WHEN JEW KILLS JEW
Dean Godson explains why Yitzhak Rabin
might well not have been astonished by his own assassination
`HOW CAN one Jew do this to another?' That has been the shocked refrain of most Israelis, and Jews elsewhere, following the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. To most outsiders as well, the murder of the Prime But the assassination of a Jew by a co-religionist might not have seemed such an innovation to Yitzhak Rabin, himself trained by the Haganah, the pre-state Jewish defence force. For, before the birth of Israel in 1948, the Haganah — as well as the Irgun (lat- terly led by Menachem Begin) and the Stern Gang (latterly led by Yitzhak Shamir) — did, on occasion, kill other Jews. In one study, Political Assassina- tion By Jews: A Rhetorical Device for Justice (1993), Nachman Ben-Yehuda of the Hebrew University showed that 60 per cent of the 91 victims in the 20th century were Jewish, 25 per cent were British and a mere 8 per cent were Arab.
For the purposes of his study, Ben- Yehuda defined political assassination (whether successful or not) as a pre- planned attack on a specific individual; thus excluding the much longer list of victims of indiscriminate atrocities that characterised terrorist actions, such as the bombing of the King David Hotel. Although the first botched assassina- tion attempt — which took place while Palestine was still under Turkish rule involved two rival paramilitary organisations, relatively few were killed in inter-group feuding. Rather, most were suspected informers shot by other members of the same clandestine groups, or else were Jewish officers serving in the Pales- tinian police under the British Mandate. Ylgal Amir, who must now stand trial for the Rabin assassination, fits squarely into the pattern of earlier killers. The only dif- ference in his case lies in the importance of his target. Few, if any, of these Jewish assassinations were undertaken by lone deranged individuals with personal vendet- tas; rather, they were ideologues who enjoyed the benefits of smaller or larger networks of support. To employ an Ameri- can analogy, there has been no Israeli John Hinckley (the lunatic who shot Ronald Reagan in 1981), but there has been many a Jewish John Wilkes Booth (no matter how remote the chances of attaining their ends). The common theme, however, in nearly all these assassinations is the allegation of collaboration with the enemies of the Jew- ish people. Indeed, the justification most frequently offered is that the victim was a Moser, or, in Yiddish, Moyser. This most often means 'an informer'; but it literally means 'a giver' — and hence can be used to describe someone who collaborates, sur- rendering Jewish people to their foes. Much of the Israeli Right thinks that this is what Rabin was doing in agreeing to pro- gressive Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank, so leaving settlers under Palestinian authority.
Inevitably, the assassination of Jews by other Jews has Biblical precedents. The Book of Samuel refers to the assassination of Abner by Joab, who alleged that the victim was a spy; the Book of Kings describes how the over-mighty and insubordinate Joab was in turn assassinated on the orders of Solomon, as one of his father's dying requests. In the New Testament epoch, Josephus Flavius describes Herod the Great's instruction that the last of the Hasmonean High Priests, Aristobulus III — whom Herod saw as a rival — be drowned by soldiers during a swimming expedition near Jericho.
The most significant Jewish assas- sins of all, however, were the Sicarii — a group of extremists who emerged between 50 and 60 CE and played a salient role in the Jewish revolt against the Romans which broke out in the year 66. Deriving their name from the Latin sica — the curved dag- ger which they carried underneath their robes — they killed and kid- napped many Jewish collaborators, especially on holidays. So inspira- tional were these 'dagger-men' to later generations that Avraham Stern of the eponymous gang took the nom de guerre 'Yak' after the commander of the Sicarii garrison at Masada.
The example of the Sicarii was also evi- dent in the most famous assassination in modern Zionist history to date — the mur- der of the socialist leader, Chaim Arloso- roff, in 1933. Arlosoroff was the rising star of the Labour wing of the Zionist move- ment and head of the Execuctive Political Department of the Jewish Agency. He had angered the 'Revisionist' Right by visiting Germany shortly after the Nazis came to power, where he sought to negotiate the transfer of Jews and some of their assets (although in the form of much needed equipment) to Palestine. Led by Men- achem Begin's mentor, Zees, Jabotinsky, the right-wing Revisionists — so called because they wanted to revise the goals of the Zionist movement in a more expansive and aggressive direction — virulently denounced him as a 'Red Infant' and worse. Shortly thereafter, in June 1933, whilst walking along the Tel Aviv sea-front, Arlosoroff was shot dead.
Three members of a right-wing groupus- cule called Brit Habiryonim — a faction that criticised Jabotinsky but nonetheless called him 'our Duce' — were arrested; they explicitly modelled themselves on those Biblical Sicarii. Two were found not guilty, while the third, Avraham Staysky, was acquitted on grounds of insufficient evidence (he was later killed by the new- born Israel Defence Forces, when they crushed Begin's Irgun as it sought to bring ashore its own arms aboard a ship called the Altalena, in 1948). The socialists then — as Leah Rabin does now — claimed that harsh right-wing rhetoric had created a cli- mate in which assassination could flourish. The Right retorted that this was a 'blood libel' employed for partisan advantage on the basis of no evidence. Either way, Jabotinsky was placed on the defensive and was forced to distance himself from the affair; it created a deepening split between the two wings of the Zionist movement, which ultimately led to the Revisionists' withdrawal from the World Zionist Organi- sation in 1935.
The Arlosoroff affair continued to resound in Israeli public life for decades thereafter; indeed, when mysteries remain unsolved, Israelis sometimes ask, semi- humorously, 'And who killed Arlosoroff?' So anxious was Begin to exonerate the Revisionists that as Prime Minister he launched a commission of inquiry in 1982. Its report stated that the individual defen- dants were innocent, but also that socialist suspicions about right-wing involvement could not entirely be gainsaid; subsequent evidence suggests that Arabs might have been involved. Indeed, in recent weeks when press reports suggested that Rabin was under physical threat — the former Prime Minister, Yitzhak Shamir, suggested that an Arlosoroff-like blood libel was being perpetrated to discredit legitijnate criticism of government policy.
But assassinations were never confined to the Right. The first successful political assassination in the pre-state epoch was carried out in 1924 by, the Haganah, the mainstream Jewish defence force closely associated with the Labour movement. The victim was Jacob Israel de Haan, a Dutch- born journalist who was, inter alia, Pales- tine correspondent of the Daily Express. De Haan gradually became disillusioned with Zionism and instead gravitated towards Are there many veterinary chiropractors?' certain anti-Zionist, ultra-orthodox ele- ments. He proceeded to denounce the Zionists to the British authorities and in 1922 even intrigued with Emir Abdullah of Transjordan. The Haganah warned him to desist, but de Haan persisted and was gunned down in Jerusalem after evening prayers. Rumours circulated that Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, subsequently Israel's second pres- ident, had a hand in the affair.
The numbers of assassinations declined very rapidly after 1948. True, several deranged individuals sought to kill Israel's first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, and ultra-Leftists such as Meir Wilner and Uri Avneri were attacked unsuccessfully by right-wing extremists; but the only victim to die was Israel Kasztner, a senior official in the Industry Ministry, accused of conceal- ing the danger of extermination to Hungar- ian Jewry in order to save 1,700 'important' Jews, in collaboration with Adolf Eich- mann. Following his assassination at the hands of nationalists in 1957, the Supreme Court found that Kasztner had not collud- ed with the Nazis, although he had sworn false testimony on behalf of an SS officer at the Nuremburg trials.
Curiously, despite the tensions between Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews, intra-com- munal ructions of this kind have played no part in any Zionist assassinations. Rather, assassins have waged ideological struggles for the political soul of their people. Such patterns are common in wars of national liberation, as exemplified by the thousands of Kikuyu killed by the Mau-Mau, com- pared with the hundreds of European set- tlers slaughtered; or even by the very high proportion of Palestinian casualties inflict- ed by their compatriots during the Intifada. By such standards, and considering the pres- sures of the epoch, the Zionist movement has scarcely been prolific.
The most interesting question, however, is the reason for the reduction in assassi- nations after 1948 — and their very recent revival. The answer would seem to be that, after 1948, the territorial and political boundaries of the Jewish state appeared to be fixed. Its purposes were comparatively certain; political and legal justice were secure, and the need to resort to assassination accordingly dimin- ished. In consequence of the continuing peace negotiations with the Palestinians, that settlement now appears to have been undermined in the eyes of elements of the Israeli Right. Large numbers of their compatriots, many of them ideological kinsmen, may be transferred to alien rule, and even this 'sacrifice does not guarantee an end to Arab terrorism. Simultaneously, elements of the Israeli Left, in conjunc- tion with some Israeli Arabs, are embold- ened to embark upon the early stages of the project of 'de-Zionisation' — of dilut- ing the state's specifically Jewish charac- ter. Peace negotiations may be the only way forward, but no one should be in any doubt as to their perilous consequences.
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