Podcast #110: Dan Ephron on When The Man Who Almost Changed Israel Met Clinton
The 1995 assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin is one of the most significant events in the histories of Israel or Palestine. In Killing a King: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel, Dan Ephron tells the stories of Rabin and his stalker Yigal Amir. Ephron, a longtime writer for Newsweek, is one of the incredible finalists for NYPL’s Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism. Each year the award is given to journalists whose books have brought clarity and public attention to important issues, events, or policies. This week, for the New York Public Library Podcast, we're proud to present Dan Ephron.
When asked about Rabin, Ephron described the former prime minister as a military man with unusual breadth of vision:
"Rabin was Mr. Israel of the older model. The thing that I think we thought about Israel in the sixties and seventies. He thought of himself as a lifelong soldier. One of the things his daughter told me was that Rabin used to every morning sit on the edge of his bed and shine his own shoes... The military is in his blood. I think if you asked him to describe himself even in the nineties, he would say I'm a military man, certainly not a peacenik. I don't think he would use that term. But during the course of his military service and later his political service, and this is not uncommon in other parts of the world, he came to the idea that Israel can't continue living by the sword, that there has to be some compromise with the Palestinians. He talked about the idea that it was toxic for Israeli society to continue ruling over millions of Palestinians."
Ephron made a surprising comparison of Rabin to another leader, Charles de Gaulle. Both, he says, held a sense of invincibility:
"I think he would say, and I think he did say something like this at different points, 'No one's gonna pose a threat to me in my country. I'm the guy who was the general in the war. I'm not gonna take precautions.' And by the way, I'm reading a book about the Algerian war [by] Alistair Horne, who talks about de Gaulle having this same kind of thing, despite multiple attempts on de Gaulle's life, he just can't fathom the idea that someone poses a threat to the great de Gaulle. Rabin has a security chief who tells him, 'You've got to be wearing a bulletproof vest,' and Rabin says, 'Absolutely not. Not going to wear a bulletproof vest in my country.'"
While Prime Minister, Rabin met with then-President of the United States, Bill Clinton. Their personalities made them odd bedfellows:
"He was taciturn, gruff, not a small talker. At some point, Rabin meets Clinton and boy, it's hard to find two more different men. Here's Clinton, the baby boomer who is [a] larger than life presence in the room. He's got a ton of charisma. And they're in the room for the first meeting and they're in these awkward silences because Rabin is just not a small talker... The relationship between Clinton and Rabin evolved, and it evolved very well."
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