Back to Ambassadorial Speeches - Ambassador Itamar Rabinovich

Interview with Ambassador Itamar Rabinovich on the Charlie Rose Show on Prime Minister Rabin's Assassination November 10, 1995

CHARLIE ROSE: We begin this evening with the Israeli Ambassador to the United States, Itamar Rabinovich. He was a friend of Yitzhak Rabin. He accompanied President Clinton on Air Force One to the funeral of Prime Minister Rabin on Monday. He was there for several days and returned to the United States. He is here this evening to talk to us about the mood in his country and the investigation into the assassination of Prime Minister Rabin, and I am very pleased to have him on this broadcast this evening.

Welcome, sir.

ITAMAR RABINOVICH, Israeli Ambassador to the U.S.: [Washington, DC] Thank you very much, Charlie.

CHARLIE ROSE: Tell me what you feel and sense about where Israel is after this assassination, the sense of the country grieving and mourning and asking itself, 'Where are we, and where do we go?'

ITAMAR RABINOVICH: Well, you have, you have both elements. There is a very profound sense of bereavement, interestingly, mostly manifest among young people. There are vigils with thousands of younger people, in their teens, mostly, who stand with candles, hundreds of them, in front of the Prime Minister's private residence, thousands of them in the square where he was assassinated and which now bears his name, and in many other ways. And it is a bereavement, it is a sense of want. I think that there were many qualities to Yitzhak Rabin's leadership. He was not a father figure to the Israeli public, for- to the Israeli youth. He became that in his death, and it is very essential to understand that in order to understand the sense of mourning that now engulfs the country.

CHARLIE ROSE: Give me some sense of how you think this man, who you worked so closely with, and, and you were intimately involved and have been intimately involved in the negotiations with Syria over the possibility of a peace treaty with Syria and serving as his representative and the representative of your country here in this country - Israel's best ally - how you see this transformation almost in his place in Israel. He's a martyr, clearly, but what else?

ITAMAR RABINOVICH: He was, he was the prime minister. He was the ultimate leader, took the decisions. He worked in close partnership with Shimon Peres, who now is the acting prime minister and in all certainty will become the full-fledged prime minister very soon. He was a very authoritative man and a very authoritative leader, and part of the acceptance of the policies that he carried with him then and now has to do with the authority that he radiated to the Israeli public. He was a general and had a strategic mind, and he thought strategically, but he was also a first rate tactician. You mentioned the negotiations with Syria and negotiations involve tactics, and he could see the whole forest, but he could also see the trees and he could see the way in which - one or two - to have climbed or scaled that particular tree or that particular height. And the leadership meant to the Israeli public that there was somebody that they trusted, who was plain spoken, often to the point of bluntness, but one had the sense that one met the, the original item and that there were no disguises, and that lent credibility, and somebody who, who had profound- who had professionalism in national security. This and much else added and built up that leadership quality.

CHARLIE ROSE: Did you see the warmth that his granddaughter spoke about at the funeral?

ITAMAR RABINOVICH: Yes, I saw it in many ways. If I may be personal with regard to you, Charlie, you, you were the master of ceremonies in a memorable evening on board the U.S. Intrepid, and when the evening was over and he was about to go, he wanted to say goodbye to you, and he gave you a bear hug. This is not something that, that sat comfortably with the, with the general image that Yitzhak Rabin had, and yet he felt about you in a certain way and he hugged you. And, you know, we, we could see that, people who knew him close by and with whom he felt comfortable, could see that warmth. Of course, none of us outside the family had the access and the closeness and the warmth that members of the family - the granddaughter in this case - had, and none of us will ever be able to convey in the same personal and, and gripping terms, but it very much was there, and people who observed him many times and for many hours could see it in many ways.

CHARLIE ROSE: What do we know now about - as we speak - about the investigation into the assassination? Who did it? How many? What relationship?

ITAMAR RABINOVICH: We know one, one thing for certain: that there was, that there was an assassin who confessed to, to the crime and who claims to have acted alone. There is an investigation. It is still in early phases. Additional arrests were made. The brother of the killer was arrested, a leader of an extremist group was arrested. It is too early to say what the relationship between the group and the assassination was. And these are not just issues that are [unintelligible], but have tremendously explosive potential in them, and we all want to be very careful in making any connections and in making any statements. So, all that I will say is what we know for sure is who the assassin was and why he did it, and that the other arrests have been made and there are other suspects, and that the investigation is being followed very carefully, very closely and with a sense of responsibility because everybody realizes what the potential there is.

CHARLIE ROSE: I understand the reason that you can't elaborate too much, but is there a feeling among the investigators that this was not just- not that there's a grand conspiracy, but more than one person knew or ha- should have known that this kind of act was in the mind of one person?

ITAMAR RABINOVICH: I don't, I don't think that in an investigation we, we can always necessarily speak about feeling, but there's a, a working assumption, an hypothesis, that needs to be tested, that there may have been more than one person, and this is what the investigators are, are trying either to, to prove or disprove. So I will not speak about the feeling, but about testing assumptions or working hypotheses.

CHARLIE ROSE: Yeah. What about the investigation into the security lapse?

ITAMAR RABINOVICH: There was one investigation that was conducted by the secu- general security service itself. It led either to the firing to the, the resignation of, of four men. Everybody knows that an internal investigation has its own limitations, and there will be a formal investigation-

CHARLIE ROSE: By the Knesset or-

ITAMAR RABINOVICH: No, no. By what we call a state commission of, of inquiry. But there was a very careful definition of the mandate of the commission, and here we come to, to a very important and a very sensitive area. The mandate was, was defined very carefully. It is a mandate to look into the assassination itself and not, not into the larger context in which the assassination took place because what we have - and this goes back to the very first question you presented to me - what we have is a democratic society that is pondering the, the deed and its aftermath and its significance. It knows that, that there is a tremendous need for unifying, for closing ranks, for healing, and yet for finding those who are responsible. And what I think we all collectively want to do is do both and not cross any lines. We want to, to heal and unify. We want to identify those who were directly responsible, but we do not want to use a very broad brush because we do not want to cross that very fine line.

CHARLIE ROSE: Much has been said in the aftermath of this assassination about the nature of the rhetoric that was taking place, calling this prime minister a Nazi, calling this prime minister, this - because of his position on the peace process, because he was moving forward on that journey, because he believed strongly that he was protecting Israeli security by what he was doing rather than making it more vulnerable, and because of the attacks on him personally - in an obscene way created a climate that this could happen. Even the widow, Leah Rabin, has taken note of that. Speak to it, if you will, for this, an American audience, as to the feeling about what had happened in extremist charges and rhetoric in Israel.

ITAMAR RABINOVICH: Of course, much of that rhetoric is, is unacceptable and beyond the pale. It is not just calling somebody a, a Nazi or a traitor, but using some very specific terms from the, the heritage of the Jewish tradition- is a term in Hebrew that means more or less a persecutor, and a persecutor, in, in inverted commas, is, is somebody whose, whose blood is licensed, whose, whose life can be taken away because of that, of that scene (?). So it was even more specific than calling somebody a traitor or, or a Nazi. And we all understand that that was unbearable, and it is even more unbearable now. And I think that the law will be used in this respect. But we also understand two other things. One is that the solution to this problem is not a legal one, doesn't have to do just with law enforcement, but has to do first and foremost with education. And there is a soul-searching process in Israel, now. Meetings have been convened by political movements and by groups who broadly speaking were close to the, the nationalist- or to the right wing opposition, calling for, for such soul-searching of chest-beating. And this is taking place now in spontaneous and, if I may use the word in this context, in a healthy way. And this is a, a process that needs to take place and needs to take place within the right proportion.

CHARLIE ROSE: Will there be a call, do you think, in the party politics of Israel now to somehow move against extremism?

ITAMAR RABINOVICH: That takes me to, to the second point. Just to complete the first, but we know that this, this is a very healthy process, but that the transition to partisanship or to vindictiveness is, is a very easy one, and I think we all want to avoid that. Now, to your, to your question. This is a problem, a dilemma that is familiar to all democracies and familiar to, to you here in the United States. There is freedom of speech and, and then there are some boundaries that freedom of speech must not cross. And it's, it's very easy to, to cross these boundaries from either direction, and what a healthy democracy wants to do is it, it wants to keep the proportion. We now need to react to hateful, inflammatory deadly rhetoric. We do not want to overreact to this rhetoric because we do not want freedom of expression in the normal operation of the democracy to be, to be heard.

Let us take the assassination itself. I mean, if the Prime Minister had not mingled with the Israeli crowd, he may not have been assassinated. But what is the answer? To, to protect the leader of Israel and of any other democratic nation while difficult decisions are being made by keeping them beyond glass walls in their mentions, or in their, in their offices and to deny the public in our country and in your country the direct contact with the, with the leaders, or- leader or leaders? These are difficult questions that every democracy needs to contend with, that the United States - having gone through several traumas of political assassination - had to cope with in the past and that we are coping with right now.

CHARLIE ROSE: Where is the peace process? We just had a significant turn in terms of the- stage two of the process. The difficult questions are ahead, but what's happening, in a sense, on the ground and in the communication between Palestinians and Israelis?

ITAMAR RABINOVICH: On this stripe of the peace process, the Palestinian track of the peace process, the issue right now is implementation. There is no need to hold further negotiations for several months now. Permanent status negotiations are not due before May 1996, and between now and May 1996, we need to implement, we need to redeploy. The Palestinians need to go to their elections. These are not easy matters. Implementation is not automatic. It's not easy, but it can be done, and I think the priority here - both by us and the Palestinians - will be to, to help implementation take place and take place in as effective and as smooth a fashion as we can have it.

CHARLIE ROSE: What about Syria?

ITAMAR RABINOVICH: That's, that's a more complex question. Negotiations with Syria has been suspended for several months now. It's been suspended essentially by Syria. There's been some more moderate and encouraging rhetoric from Syria during the past few days, and we may see some Syrian willingness to, to try to renew the negotiations, to resuscitate them, maybe to be forthcoming. But in, in the first place, you know, we need to, to form the government, and in, in the second place, we will have to test and see if this rhetoric is this change in tone or if the Syrians made the decisions that will enable these negotiations to, to move forward. It is-

CHARLIE ROSE: Has there been any communication from Hafez al-Assad to the Israeli government with respect to the assassination of Prime Minister Rabin?

ITAMAR RABINOVICH: No. None whatsoever.

CHARLIE ROSE: Not even a, a note of sympathy?

ITAMAR RABINOVICH: Unfortunately, no. I, I'm, I'm not surprised because this has been a very cold negotiation. I've been, I've been personally in that negotiation for over three years now. Over a year ago, the son of President Assad was killed in a car accident. I was negotiating with two Syrian diplomats at the time, and in the aftermath of the- of his death, I conveyed personal condolence to President Assad, to his two representatives on behalf of Prime Minister Rabin and our government. I know that the Foreign Minister then, Mr. Peres, conveyed his, his own sense of, of grief at the same time. There's been no reciprocity in our difficult moment.

CHARLIE ROSE: Is there going to be- I would clearly think there's going to be a much, much more pervasive - and you've talked about democracy and the limits of democracy, and, and the demands of freedom in terms of the future of a society that prides itself on being a democracy and a healthy debate within its Knesset and other places - but I would- got to believe that this kind of the first assassination in Israel's history is going to demand, you know, a very close scrutiny of all these kinds of groups.

ITAMAR RABINOVICH: I believe what you will see as the result of this terrible deed, is not just pressure on people who, who engage in virulent rhetoric to recant and not just clamping down on, on terrorist groups, but some larger questions in, in the society about the quality of, of dialogue and interaction in our own society, hopefully with benign results.

CHARLIE ROSE: Two political questions. One, are you surprised that, that the acting Prime Minister said that he was not going to call for early elections?

ITAMAR RABINOVICH: No, I am not. There is no, there is no need to do that. He will form a government. The government will have a majority. It will be a government of continuity. He was one of the, the two architects of this government and these policies, and at this time, at least, there is no need to think about early elections.

CHARLIE ROSE: Would you expect to see Ehud Barak the new Defense Minister?

ITAMAR RABINOVICH: I think that the consultations on the, on the portfolios and who will do what are still going on, and I think it would be premature to engage in, in the guessing game of who will do what?

CHARLIE ROSE: Yes. It's not the role of the ambassador to the United States to announce Cabinet changes?

ITAMAR RABINOVICH: I- well, I am the, I am the Israeli ambassador to Washington, not the American ambassador to, to Tel Aviv.

CHARLIE ROSE: Thank you very much-

ITAMAR RABINOVICH: [Crosstalk]

CHARLIE ROSE: -Ambassador Rabinovich, again. We have- we thank you for taking time on this evening to reflect on what has been an extraordinary week in the history of Israel and the death of a great man. Thank you very much for joining us.

ITAMAR RABINOVICH: Thank you very much, Charlie.