Killing a King; The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel

New York, N.Y.: W. W. Norton & Company, 2015. First Edition [Stated], First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. xiii, [1], 290 pages. Includes Introduction, Prologue, Epilogue, Acknowledgments, Notes, and Index. Also includes 7 black and white photographs of Rabin (several taken with family members), and 12 color photographs of Rabin and his family. There also are two color photographs of Yigal Amir (the shooter) at his trial. Dan Ephron is the executive editor for news and podcasts at Foreign Policy. Before joining Foreign Policy, he spent 13 years at Newsweek, where he served as Jerusalem bureau chief, deputy Washington bureau chief, and national security correspondent. His book, Killing a King, about the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, won a Los Angeles Times Book Award and was chosen by both the New York Times and Washington Post as one of 2015's 100 notable books. Based on Israeli police reports, interviews, confessions, and the cooperation of both Rabin's and Amir's families, this book is a tightly coiled narrative that reaches an inevitable, shattering conclusion. The author can't help but wonder what Israel would look like today had Rabin lived. A riveting story about the murder that changed a nation: the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. The assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin remains the single most consequential event in Israel's recent history, and one that fundamentally altered the trajectory for both Israel and the Palestinians. Killing a King relates the parallel stories of Rabin and his stalker, Yigal Amir, over the two years leading up to the assassination, as one of them planned political deals he hoped would lead to peace, and the other plotted murder. Dan Ephron, who reported from the Middle East for much of the past two decades, covered both the rally where Rabin was killed and the subsequent murder trial. He describes how Rabin, a former general who led the army in the Six-Day War of 1967, embraced his nemesis, Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat, and set about trying to resolve the twentieth century's most vexing conflict. He recounts in agonizing detail how extremists on both sides undermined the peace process with ghastly violence. And he reconstructs the relentless scheming of Amir, a twenty-five-year-old law student and Jewish extremist who believed that Rabin's peace effort amounted to a betrayal of Israel and the Jewish people. As Amir stalked Rabin over many months, the agency charged with safeguarding the Israeli leader missed key clues, overlooked intelligence reports, and then failed to protect him at the critical moment, exactly twenty years ago. It was the biggest security blunder in the agency's history. Through the prism of the assassination, much about Israel today comes into focus, from the paralysis in peacemaking to the fraught relationship between current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Barack Obama. Based on Israeli police reports, interviews, confessions, and the cooperation of both Rabin's and Amir's families, Killing a King is a tightly coiled narrative that reaches an inevitable, shattering conclusion. One can't help but wonder what Israel would look like today had Rabin lived. Derived from a Kirkus review: Israelis had grown tired of peace conferences. And it wasn't at all clear whether the extremists, Arabs or Israelis, were declining or ascending." Those words, describing the situation in the aftermath of Yitzhak Rabin's assassination, are just as true 20 years later. In a single moment, the Jewish zealot Yigal Amir derailed the Oslo negotiations and forever altered the destinies of two nations. Ephron argues that the murder presaged the rise of the Israeli hard right, and today, with Rabin's archrival Benjamin Netanyahu serving as prime minister and a quarter of the population supporting clemency for Amir, peace with the Palestinians seems as distant as at any time since 1948. In tense, gripping prose, the author dissects Amir's background, describing him as a bright student who, "in his own view...knew God's word better than most Jews, even most rabbis. And he was a doer-the characteristic that defined Amir more than any other, that distinguished him from his peers in school and in the military." In college, he threw himself into activism but "racked up nothing but failures: the failure to form a serious militia; and the failure to stop Rabin." The story of Rabin's evolving relationship with Yasser Arafat and Amir's growing militancy unfold in parallel, Amir making repeated attempts to get close to his quarry as he schemed with his brother and harangued his college friends. Amir considered Rabin rodef, a villain who pursues Jews with the intent of killing them, and Ephron makes the solid point that "any honest interpretation of the Talmudic principle he fixated on would have pointed back at him. Amir was the real rodef." In a book with broad appeal, Ephron cogently analyzes the origins and ramifications of a national tragedy he reported on as a young journalist.