“At the beginning, it was such a hatred that you can’t even imagine.”
From his desk at the prime minister’s office in Jerusalem, Rabin called out to his military secretary in the next room. “Get Arafat on the line.” Danny Yatom, who had been operating in crisis mode since that morning, October 11, 1994, recognized the agitation in his boss’s voice. This would not be an amicable call.
Earlier in the day, Hamas had released an abduction video showing a shackled Israeli soldier seated in front of an armed man in a ski mask. The group had grabbed Cpl. Nachshon Wachsman from a hitchhiking station midway between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv and was threatening to kill him unless Israel released some two hundred Palestinian prisoners. Rabin, who in crises could burn through a pack of cigarettes in the course of a long meeting, watched the video in a conference room adjoining his office, along with his military and intelligence chiefs. The security establishment had a drill for these situations: Analysts would begin studying the video for clues while intelligence operatives probed their Palestinian informants—of which Israel was rumored to have thousands. But Rabin also wanted to lean on Arafat. Hamas had delivered the videotape to the Gaza office of the Reuters news agency. Gaza was Arafat’s domain.
Rabin had been holding regular conversations with Arafat for more than a year now, but the calls usually required some cumbersome arranging. Aides from both sides would discuss the talking points in advance and set a time for the call. Someone had to track down an interpreter, who would listen in on the line. The two leaders communicated in English but Arafat’s comprehension sometimes faltered.
With the Hamas ultimatum ticking down, the call this time went through quickly. The captors had given Israeli authorities until Friday at nine p.m. to meet their demands. It was now Tuesday. Rabin opened by asking Arafat what he knew about the event. For months, the Israeli leader had been pressing him to crack down on Hamas and Islamic Jihad, strip the militants of their weapons, and jail their political leaders. Arafat always gave the same response: he had his own way of dealing with the groups, a Levantine blend of coercing and co-opting that would bring the Islamists to heel without setting off a civil war. Certainly, he knew something about asserting power. The torchbearer of the Palestinian liberation movement had been outmaneuvering political opponents for three decades.
But Hamas kept killing Israelis. Just two days earlier, a gunman from the group fired into a crowd at a Jerusalem promenade, wounding dozens of people, two of them fatally. Much of the time, Rabin suspected that Arafat lacked the necessary leadership or resolve or worse—that he quietly condoned the violence. Now on the phone, he demanded a sweeping operation to find Wachsman’s captors. But Arafat had inquired with his security chiefs and was sure the Israeli soldier was being held in the West Bank, where Israel still maintained full control. “I checked and he’s not in Gaza,” he said. Arafat repeated the line several times until Rabin lost his temper. “I will burn Gaza to the ground if you don’t find him. I will destroy every home,” he hollered into the receiver.
From the awkward handshake at the White House thirteen months earlier, the sediment of the relationship had never quite settled. Rabin embraced the idea that Israel’s rule over the Palestinians needed to end and that Arafat should wield genuine authority, at least until Palestinians could muster an election. But he also viewed Arafat as Israel’s auxiliary in the fight against Islamic militancy—a subcontractor who could operate with fewer constraints. In a television interview a few months after signing the Oslo deal, Rabin reassured viewers that Arafat would be able to fight terrorism without being hampered by B’Tselem and Bagatz. B’Tselem was an Israeli human-rights group that reported regularly on Israeli abuses in the West Bank and Gaza. Bagatz, an acronym for the Israeli High Court of Justice, had occasionally set curbs on the government’s antiterrorism policies, including its jailing of Palestinians without trial. To Rabin, each Palestinian attack after Oslo felt like an infringement of the agreement’s core transaction.
Arafat saw it differently. He and Rabin had a common enemy in Hamas, that much was clear. The Islamic group had been in existence for just seven years and already it had its own power base in the West Bank and Gaza, a charity network that catered to many thousands of Palestinians, and the backing of religious authorities. Hamas projected discipline and political integrity compared to Arafat’s PLO, which had grown fat on the patronage of Arab regimes. The Hamas military wing, Izz ad-Din al-Qassam, had accumulated weapons and bomb-making know-how and posed a challenge to the sovereignty of the new Palestinian Authority. And yet Arafat refused to see himself as Israel’s enforcer against the Islamists.
And Arafat had his own grievances against Rabin—chiefly around what he saw as Israel’s creeping entrenchment in the West Bank and Gaza. Rabin had imposed a freeze on most housing construction but allowed some settlements to grow, including those in and around East Jerusalem. For Arafat, any expansion came at the expense of the state he expected to get at the end of the Oslo process. In places where the freeze was imposed, the settlers sometimes found ways to cheat. At Elon Moreh, for example, settlers hired several hundred Palestinian laborers to pour dozens of new foundations over the course of a weekend before Rabin’s moratorium went into effect. Though observant Jews are not allowed to ask non-Jews to work on the Sabbath, settler rabbis granted special dispensation for the campaign. The result was a new neighborhood at Elon Moreh.
Arafat’s administration tracked the data on housing starts in the settlements. In Rabin’s first two years in office, the figure dropped by 79 percent, an encouraging sign. But Palestinian leaders also noted the network of roads Rabin was building from Israel to the settlements, a huge and expensive undertaking that seemed to suggest Israel was digging in. In Rabin’s thinking, the roads were a stopgap. Until the final status of the territory was determined, they would allow settlers to bypass Palestinian towns that would come under Arafat’s rule and get to their homes more safely. Rabin conceded to his advisers that many of the roads would end up on the Palestinian side of the border when a permanent agreement was reached. But the sight of so many Israeli bulldozers grinding up the territory just didn’t square with a process that was supposed to lead to Palestinian sovereignty.
Only much later would the unintended consequence of these roads become evident. They would transform many settlements from isolated colonies to bedroom communities easily accessible from Israel’s main cities. The roads and the cheap housing at the settlements would make them appealing to everyday Israelis and not just ideologues, powering their expansion for years to come.
All these factors hampered the relationship between Rabin and Arafat. But there was something else as well—a palpable lack of chemistry and trust that deepened in the first year of their partnership over a series of difficult interactions. “At the beginning, it was such a hatred that you can’t even imagine,” Eitan Haber, Rabin’s chief of staff, recalled.
The most damaging of these occurred in May, at the ceremony in Cairo for the Gaza-Jericho agreement. Onstage, flanked by the US secretary of state and the Russian foreign minister, Arafat balked at signing one of the maps appended to the accord, suspecting Israeli negotiators had somehow tricked him into accepting less than what the sides had decided. The standoff on live television lasted nearly an hour and turned the event into a fiasco. Arafat’s own advisers eventually brought him around, but the drama left Rabin feeling embarrassed and angry.
A few days later, during a speech at a Johannesburg mosque, Arafat urged an audience to join the “jihad to liberate Jerusalem.” The Palestinian leader was attending the inauguration of South African president Nelson Mandela, another former revolutionary who had reconciled with his enemies. But unlike Mandela, Arafat seemed to have a tough time shedding the persona of his old guerrilla days. When a recording of Arafat’s speech reached Israel, Rabin threatened to pull out of the peace process. Arafat explained later that he meant a jihad for peace.
Even Arafat’s festive arrival in Gaza in July, an event that marked the official start of Palestinian self-rule, was marred by discord. Hours after he and his men crossed from Sinai in a convoy of Mercedes cars, Rabin discovered that his entourage included former militants Israel had expressly barred from the territory. After a night of heated exchanges between Israeli and Palestinian negotiators by phone, Arafat was forced to send them back to Egypt. “Rabin was very angry that his trust was breached. . . . It was a very difficult evening,” recalled Nabil Shaath, one of the Palestinian officials involved in the conversations back and forth.
The animosity between the two leaders was apparent to everyone involved in the peace process. It became even more glaring as Rabin edged closer to a peace agreement with Jordan’s King Hussein in the late summer. To Israelis, Hussein had some deeply appealing qualities that Arafat lacked—a regal gentility, a gift for eloquent speechmaking, and a willingness to embrace the emotive side of reconciliation. Though Jordan had fought in two wars against Israel, the relationship between the countries lacked the toxic legacy of either occupation or terrorism. In their months of negotiations, Hussein and Rabin developed a rapport that seemed exceptional by any standard of diplomacy. Haber, who often participated in their meetings, thought that the two leaders had come to trust each other more than they trusted their own staff members and confidants. “No doubt about it, Rabin and Hussein fell in love.”
In mid-September, Rabin sat in his office and reviewed the data on Palestinian attacks over the preceding twelve months. The first year of peacemaking had been more violent than any of the intifada years. Sixty Israelis were killed, compared to forty-one in the preceding period. Most were civilians. In every category, from bombings and stabbings to hand-grenade and Molotov-cocktail attacks, the numbers had spiked. Rabin could hardly blame Arafat. Most of the casualties preceded his arrival in Gaza. And even Israel’s pervasive and proficient security agencies had never been able to shut down the violence altogether. At a meeting with the Palestinian leader at the Erez border crossing between Israel and Gaza in late September, Rabin conveyed how critical it was to stop the cascade. The attacks were turning Israelis against the peace process and vindicating the hardliners. When Rabin left the meeting, he felt he’d gotten through to Arafat. The two leaders were finally understanding each other.
And then Wachsman went missing—touching off the most wrenching two-week period of Rabin’s term.
The nineteen-year-old soldier had been serving in the army for about a year, having followed his two brothers to the Golani Brigade. Short and slight, Wachsman got through the rigorous infantry training by sheer force of will. His unit had just completed a rotation in southern Lebanon, where Israel maintained a security zone to protect itself from rocket attacks. On Sunday, October 9, Wachsman got a ride with a friend from a base in northern Israel to a junction near Ben-Gurion Airport. When he climbed out of the Subaru, he told his army pal he would travel by bus the rest of the way to a friend’s house in Ramle or else hitchhike, whichever was quicker. In the late-afternoon traffic rush, someone was sure to pick him up. Wachsman was holding an M16 assault rifle and a plastic bag full of clothes. He had a weeklong leave coming to him, which he intended to spend with his parents in Jerusalem.
As soon as he raised his hand to hitch a ride, a red van pulled over with four men inside. Wachsman bent over and peered through the open window on the passenger’s side. He noticed the driver was wearing a crocheted skullcap much like his own, and so were the others. A Jewish prayer book lay on the dashboard and Hasidic music chimed from the speakers. Wachsman squeezed into the backseat and balanced his rifle between his legs.
The men in the van belonged to a Hamas cell from the Jerusalem area. They’d purchased the skullcaps the week before and rented the vehicle that morning. Hamas militants had abducted four other soldiers in the preceding year in a similar manner but in those incidents, they killed their captives soon after grabbing them. Wachsman actually knew two of the victims—they’d grown up in Ramot, the same Jerusalem neighborhood where he lived. One of them was his upstairs neighbor. Now the group had a new strategy. Israel had been releasing members of Arafat’s Fatah movement from prison as part of the Oslo deal. Hamas wanted its own men freed as well.
On the road, the men overpowered Wachsman quickly. One passenger grabbed him by the neck and pushed his head toward his knees while another lunged for his gun. Wachsman fumbled for the charging handle trying to load a round in the chamber, but one of the militants swung at his hand with a hammer. Once he lost his gun, he stopped resisting altogether. As the van sped toward Jerusalem, the men tied up their captive and lowered a hood over his head. From the darkness, he heard one of the Palestinians say in accented Hebrew: “Don’t worry. . . . We just want to trade you for our people in prison.”
The cell had prepared a safe house in Bir Nabala, a Palestinian town just north of Jerusalem and well into the West Bank—which Israel continued to control. Inside the two-story home, surrounded by fruit trees and a low wall, the Hamas men went straight to work. In a room on the second floor they filmed two videotapes, one showing a masked man holding Wachsman’s ID card and offering to exchange the soldier for 200 Palestinian prisoners, including the wheelchair-bound spiritual leader of the group, Ahmed Yassin. The second one featured Wachsman himself, looking into the camera nervously and pleading for his life. “If my parents are watching, I’m fine for now. I hope to return to you if Rabin decides to free their prisoners.”
From Bir Nabala, the Wachsman home was less than two miles to the south. When her son didn’t get home Sunday night, Esther Wachsman, an English teacher who had grown up in New York and moved to Israel in her twenties, feared the worst. It was unlike him to change plans without calling. Esther had somehow endured the military service of her two older sons. Both volunteered for combat roles, following a trend among religious youngsters. She had a pact with the boys: if they were posted someplace remote and couldn’t call home, she would try not to worry. But if she knew they had access to a phone and weren’t calling, then the anxiety would set in. Late in the evening, Esther dialed a number she had for the army and reported that her son was missing. The woman on the other end of the line seemed unconcerned. Soldiers were always heading off to Eilat during leave without telling their parents, she said. The beach town on the Red Sea was swarming with tourists in bikinis.
The following morning, one of the captors took the two videotapes and headed to the Gaza Strip. Israel had been restricting Palestinian travel between the West Bank and Gaza, which involved crossing through Israeli territory. But the twenty-eight-year-old Hamas man, Jihad Yarmur, lived in East Jerusalem and, as such, carried an Israeli identity card that allowed him to move around freely. At the Erez crossing, he showed the Israeli soldiers his blue ID and entered Gaza.
The transition was dramatic. The sparsely populated area on the Israeli side included communities with single-family homes and lush fields. Across the border, most people lived in squalor, with nearly a million Palestinians crammed into a five-mile-wide strip along the shoreline. Many were descendants of refugees who had fled their homes in 1948. They now resided in tightly arranged tenements made of exposed cinder block and administered by the United Nations.
And yet Gaza was changing. The peace deal had drawn investors from around the Arab world and Arafat’s new administration was handing out jobs—hiring civil servants and policemen. During the intifada years, the cultural scene went dormant. Now, suddenly, it had come to life. Arab performers put Gaza on their destination list, including the Lebanese singer Fawzi Yazbek, who did two shows at the Palestine Hotel in September 1994. A seventeen-member Egyptian circus came to town around the same time. On the anniversary of the Oslo deal, the Nasser movie theater in Gaza City opened its doors for the first film screening in seven years. Eight hundred people showed up, each paying about a dollar to see Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story. The owner of the theater, Mohammed Saleh, apologized to the crowd for selecting a movie that was already a year old but said newer ones were too expensive.
Yarmur spent Monday night in Gaza City and delivered the videotapes to the Reuters office there the next day. The Hamas men had chosen to get the material out through Reuters because one of them had a brother who worked as a photographer for the agency. More important, the venue served their ruse. With the abduction videos emerging from Gaza, Israeli security agencies would assume Wachsman was being held there and not in the West Bank. So would Rabin.
BY TUESDAY AFTERNOON Israel Television obtained a copy of the tapes from Reuters. The news division sent a duplicate to the Wachsman home, along with a cameraman who filmed the family watching their son’s abduction video on the television set in their basement. It was now two days since Wachsman went missing. Esther had been assuming he was dead. For all the dreadfulness of watching her son speak to her from his captivity, she felt immense relief at the evidence that he was, in fact, alive. A few hours later, Israel Television broadcast the video on its nightly newscast—along with footage of the family at home. From that moment on, the fate of Cpl. Nachshon Wachsman riveted the country.
With the ultimatum three days away, Rabin convened top security officials again Tuesday evening, including Army Chief Ehud Barak and members of the general staff. Rabin puffed on Parliaments throughout the meeting, turning his end of the large conference table into a smoky haze. The participants included people who had played a role in some of Israel’s most daring antiterrorism raids. Barak had helped plan the rescue of hijacking victims at Entebbe in 1976. Three years before that, he wandered the streets of Beirut dressed as a woman in an operation against top PLO guerrillas. But without intelligence on Wachsman’s whereabouts, none of the men at the table had ideas to offer. Haber looked around in disbelief. A few loathsome kidnappers had reduced the smartest military brains in the country to a helpless heap, he thought.
Once again, the vulnerability of the peace deal vexed Rabin. The preceding year had changed the country incontrovertibly. Israelis and Palestinians had forged relationships and partnerships previously unthinkable. Israel and Jordan would be signing a full-fledged peace accord later in the month, an agreement made possible by the reconciliation with the Palestinians. Rabin and Arafat were candidates for the Nobel Peace Prize, with an announcement expected in the coming days. Yet the Wachsman ordeal showed once more how easy it was for opponents of peacemaking to push the process to a breaking point. If the soldier proved to be in Gaza and Arafat failed to find him, the pressure on Rabin to suspend negotiations would be enormous. What was the point of partnering with Arafat if he could not exert authority over the territory he now controlled?
Rabin pressed the men around the table for options. At one point the conversation turned to the question of negotiating with Hamas. The slow-motion drama of hostage ordeals often made them more excruciating than shooting or bombing attacks. In a country with mandatory conscription, many Israelis were at that very moment envisioning their brothers or sons in Wachsman’s predicament. But Rabin also had to look beyond Wachsman. Yassin, the Hamas spiritual leader, was serving a life sentence for ordering attacks on Israelis. Allowing the group to force his release would invite more abductions. Rabin listened to the arguments for and against but took no position himself.
By the following morning, Shabak operatives had picked up a clue that Hamas might be holding Wachsman in the city of Khan Yunis in southern Gaza. Shabak prided itself on having informers in almost every town in the West Bank and Gaza. Its analysts had spent years compiling lists of the most influential people in each area and identifying their vulnerabilities. Since Israel controlled virtually every aspect of daily life for Palestinians, any request to military authorities, for a driver’s license, perhaps, or permission to be hospitalized in Israel, might be used as leverage in the recruiting process. Early on Wednesday, an informer had pointed Shabak to a specific house in Khan Yunis where the cell might be holding Wachsman.
But Khan Yunis was the hometown of Mohammed Dahlan, who ran the emerging Palestinian intelligence service known as Preventive Security. Dahlan had his own network of agents and informers, many of them fellow Fatah activists he knew from the years he organized resistance against Israel’s occupation in Gaza. Dahlan could be a tough negotiator and already had a reputation for financial corruption. But Israelis had grown comfortable with him as a partner on security matters, in part thanks to the Hebrew he taught himself while imprisoned by Israel. Now, in phone calls back and forth between Gaza and Jerusalem, Dahlan reported that Wachsman was definitely not in Khan Yunis. By midmorning Shabak’s own information confirmed it.
While Shabak ran down other clues, an Islamic scholar the government occasionally consulted suggested that perhaps Yassin himself could defuse the crisis. Yassin detested the Oslo process, viewing it as an alliance of heathens—Israel and the PLO—forged expressly to destroy Hamas. But Islam had laws about protecting prisoners. And members of Hamas held up Yassin as a religious authority. He would certainly not call on the Hamas men to release Wachsman, but he might instruct them to keep him alive.
For the interview, Rabin’s media advisers suggested Danny Levy, a reporter with Israel Television’s Arabic language service. Israeli prison authorities rarely granted interviews with inmates, but in this case they processed the request quickly. By early afternoon, Levy and his camera crew were allowed through the gates of the Kfar Yona prison east of Netanya and into Yassin’s cell.
To Levy’s delight, Yassin said just the right things. “Keeping him alive could serve our purposes, so he must be kept alive,” he told the journalist in Arabic. “I advise them to respect him, protect him and not to kill him. They should protect him and not threaten his life.” Levy left the prison thinking that he’d saved Wachsman’s life.
But when the interview was broadcast later in the day, security officials debated whether it would have the desired effect. For one thing, there was no guarantee the Hamas men who abducted Wachsman would even see it. Safe houses were often basement hideaways with no electricity. And there was also the question of how the interview would be perceived. Carmi Gillon, who had been filling in as head of Shabak for some weeks now, was sure the captors would think it was staged or coerced. “There’s not a single Hamas person who would have considered the remarks authentic,” Gillon would say years later.
By now, more than a hundred journalists had gathered outside the Wachsman home in Ramot, including the correspondents of the New York Times and the Washington Post. The neighborhood lay just inside the West Bank, effectively a settlement populated mostly by religious Jews. But it was built on land Israel annexed after the 1967 war and districted as part of the new, expanded Jerusalem.
Inside, the house had become a makeshift command center, with people constantly coming and going, some foreign to the Wachsmans, others familiar. The army had sent a psychologist to be with the family, which included Esther Wachsman’s Israeli-born husband, Yehuda, and their six sons. Other soldiers manned a dedicated phone line the army installed in the den along with a recording device, in case the captors called. Academics specializing in Islamic studies sat with the family and offered advice. Some were phoning Muslim clerics around the Arab world, asking them to call on the captors not to harm Wachsman. At Yehuda’s request, a rabbi was going from room to room to check the mezuzot—the ritual cases that religiously observant Jews affix to their doorposts with a prayer rolled up inside. A defective parchment might bring bad luck.
At one point the phone rang in the den and Rabin came on the line. He had called to assure Esther and Yehuda that he would do whatever he could to free their son. But in the back and forth, he also let on that he did not intend to trade Hamas prisoners for Wachsman. As defense minister in the 1980s, Rabin had approved two staggeringly lopsided prisoner swaps under heavy pressure from the parents of the captive soldiers. He hoped to head off demands from the Wachsmans by explaining his position directly. Yehuda pleaded with Rabin to just hint publicly that he was willing to negotiate. Even if he did not intend to strike a deal, at least he could buy time. With all those journalists camped in front of the house, Yehuda considered stepping outside and making the bogus announcement himself. But Rabin alluded to other initiatives under way and said Yehuda would only harm the chances of freeing his son.
When the conversation ended, Esther decided on a different approach. She stepped outside her front door and told journalists that President Clinton should get involved. Though Esther’s children were born and raised in Israel, they all inherited their mother’s American citizenship. The United States had an obligation to protect its nationals, she said to the cameras. Back in her living room, she dialed the White House. To her surprise, a Clinton staffer eventually phoned back and put the president on the line. Until a few days earlier, she’d been an ordinary high school English teacher; now she was talking to the president of the United States. Esther asked Clinton to press Rabin. Yes, Israel had a policy of not negotiating with terrorists. But prime ministers had applied it selectively over the years. Clinton promised to do what he could.
The hours passed with no news and no relief. It had been an unusually hot day for autumn in Jerusalem but by the late afternoon a soft breeze wafted through the house. Esther envisioned her son lying in a dungeon somewhere in Gaza, more than sixty miles away. In fact, he was just across the valley from Ramot, tied to a bed on the second floor of the home in Bir Nabala, his eyes covered with a red kaffiyeh.
In the evening, with forty-eight hours remaining until the deadline expired, a call came from Ahmed Tibi, an Arab-Israeli member of parliament. Tibi was sitting with Arafat in Gaza and wanted to put the Palestinian leader on the line. Esther had been ambivalent about the Oslo Accord when it was signed a year earlier. She hadn’t voted for Rabin and did not believe Arafat genuinely intended to make peace with Israel. But now, on the phone, he was promising to help. Arafat told her he’d ordered his security chiefs to find her son and get him home safely. Though it had been more than a year since Israel and the PLO signed their mutual recognition agreement, it was unusual for Arafat to be speaking to an ordinary Israeli—one who did not represent either the government or the military. Esther thought he sounded sincere.
Morning came with no breakthrough. The security chiefs still believed Hamas was holding Wachsman in Gaza, but one top Shabak official, Gideon Ezra, decided to check the names of people who rented cars in Jerusalem over the preceding week. The cell would likely have used either a rental or a stolen car for the abduction. Astonishingly, no one had thought to check with the car companies.
Getting the lists and combing through them took hours but by the afternoon, one name stood out: Jihad Yarmur. The East Jerusalem resident had rented a car on Sunday morning and paid his bill in cash. He returned the car on Tuesday, four days before the rental contract expired. Shabak had no file on Yarmur but did have information about one of his brothers. He was a known Hamas activist. For the first time since the abduction, investigators finally had a lead. Police officers picked up Yarmur at his home in the neighborhood of Beit Hanina, just a mile south of Bir Nabala, and brought him to a detention center for questioning.
Shabak interrogations could be corporal affairs. Over the years, investigators routinely beat Palestinian detainees, occasionally to death. After two major Shabak scandals in the 1980s, a government commission banned some interrogation methods but allowed investigators to exert “moderate physical pressure” on suspects—including shaking them violently and keeping them tied up in stress positions for hours. To Israeli and international rights groups, these “special procedures” still amounted to torture. But under the new regulations, investigators had to obtain permission from Shabak officials high up the chain of command before getting physical with suspects.
As the interrogation got under way, Gillon phoned the state prosecutor, Dorit Beinish, to notify her that he would be allowing investigators to deploy the special procedures. Still new to the job, Gillon wanted cover for what could prove to be a controversial decision. There was, as yet, no evidence linking Yarmur to the abduction. But in the initial questioning, he seemed to be hiding something the interrogators already knew—that he’d rented a car on Sunday. And with the ultimatum expiring in less than twenty-four hours, Shabak had to get to the truth quickly. Beinish thought it over quietly for several moments while Gillon held the phone to his ear. Yes, she finally said, she would back his decision.
Meanwhile, at the plaza of the Western Wall, tens of thousands gathered to pray for Wachsman’s safety, the worshippers pressed up against one another in the cool Jerusalem night. And in the interrogation room less than a mile west of there, investigators worked on Yarmur.
At six the following morning Gillon entered a meeting of the army’s top brass at the Defense Ministry in Tel Aviv with no news to report. The interrogation had gone on all night and was still in progress. But while the meeting wound on, a secretary pulled the Shabak chief out of the room for a call from Ezra, in Jerusalem. Yarmur had finally opened up, describing the abduction in detail and providing the location of the safe house. The cell was holding Wachsman in Bir Nabala, not Gaza, Ezra reported. Arafat had been telling the truth.
Gillon went straight to Rabin’s office, with Barak a step behind him. Soon Rabin’s entire security team crammed into his room, including the heads of Mossad and military intelligence. Rabin grilled Gillon about the interrogation, dwelling on almost every detail. Yarmur had last been at the house in Bir Nabala on Tuesday. He provided a description of the interior and the names of the men inside—two Hamas militants from East Jerusalem and one from Gaza. The men had automatic rifles and possibly explosives. Wachsman, he said, had been alive and well earlier in the week. Yarmur had communicated with him in Hebrew.
Yatom, Rabin’s military secretary, watched his boss take in the information. Even before the prime minister spoke, Yatom knew where the conversation was heading. Rabin had felt an agonizing powerlessness throughout the week. Now that the intelligence had come through, he would want action. “It was utterly clear that we would carry out a military operation at the moment a military operation was feasible,” Yatom recalled years later. “Not one person objected to it.”
Rabin instructed several of the participants, including Barak and Gillon, to head immediately to Bir Nabala to case the house. They left the Defense Ministry separately, to avoid arousing the suspicion of journalists who had been stalking the compound for news about Wachsman. Rabin also ordered the country’s two top antiterrorism units to begin preparing for an operation. He would leave it to Barak to choose between the two—the military’s Sayeret Matkal and the police unit known by the acronym Yamam.
Throughout the morning, officers from both units reconnoitered quietly in Bir Nabala. Of the two, Matkal was the better-known unit (in English, the general staff reconnaissance unit), having led the Entebbe mission and a series of other rescues and assassinations. To prepare for operations, Matkal liked to fashion life-size models of the structure they were targeting—a building or a plane—and use it to drill dozens of times. But the deadline was now less than twelve hours away. The teams would draw up their assault plans based on very little—the details obtained from Yarmur and their own hasty survey of the house.
WHILE THE PREPARATIONS for a raid got under way, members of the Nobel Peace Prize committee gathered in front of journalists in Oslo to announce their decision. The timing could not have been more awkward. A Shabak reconnaissance team had set up a hidden camera and trained it on the Hamas safe house, with the images transmitted directly to the Defense Ministry in Tel Aviv. The two broadcasts, one from Oslo, the other from Bir Nabala, captured the paradox of the moment. Together, they represented the main event and the sideshow of the thirteen-month peace process—though it wasn’t always clear which was which. Rabin and his aides could now see the two-story home where Wachsman had spent the past five days. Though nothing moved on the screen except for the occasional fluttering of leaves, Haber was mesmerized by the image.
The Nobel panel had deliberated for days. Not since 1973, when the committee awarded the peace prize to Henry Kissinger for negotiating a US withdrawal from Vietnam, had the arguments been so heated. One panelist, the conservative Norwegian politician Kåre Kristiansen, objected to honoring Arafat in light of his terrorist past. He resigned from the committee before the announcement. Others thought it was important to let Peres share the award. Not doing so would surely have aggravated the relationship between him and Rabin, a rivalry the Norwegians knew all about.
Finally, the panel decided to award the prize to all three men—Rabin, Peres, and Arafat. To avoid any perceived slights, the chairman of the committee announced the names alphabetically. “By concluding the Oslo agreements and subsequently following up on them, Arafat, Peres and Rabin have made substantial contributions to a historic process through which peace and cooperation can replace war and hate,” Francis Sejersted told the reporters in Oslo.
Rabin might normally have gathered his advisers and family members for a toast. Instead, he issued a statement congratulating Arafat and Peres and warning the Palestinian leader against letting Hamas get the upper hand. “Today, the Palestinians face the moment of truth: if they do not defeat the enemies of peace, the enemies of peace will defeat them.” Rabin also inserted a line meant to lull the captors into believing Israel still thought Wachsman was in Gaza. “At this time, Israel Defense Forces soldier Nachshon Wachsman is in a Hamas cell in Gaza; his plight is our plight.”
By midday, both Sayeret Matkal and Yamam had drawn up their assault plans. Barak reviewed the two proposals, then handed the mission to Matkal. The choice surprised no one. Barak had served in Matkal early in his career and so had several other people who now held senior posts in the government and the military. The camaraderie among alumni of the unit, which included Yatom and Netanyahu, marked the closest thing Israel had to an old-boys’ network.
Matkal also had a tactical advantage. Just three months earlier, members of the unit had raided a home in Lebanon, grabbing the Muslim guerrilla leader Mustafa Dirani from his bed and whisking him to Israel. Officials believed Dirani had information on the whereabouts of an Israeli airman missing since 1986. The operation involved travel by helicopter and a complicated extraction, elements that the raid in Bir Nabala would not require. But the unit had spent much time rehearsing a procedure that would now be essential: a slow, stealthy approach to a house in hostile terrain.
The action now proceeded on three fronts: Matkal members drilling for the operation in a staging area near Jerusalem, other soldiers keeping a constant watch on the house in Bir Nabala, and Rabin holding long meetings with his security team in his Tel Aviv office. As head of Shabak, Gillon sat in on the meetings with Rabin. He would recall later pondering whether the captors would make good on their threat to kill Wachsman—and concluding that indeed they would. Holding a hostage was an exhausting ordeal, difficult to sustain for more than a few days. The Hamas men would have had little sleep since Sunday and might well be running out of food and supplies. And Hamas had a track record: it had abducted and killed four soldiers in the preceding year.
At the Wachsman home in Ramot, the setting sun just after five brought matters to a standstill. Journalists still lingered at the front door, waiting for the ultimatum to expire. But inside, the Wachsmans shifted to their Sabbath routine, shutting off radio and television and—even now, with their son in captivity—unplugging the phone. “We have a rule that when the Sabbath begins, you enter a different stratosphere. You let the Almighty run the affairs,” Yehuda Wachsman would say later. Rabin had not informed the family about Yarmur’s arrest or the pending operation. Instead, he appointed a major general to wait in his car not far from the house in Ramot, ready to notify the Wachsmans about the outcome of the raid one way or another.
After dark, a surveillance team in Bir Nabala spotted a Mercedes approaching the house and a man entering. When he left twenty minutes later, soldiers let him get some distance from the neighborhood and then pulled him over. In a quick interrogation at the scene, the man admitted serving as an assistant to the cell. He had brought a tray of knafeh—a Middle Eastern cheese pastry—and other food for the captors and the hostage. The man confirmed seeing Wachsman on the second floor of the house, in a room with blankets draped over the windows—valuable information. The soldiers radioed the details to members of the Matkal team, who by this time had quietly taken up positions around the house. With the confirmation that Wachsman was alive, the operation was a go.
THE FORCE, NOW divided in two, stormed the house at 7:45 p.m., an hour and fifteen minutes before the deadline. The plan called for the two teams to blast their way in through separate entrances, with one group engaging the Hamas men inside while the other raced upstairs to free Wachsman. But the operation went badly from the outset. One team headed by Capt. Nir Poraz came under fire immediately on entering the house. Poraz died instantly, and several of his men sustained bullet wounds.
The second team, meanwhile, had trouble forcing its way in. By the time Capt. Lior Lotan and his fighters entered the house and sprinted upstairs, the two remaining Hamas men had barricaded themselves in the room with Wachsman. Lotan tried to shoot his way into the room but the heavy door would not open. From the other side, he heard one of the Hamas men threatening to kill Wachsman if the soldiers didn’t leave. He also heard gunfire. Minutes passed while Lotan tried to blast the door off its hinges. The Matkal fighters had counted on their ability to surprise and overwhelm the cell. Now, as the setbacks multiplied, Lotan heard the man inside saying he’d killed Wachsman and was not afraid to die. Finally, Lotan’s force charged through the door and killed the two Hamas men. But Wachsman was already dead. The operation to save one soldier had cost the lives of two.
Barak, who followed the events from a staging area near Bir Nabala, phoned Rabin to report that the raid had failed. Yatom had been with the Israeli leader all evening. In the hour leading up to the operation, he watched his boss pace back and forth in his office. Now, as the phone conversation dragged on, Yatom could read the news on Rabin’s face. “I understood from his expression that something went wrong.” That Wachsman died was bad enough. Poraz, the twenty-three-year-old captain who commanded the raid and died in its initial moments, was just a few weeks from completing his military service. Poraz’s father had also been killed in action, his plane shot down over Sinai during the 1973 war.
The rest of the ordeal unspooled over a grueling weekend. Late in the evening, Rabin held a press conference to explain his decision to order the raid. “It is our obligation not to surrender to a terrorist ultimatum but to fight against terrorism with all of the attendant pain and suffering,” he said. The following day, he paid a visit to the Poraz family. As army chief and later defense minister, Rabin had made plenty of condolence calls over the years but this one felt especially excruciating. Poraz’s mother had tried to prevent her son from serving in a combat unit but eventually relented. Now, she lashed out at Rabin for sending him on a mission that was doomed to fail. “They had a very traumatic visit,” Rabin’s daughter, Dalia, recalled years later. “She was very, very bitter.” The family buried Poraz alongside his father in Tel Aviv.
Rabin also called on the Wachsman home, where journalists still lingered outside. Inside, Esther was preparing for her son’s funeral. She had managed to get through the night only with the help of sedatives. Rabin arrived with several military officers, but Yehuda asked to speak to the prime minister alone. In the basement of the home, where the family had watched the abduction video four days earlier, Yehuda said he understood the decision not to negotiate with terrorists and didn’t fault Rabin for ordering the raid. But he couldn’t comprehend why Rabin didn’t stall in order to give the unit more time to prepare. In the final hours, Hamas had seemed ready to extend the deadline. Rabin said he hadn’t trusted the group to keep Wachsman alive and repeated a line from his press conference—that the decision and the failure were his own. When Rabin emerged from the basement, Esther noticed his eyes had welled up.
At meetings throughout Sunday, Rabin’s security team reviewed the events of the preceding week. The one redeeming aspect of the affair had been Arafat. The Palestinian leader had combed Gaza to find Wachsman. He detained some two hundred Hamas men for questioning. When he reported to Rabin that the missing soldier was not in his territory, he was telling the truth. “Yasser Arafat earned many points from Yitzhak Rabin, deservedly. He ordered all his men to assist in the search [and] did everything we asked of him,” Carmi Gillon would write later in a memoir.
Haber came to view the ordeal as a defining moment in the interaction between the two leaders. Each Hamas attack on Israel had prompted a debate among Rabin’s security advisers: had Arafat been unable to stop it or simply unwilling? In the Wachsman case, when Rabin brought pressure to bear, Arafat responded. “Rabin even said, ‘Hey, he told us the truth,’ ” Haber recalled two decades later. And yet, the most he could muster for now was a slow thaw. When Haber proposed that his boss phone Arafat and acknowledge his efforts, the Israeli leader recoiled. “He said, ‘That’s my red line. I’m not going to apologize.’ ”
The contours of the relationship were forming. Arafat seemed to revere Rabin’s military bearing and fear his temper. At meetings he addressed him as “Your Excellency.” Rabin was coming to terms with the fact that Arafat could not shut down Hamas violence—certainly not from areas that remained under Israel’s control. If the Palestinian leader was making a genuine effort, the peace process could continue. To his own advisers, Rabin said repeatedly that Arafat needed to have his Altalena moment, to take on those rivals who threatened his sovereignty. But he also understood the complexity of domestic politics. Rabin had his own extremists to deal with—and he often chose to avoid confrontation.
In an interview with the reporters Nahum Barnea and Shimon Shiffer soon after Wachsman died, Rabin mounted a defense of his agreement with Arafat, something Israelis had been accustomed to reading. But he also defended Arafat himself. “Making a deal with Arafat was difficult, given the history of terrorism. But I came to the conclusion that it’s Arafat or Hamas,” he said. “I certainly don’t regret coming to an agreement that included reciprocal recognition with the PLO. Arafat is a strategic partner of this government.” Pressed on the ways the Oslo process had come up short, Rabin said: “Arafat is disappointed that he didn’t get certain things from this agreement, just as I am.”
Yossi Beilin, who accompanied Rabin on some of his subsequent meetings with Arafat, noticed the improvement. But he also began to think that the strategy he himself had devised in the Oslo talks—an incremental advance toward peace between the two sides—was misguided. The approach aimed to build confidence between Israelis and Palestinians, enough to allow each side to make difficult concessions in the final agreement. No doubt it had altered the landscape. Israeli and Palestinian troops now patrolled together in Gaza, an astonishing sight for anyone familiar with the history of enmity between the two sides. Academics were meeting across the region in what came to be known as track-two talks—freewheeling discussions on ways to solve the conflict for good. Dialogue groups had sprung up in all the big Palestinian cities, often led by former political prisoners. Youth groups, artists, businessmen, parents who had lost children in the conflict—all were looking for counterparts to engage with. Oslo had started as a process between leaders and quickly filtered down.
But the slow, staged approach of the political process had also allowed opponents to mobilize against it. Their campaign of violence had been so effective that, thirteen months after the signing in Washington, it was not clear whether the peace process was enhancing confidence or eroding it.
Under the terms of their deal, the two sides had until May 1999 to complete a final peace agreement. But Beilin now worried that another five years of shootings and bombings, closures and crackdowns would drain Oslo of public support on both sides. As the process moved into its second year, Beilin approached Arafat’s deputy, Mahmoud Abbas, about launching another secret channel, this one in Stockholm. He envisioned replicating the Oslo talks but instead of negotiating another interim deal, hashing out all the complicated details of a final peace accord, including where the border would run between Israel and Palestine. When the official final-status negotiations got under way, the two sides could work from the paper drafted in Stockholm instead of starting from scratch. Beilin appointed the two academics who had negotiated the Oslo deal, Ron Pundak and Yair Hirschfeld, to lead the talks. He informed neither Peres nor Rabin about the channel.
In the weeks that followed the Wachsman ordeal, the pendulum kept swinging between bad news and good news, trauma and euphoria. On October 19, just five days after the raid in Bir Nabala, a Hamas suicide bomber blew himself up on a Tel Aviv bus, killing twenty-two people. It was the deadliest attack yet by the group and a shock to residents of Israel’s busiest city—who seemed to feel largely removed from the rising brutality of the conflict. The bomber had struck on Dizengoff Street, a main artery of the city lined with cafés and boutiques.
Rabin once again pressed Arafat to tighten his grip on Gaza. But the bomber turned out to be a resident of Qalqilya, a West Bank city under Israel’s control. Israeli authorities had detained him six times in the preceding years. After cutting short a trip to London, Rabin told reporters in Tel Aviv that Israel must finally come to terms with separating itself from the Palestinians and the land—much of it anyway—it conquered in 1967. “I am prepared to fight them [Hamas] to the finish because they are the enemies of Israel and the enemies of peace. But I must also consider, what next? What is the solution? Should it be separation between the Palestinians and Israel, or a continued blurring of the line—continuing to create the conditions that led to fanaticism among the Palestinians [in the first place].” He admitted there was little Israel’s security agencies could do against a lone suicide bomber bent on destruction.
Rabin also said Israel was hunting for a certain engineer who made bombs for all of Hamas’s attacks. In meetings with the security team, Shabak identified him as Yahya Ayyash.
Just one week later, Israel and Jordan signed a formal peace accord in a stretch of desert on the border between the two countries. Israeli troops had been clearing land mines in the area for weeks, preparing it for what would now be a transit point. Though Israel and Jordan had not fought a war in twenty-seven years, the agreement carried huge symbolic weight. For the first time since its founding, Israel now had more allies than enemies on its perimeter. Some five thousand people attended in one-hundred-degree heat, including President Clinton, whose face turned bright red under the desert sun. When it was over, Israel and Jordan threw switches connecting their electric grids in Eilat and Aqaba, twin cities on the Red Sea. Even Rabin’s sharpest critics praised the deal; the Knesset ratified it by a vote of 105 to 3.
Rabin had now been in office for twenty-eight months. Questions surrounded his agreement with the Palestinians. Arafat had yet to assert himself with Hamas and Rabin had still made no public commitment to a Palestinian state. Whether the two men could muster a final treaty was by no means certain. But the messy accord with Arafat had led to a comprehensive agreement with Jordan. And Rabin still hoped to lock up a deal with Syria, the one bordering state that posed a genuine threat. The Israeli leader had set out to change the country’s corrosive status quo and made good on that promise, unquestionably. Israel looked nothing like it had when his term began.
The Nobel Prize ceremony took place in mid-December. In Tel Aviv, it was still warm enough for dedicated beachgoers to swim in the Mediterranean. At Oslo’s Fornebu Airport, just five hours away by plane, technicians were de-icing the runway. Days before the event, Arafat’s wife announced she was several weeks pregnant. Suha Tawil had been Arafat’s secretary, more than thirty years younger than he was, when they married secretly in 1991. Now, she described the timing of the pregnancy as a harbinger of good things for the Palestinians. “It’s a double blessing for Abu Ammar—the Nobel Prize and a baby,” she said, using Arafat’s nom de guerre.
Rabin had been irritated about having to share the prize with Peres. To Shimon Sheves, he said he needed no help “carrying the envelope.” But offstage and later at the reception, Sheves noticed something surprising: an easy, almost demonstrative rapport between Peres and Rabin. The antagonism from more than two decades of quarreling had not quite dissipated—but it had been receding for some time now. Peres had several cuts on his face, having tripped the night before during a walk to an Oslo synagogue. When Norwegian security men watched him tumble, one of them thought someone had taken a shot at the Israeli foreign minister.
From Oslo, Rabin made a stop in South Korea for a meeting with President Kim Young-sam and then headed back to Israel. On a Saturday following his return, the red phone rang in his apartment on Rav Ashi. Rabin braced himself for bad news but the voice on the other end of the line sounded decidedly calm. It was Peres calling to inquire whether somehow the Nobel Prize medals had been switched. The one he was holding had the letters Y.R. engraved on the back—clearly it belonged to Rabin. Did Rabin have Peres’s medal? Or was there a three-way switch with Arafat?
When Rabin explained the mix-up to the family over lunch, Noa, his teenage granddaughter, let out a derisive giggle. Did Peres have nothing better to do on a Saturday than admire his Nobel medal? But Rabin silenced her with a hand gesture. Peres had worked hard for the achievement and it was his right to revel in it, he said. Noa felt her jaw slacken. How strange it was to hear her grandfather defending the man he had loathed for so many years, not just his political rival but the antagonist-in-chief for the entire Rabin family. She made a mental note to hold her tongue from now on when it came to Peres.