Famed Security Slipped Up
How could it happen?
No country puts more emphasis on security than Israel. The Shin Bet secret service built an enviable reputation for protecting its leaders and preventing terrorist attacks.
Security broke down, however, when bodyguards apparently mistook a young law student for a VIP driver and let him get close enough to shoot Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin with a 9mm Beretta. Questions are also being asked about why Rabin was not wearing a bulletproof vest.
It’s not as if there wasn’t ample warning that an attack might come from Israel’s religious right-wing. The suspect had links to right-wing extremists.
In recent weeks, angry debate over the future of the West Bank spilled into the streets with right-wingers heckling Rabin at public appearances, calling him a “murderer,” “Nazi” and “traitor.”
His Cabinet ministers were also under threat, and extra bodyguards and armored cars were deployed. Housing Minister Binyamin Eliezer was trapped in an angry crowd, Education Minister Shulamit Aloni was punched in the stomach and Environment Minister Yossi Sarid’s car was forced off a highway.
Yossi Melman, an author and expert on intelligence, said security was “a total failure because the handwriting has been on the wall for the past month.”
One reason was that few Israelis really believed that an Israeli would kill an Israeli.
The security instead focused on Palestinian militants, especially Islamic extremists who had threatened to get even for Rabin’s reported decision to order the recent execution of the Islamic Jihad leader Fathi Shakaki in Malta.
An official who spoke on condition of anonymity said Rabin refused to wear a bulletproof vest. Melman said the Shin Bet should have insisted that he wear one and that the shots might not have been fatal if he had.
But Ehud Sprinzak, a professor of political science at Hebrew University, said Rabin would have refused to wear a vest anyway.
“We are talking about a very old soldier who went through all kinds of dangers in his life. He did not consider an assassination a serious danger,” said Sprinzak.
Before the attack, Rabin’s wife, Leah, was asked why he was not wearing a bulletproof vest at the rally.
The very idea, the Haaretz newspaper quoted her Sunday as saying, “is ludicrous. You journalists have some very strange notions.”
The Shin Bet had appealed to political parties in recent weeks to curb the rhetoric of incitement and tried to get Rabin to cut down on public visits. But Rabin, a war hero with battle wounds, pressed ahead.
“Those responsible for security tried to limit his movements. He told them the answer was not bodyguards but an end to the incitement that causes violence in every sphere,” said military affairs reporter Zeev Schiff.