but to keep him alive, so he could stand trial. And yet in those long seconds, it was a different thought that pulsed through him. “What I thought was, we failed.” Whether Rabin lived or died, a gunman had got close enough to fire two bullets into the prime minister. “We failed in our job. In my job. I failed. And I still carry that feeling with me. And, honestly, I can’t let go. Even after so many years.”

The official inquiry found that he and his fellow agents followed procedure perfectly; they could not be faulted. But that’s not how it feels. “It was something that, in my worst dreams, I didn’t expect to happen,” he says now. “It’s a burden.” He was only 23 when it happened: he thought he was old then, but these days he understands he was “very young”.

When our interview is over, unprompted, Agent A clicks on the camera so I can see his face. He doesn’t mind that I know what he looks like; it’s everyone else who must never know. Does he fear people would blame him for Rabin’s death? “At first even some of my colleagues did. They didn’t say it to my face, but they said if they’d been there instead of me, maybe it wouldn’t have happened.”

The agent who had been shot managed to bundle Rabin into the car and ordered the driver, Menachem Damati, to take the prime minister to Ichilov hospital, just a few minutes away. But the driver was so shaken, he became confused. Rabin was in the back and talking: he said he didn’t think he’d been hurt too badly, before passing out. Swerving to avoid pedestrians, crashing through red lights, Damati eventually saw a police officer. He pulled over and told the man to jump in. The officer took control of the car’s megaphone, instructing other vehicles to get out of the way and navigating Damati to the hospital. Ten minutes had passed since the prime minister had been shot.

Incredibly, no one at the hospital gate had been alerted. Damati had to stop and explain what had happened, before he and the police officer carried Rabin, bleeding profusely, into the trauma ward.

Soon a medical team of more than a dozen filled an operating theatre – including specialist surgeons who had driven across Tel Aviv in a crazed scramble. The room was quiet as they cleared the air from Rabin’s chest cavity and massaged his heart back to life: a pulse returned for four or five minutes. One of Rabin’s aides promptly made arrangements to set up an office inside the hospital, ready for a revived PM to resume his duties.

But it was a false hope. “He was dead on arrival,” says Professor Yosef Klausner, then head of surgery at Ichilov. He knew their resuscitation efforts were futile, yet the doctors kept going: “They didn’t want to stop.” Eventually Klausner had to call a halt and formally declare Rabin dead.

Two nurses passed by and one said to the other, ‘He’s not going to make it, but they’re not telling the family yet'

The doctor tells me all this from his desk in Tel Aviv. On the video call, you see a man who is controlled and precise, a medical professional at the top of his field. But talking about that night, he falters. He is back in the operating theatre, watching the prime minister’s life slip away.

“People started to cry,” he says, pausing to collect himself before each sentence. “They sat on the floor, crying. Some of them loudly.” There is a long silence. “Nobody knew him personally,” he says. Instead, “It was as if they knew that this was going to affect their country, their life, their families. They were crying not only for the prime minister – they were crying for their fate.”

Rabin’s family were waiting outside the operating theatre. The journey there had been frantic, all of them piling into a car, following the news on the radio. Noa recalls, “I kept saying, ‘Nothing happened to him. I can assure you, nothing happened to him.’ And I think the sixth or seventh time I said it, my mum, who’s very gentle and polite – I can hardly remember when she raised her voice to me – looked at me and said, ‘Shut up. We don’t know anything, and you don’t know anything. So just shut up.’”

No one at the hospital had been expecting them. They had no ID and waited for 15 minutes before being ushered in. By now Jonathan was sobbing. “All of a sudden you were in a movie,” Noa recalls. “The number of people and press outside. It was a feeling that the whole country was looking at that hospital, at that moment.”

She and her brother stood in a corridor. “There were two nurses passing by and one said to the other, ‘He’s not going to make it, but they’re not telling the family yet.’” She saw the army chief of staff arrive, along with officials from the Mossad and Shabak. “And you know that the moment is coming, and you don’t know how you’ll face it.”

Klausner and a colleague came to tell the family that Rabin was dead. Noa remembers instinctively pulling out a cigarette, the first time she had done that in front of her parents. “All of a sudden the whole corridor was holding cigarettes and lighting up. We started laughing, that this is the legacy.” Rabin had been an incorrigible chain-smoker.

The family were ushered into a room to say their last goodbye. Noa thought she saw her grandfather’s trademark half-smile and asked a doctor about it. He told her it might mean Rabin had not died in pain – that when you’re shot in the back it can feel like no more than a sharp slap. “You can see in the video of the assassination that he’s turning around,” Noa says now, as if “he thought it was someone saying hi. I found a lot of comfort in that. He never knew it was one of his people who shot him in the back.”

© Provided by The Guardian Rabin’s widow, daughter and granddaughter Noa at his funeral, with the Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak. Photograph: AP

At 11.15pm, the prime minister’s spokesman announced the death to the crowd that had gathered outside the hospital. There were cries of, “No! No!” The journalist Attali, then a schoolboy, recalls hearing the news on a bus packed with his fellow religious students. One punched the air and said, “Yes!” He got a smack round the head from the rabbi for his disrespect.

Two days later, Rabin was buried in Jerusalem. In attendance were kings and queens, presidents and prime ministers, including King Hussein of Jordan with whom Rabin had signed a peace treaty just a year earlier. (Arafat was asked to stay away, though he did visit the Rabin apartment during the shiva, the traditional week of mourning: in what was seen as a gesture of deep respect, he removed his keffiyeh.) Bill Clinton bade farewell to a man he had come to see as a father figure with the words, “Shalom, chaver”: goodbye, friend. The teenage Noa gave a eulogy she had written before dawn that morning, in which she spoke very simply of a granddaughter’s love: “The ground has slipped away from under our feet,” she said.

“There was no question whatsoever who would eulogise my grandfather,” she says now. “It was clear it was me. I was the one who was writing all the family speeches from the day I could hold a pencil.” But to speak in front of such a big audience, after such a tragedy? The soldier’s granddaughter replies, “Let’s just say I was brought up on tragedies.”

Rabin’s immediate successor was his decades-long rival, Shimon Peres. Sheves recalls going to see the new PM, urging him to call a snap election. The right was weak, shamed by its association with the incitement that had led to murder; the wave of public grief, embodied by the candlelit vigils of young people, would surely lead to a landslide victory and an immediate mandate to complete Rabin’s peacemaking work. But Peres said no. After years in Rabin’s shadow, he wanted to wait until the scheduled election the following summer rather than rely on a sympathy vote. “He wanted to be elected by himself. It was just his ego,” Sheves says.

Related: Looking back: Political assassinations

As Sheves feared, Peres lost in May 1996. The winner was the man who had watched those crowds chanting “Death to Rabin”, the man accused of turning a blind eye to the incitement that led to murder: Benjamin Netanyahu.

Netanyahu remains prime minister today. For all but 20 months of the last 25 years, the right and centre-right have held power. At the last election, the once-dominant Israeli Labour party of Yitzhak Rabin garnered less than 6% of the vote, and just seven seats. For two and a half decades, Labour has struggled to find a leader who might offer what Rabin did – that almost unique combination of a willingness to compromise for peace, and the credibility and political skill to deliver it. A quarter of a century after that rally in Tel Aviv, the notion of making peace with the Palestinians is discussed only on the fringe left.

Soon after Rabin’s death, they found in one of his pockets the lyric sheet for Shir LaShalom, the Song For Peace. The words read differently now, especially the line lamenting the impossibility of bringing a dead man back to life, for no amount of “bitter tears” can wake him. But the words were also hard to make out: the piece of paper carrying Rabin’s song for peace was stained thick with blood.

• The Most Successful Assassination In History, presented by Jonathan Freedland, is on BBC Radio 4 at 8pm on 2 November and 11am on 4 November.

Reference: Guardian: Jonathan Freedland  1 day ago