Browsing newly published books at the LA Times Festival of Books this weekend, I couldn't resist buying the one about Yitzhak Rabin's assassination. It looked like an eye-opener.
A few hours later it won the LA Times award for best book of history book written in 2015 as I sat in the audience at Bovard Auditorium on the USC campus.
Dan Ephron, Killing a King: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel (W. W. Norton and Co.)
Here's what the LA Times says about the book:
Here's what the LA Times says about the book:
"Ephron's deeply researched tome recounts the events of Rabin's assassination and how it affected Middle Eastern geopolitics."
The prologue describes a few moments in the life of Rabin on the morning of November 4, 1995. He had an eye infection; he cancelled his usual Saturday tennis match and an eye doctor paid a house call.
It also describes the visit to a synagogue that morning of two Orthodox, violently nationalist brothers who were planning to kill Rabin.
Then Chapter 1 begins with Rabin in 1993, skeptical about whether to fly to Washington to attend the signing of a peace agreement between his government and the Palestine Liberation Organization.
The 12-page document "ended the state of belligerency between Israel and the PLO, promised to upend a quarter century of Israeli policy toward Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and created an opening for resolving the broader Arab-Israeli conflict," writes Dan Ephron (p. 8).
Ephron was present at the peace rally where Rabin was shot--he was a reporter covering it for Reuters and had just left the rally at 9:30 pm when the shooting occurred (p. 243).
This book is a page-turner.
This book is a page-turner.
Because he was there in 1995 and later served as the Newsweek bureau chief in Jerusalem, and then researched this book, Ephron is the perfect person to pose the question: what if Rabin had not been assassinated?
Would Israel and Palestine be closer to peace now?
Terry Gross asked him that question on Fresh Air last October.
http://www.npr.org/2015/10/13/448269886/revisiting-rabins-assassination-and-the-peace-that-might-have-been
The answer can never be known, but one thing is sure: things would not be as bad as they are now between the two groups of people.
When I reminded a pro-Netanyahu friend that some Israelis do want negotiations for peace with Palestine, her answer was: "There are always self-hating Jews."
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