Source: prismnet.com, by Barry Chamish
 
  - Just previous to the evening of November 4, 1995, Prime Minister
 Yitzhak Rabin was a very worried man. His peace process with the PLO
 was not going well with the Israeli public. The latest poll in the
 daily newspaper Maariv showed that 78% of the public wanted the
 process stopped until a national referendum was held to decide whether
 to continue or not. Only 18% of Israelis trusted Rabin enough to have
 him carry on his diplomacy without a public referendum. Rabin couldn't
 step out in public without being heckled. His most humiliating moment
 came in August when he was introduced at a soccer game and
 40,000 fans jeered him in unison.
 
 But that evening would be different. A coalition of left wing
 political parties and youth movements had organized a rally in support
 of him and Rabin knew that, for a change, he would be surrounded by
 thousands of well wishers.
 
 Which made his murder that evening doubly unexpected. It all seemed so
 easy. At 9:15, Rabin ad-libbed a speech before 100,000 supporters
 gathered at a square outside Tel Aviv's city hall. A half hour later,
 he walked down the steps of the stage into the "sterile" area below
 where his car awaited him. Here he would be safe from threat because
 no one but approved security personnel were supposed to be there.
 
 But something was very wrong in the parking lot below. The area, far
 from being sterile, was crawling with unauthorized personnel. If Rabin
 had been alert he would have noticed that things were not looking very
 right at all. First of all, he should have thought, where's the
 ambulance?  There was always an ambulance stationed near his car when
 he made public appearances, yet this evening it was nowhere to be
 seen. Then he should have asked, where are the policemen? Dozens of
 policemen should have providing security but only a few were in sight.
 The parking area was almost totally dark whereas it was standard
 security procedure to illuminate his walking route. 
 
 But Rabin seemed buoyed by the success of his speech and
 uncharacteristically walked alone, unaccompanied by his wife, Leah,
 toward his car. A few seconds before he reached his vehicle, a
 security agent of the General Security Services (Shabak) who was 
 supposed to cover his rear stepped back, stopped and permitted an
 assassin, Yigal Amir, to get three clear shots at Rabin's back.
 
 As soon as the bullets were fired, a Shabak agent yelled, "Srak.
 Srak," or "they're blanks, they're blanks," while another agent told
 Rabin's wife Leah a few moments later not to worry because "the shots
 were blanks." The agents next to Rabin pounced on the killer and
 cuffed him. His first words after being apprehended were, "Why are you
 handcuffing me? I did my job. Now it is time to do yours." The first
 question the Shabak agents asked the assassin was, "Didn't you fire
 blanks?" 
 
 Since there was no ambulance, Rabin was driven by car to a nearby
 hospital. The car was not equipped with a radio so neither the
 policemen manning roadblocks cleared the way nor were hospital staff
 awaiting the victim. A few minutes later, dozens of reporters received
 messages from a spokesman from an unknown group called Jewish
 Vengeance promising to get Rabin next time. After the announcement of
 his death, the spokesman called the reporters back, retracting the
 earlier announcement and taking responsibility for the murder.
 
 At 11:15 P.M., Rabin aide Eitan Haber, holding what he claimed was a
 bloody songsheet Rabin had sang from at the rally, announced the Prime
 Minister's death. That task done, Haber rushed to Jerusalem and
 cleaned out the files of Rabin's defence ministry office. He
 apparently couldn't wait until the next morning and later told a
 reporter from the weekly magazine Kol Ha'ir that "I wanted to be sure
 the files were donated to the archives of the Israel Defence Forces
 (IDF)." 
 
 WHAT HAPPENED TO YIGAL AMIR IN RIGA? 
 
 The accused killer Yigal Amir had served honorably in the elite Golani
 Brigade of the Israel Defence Forces and immediately after his release 
 was sent to Riga, Latvia in the spring of l993 on some sort of mission
 by a covert branch of the Prime Minister's Office, the Liaison
 Department.
 
 Founded in 1953 to educate and rescue Jews from behind the Iron
 Curtain, the Liaison Department had become a nest of spies over the
 years. As the daily newspaper Haaretz reported a few weeks after Rabin
 was killed: "The Liaison Department conducts its own diplomacy and has
 its own private agenda."
 
 Amir was an activist for reputedly the most radical anti-government
 organization of all, Eyal. The head of Eyal, Avishai Raviv was filmed
 by Israeli TV a month and a half before leading an induction ceremony
 in which new members vowed to kill anyone who "sold out the Land of
 Israel." If Eyal was really a secret organization why did the members
 allow themselves to be filmed by Israel TV and expose themselves to
 the public? 
 
 A week after Rabin was killed, on November 12, journalist Amnon
 Abramovich revealed on Israel TV that Eyal was set up by the Shabak to
 provoke and trap right wing radicals and its leader, Avishai Raviv was
 an agent whose code name was "Champagne", referring to the bubbles of
 incitement he raised.
 
 Raviv was an agitator on the campus of Bar Ilan University, where Amir
 studied. He befriended Amir and encouraged him to organize study
 weekends in Hebron. As it turned out, Raviv was no newcomer to the
 Shabak. Back in 1987 he was supposed to be expelled from Tel Aviv
 University for his radical activities by the dean, Itamar Rabinovitch,
 who until just recently was Rabin's chief negotiator with the Syrians.
 Then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir ordered his aide Yossi Achimeir to
 personally intervene on Raviv's behalf. Thus Raviv was not recruited
 after Rabin came to power.
 
 Eyal had only two members, Raviv and Erin Agelbo. They shared a rented
 apartment in the Hebron suburb of Kiryat Arba in the same building
 where Baruch Goldstein once resided. But Agelbo, it turned out, was
 not just an ordinary, everyday extremist either. After the weekly
 magazine Yerushalyim printed his picture, a reader recognized him as a
 Jerusalem policeman who trained her in weapons use during a stint in
 the civil guard. Lo and behold a link between the assassination and
 the police emerged. The Jerusalem Police Department owned up and
 admitted Agelbo was a "former policeman who was fired for his radical
 activities in 1994."  
                                                               
 Shortly after the murder, the Israeli media began exposing some very
 incriminating evidence. The most serious of all was that Yigal Amir
 was a Shabak agent. The first to make the accusation publicly was
 Professor Michael Hersigor, a left wing political science professor at
 Tel Aviv University. On November 11, a week after the killing, he told
 a reporter from Yediot Achronot, "The murder of the prime minister has
 no rational explanation. There is no explaining the breakdown and no
 telling what happened. But in my opinion it would be advisable to seek
 the connection between Amir and the Shabak. It's possible there was a
 conspiracy. It turns out the murderer was in the Shabak when he
 travelled to Riga. He was supplied with false documents with which to
 receive a gun license. It sounds like he had connections to the Shabak
 at the time of the murder."
 
 The heat was turned up when Alex Fishman of Yediot Achronot reported
 that Amir was trained by the Shabak in Riga. Soon after, Army Radio
 broadcasted an interview with Rabbi Benny Elon, a leader of the Jewish
 settlement movement, who said, "The Shabak was responsible for the
 founding and funding of Eyal and its leader Avishai Raviv. I claim
 that the Shabak knew Eyal's every move before the assassination and
 that the Shabak funded its activities." 
 
 With the facts closing in, the government embarked on a sloppy cover-
 up of Amir's Riga days. In order; the government's press office
 announced that Amir, who spoke no Latvian and had no teaching
 credentials, was a Hebrew teacher in Riga for five months. The head of
 the Liaison Department, whose name was whited-out of a Maariv article,
 then changed the story to read he was a teacher for two to three
 months. After this, Minister of Internal Security, Moshe Shahal, told
 Israel TV that Amir was a security guard in Riga for two months, which
 was probably the closest version to the truth. Finally, running out of
 ideas, the spokesperson of the Prime Minister, Aliza Goren, announced
 in late December that the Prime Minister's Office is now certain Amir
 was never in Riga and that any journalist writing so "was acting
 irresponsibly." That ploy fell apart when the BBC filmed a copy of
 Amir's passport with the letters CCCP clearly stamped in it.
       
 But this wasn't the end of the story of the Prime Minister's strange
 Liaison Office. In the months prior to the assassination, the State
 Comptroller's Office initiated an investigation of profound corruption
 at the Liaison Office and the unexplained disappearance of a great
 deal of money in the C.I.S. In late l992, Rabin announced he was
 considering closing down the Liaison Office for good.
 
 THE KEMPLER FILM
 
 A co-called amateur photographer, Ronnie Kempler, filmed the murder of
 Rabin. He had no camera of his own so borrowed one from his sister and
 hung around on a balcony overlooking the parking lot for over an hour,
 unquestioned. He claimed he had "an odd feeling" about Amir and
 focused in on him for long periods of time. 
 
 His film clearly shows Amir signalling someone in the distance a few
 minutes before the shooting and it captures the movement of an agent
 who circled Rabin, took over the rear position and allowed Amir in to
 take his shots. What the tape shows (albeit does not prove) is that
 Yigal Amir pointed a gun at Yitzhak Rabin and shot at him. But what if
 the bullets weren't real? 
 
 The amateur film of the Rabin assassination has since been examined by
 numerous people in frame by frame sequence and found to have been
 sloppily cut and edited. The strangest part of it is Rabin's reaction
 to being shot. Instead of lurching forward from the bullets, he
 alertly turns back, seemingly aware of the events taking place. 
 
 Kempler works for the State Comptroller's Office. Even the most
 skeptical Israeli had to ask why the fateful moment wasn't captured on
 film by a car salesman, postal carrier or computer programmer. Why was
 he employed by the very office that was investigating the former
 employer of the assassin? 
 
 At the very moment Rabin was shot, Kempler stopped filming. He told
 Israel's Second TV channel interviewer Rafi Reshef that it was because
 "he had seen enough." Yet he told another journalist he had dropped
 the camera, and another, that a policeman told him to stop shooting.
 When the beta film was converted for viewing on national
 television, the technician who did the transcribing claimed that the
 sound of the agent yelling "blanks, blanks" was removed. 
 
 Other than one short appearance on Channel 2 after the film was aired,
 Ronnie Kempler has never been quoted publicly in any newspaper-
 anywhere. 
 
 THE SHAMGAR COMMISSION 
 
 The testimony of policemen at the Shamgar Commission hampered a clean
 cover-up. While the Shabak chose to exonerate the police of all
 responsibility for the murder, the chief of the Tel Aviv Police
 Department, Gabi Lest, testified that his men were supposed to secure
 the sterile area but were not stationed by Rabin's security men. Those
 policemen were shocked to see that the Shabak officers were not in
 place.
 
 What those few officers in place testified to the Shamgar Commission
 compromises the lone gunman theory, which the Commission, personally
 appointed Prime Minister Shimon Peres, eventually ruled was the case. 
 
 Officers Sergei and Boaz testified that they saw Amir talking with a
 tall, dark man in a tee shirt who he appeared to know about a half
 hour before the shooting. Sargent Saar testified that he saw Amir's
 brother Hagai, who was later charged with supplying the bullets for
 the assassination, near the crime scene shortly before the murder.
 Officer Sharabi testified that, "A man who we knew by face as an anti-
 Rabin demonstrator rushed at Rabin, shook his hand and left."
 
 Sergei became suspicious of the whole atmosphere and specifically of
 Amir. He asked another officer who Amir was and was told he was
 working undercover. The police claimed that Amir got into the sterile
 area when he presented government credentials given to him by the
 Liaison Office. 
 
 Thus the Shabak allowed Amir, who had been filmed being taken away
 kicking from a demonstration at Efrat by the Shabak two weeks earlier,
 another known demonstrator, Amir's brother who supposedly was carrying
 bullets, an unknown film maker, and a mysterious man wearing a tee
 shirt to roam at will in an area that was meant to be cordoned off to
 unauthorized personnel. 
 
 RECONSTRUCTING THE MURDER 
 
 There are basically only two explanations for Rabin's assassination.
 One is that the Shabak, one of the world's most respected security
 organizations, is totally incompetent. The other is that agents on the
 scene allowed the assassination to take place. Probably with Rabin's
 knowledge, the Shabak set up Amir. 
 
 The theme of the gathering on the fateful night was, "No To Violence."
 Amir was to have shot Rabin with blanks, Rabin was to have
 miraculously escaped an assassination attempt and then climbed back on
 the stage with a stirring speech, written by his close aide, Eitan
 Haber. The public would react with revulsion against the attempted
 assassination by an extremist right winger and the government could
 justify a crackdown against opponents of the peace process.        
 
 WHAT DOES AMIR KNOW? 
 
 Consider the story of Shabak agent Yoav Kuriel who is widely believed
 to have been the agent who yelled "they're blanks, they're blanks."
 The night of Rabin's murder, his body was taken to Ichilov Hospital
 and its organs were removed. The government claimed he committed
 suicide and buried him in a closed funeral at Hayarkon Cemetary
 outside of Tel Aviv. Traffic was diverted for ninety minutes while the
 funeral took place. Maariv investigative journalist David Ronen
 succeeded in tracking down Kuriel's death certificate. The hospital,
 in a blatant disregard for procedure, left out the reason for death. 
 
 One day during his trial when Amir was seated in court he screamed to
 the reporters, "Why don't you print the story about the murdered
 bodyguard." He was asked which one. "The one who yelled the bullets
 are blanks."  In theory Amir was being kept in solitary confinement
 with no access to the news. How did he know the story? And Amir wasn't
 finished. He added,"I know enough to bring down the whole regime. The
 whole business has been a charade. The entire system is rotten. I will
 be forgiven when people know the whole story."
 
 If that outburst was for public consumption, it was certainly
 consistent with what he has been saying privately. On November 29,
 l995, according to a report published by Maariv in early January '96,
 he complained to the police officer taking testimony, "They're going
 to kill me in here."                                  
 
         "Nonsense," replied the officer.
         "You don't believe me, well I'm telling you it was a
 conspiracy. I didn't know I was going to kill Rabin."
         "What do you mean? You pulled the trigger, it's that simple."
         "Then why didn't Raviv report me? He knew I was going to do it
 and he didn't stop me? And why wasn't I shot to save Rabin?" 
 
 WHO KILLED YITZHAK RABIN?
        
 By the early spring of 1996 new evidence led to the proposition that
 Yigal Amir shot blanks while Rabin was murdered with real bullets
 inside his car, not by the blanks that Amir fired. 
 
 On May 3, l996, Yigal Amir's lawyers appealed his conviction to the
 Supreme Court arguing that it had not proved that his shots actually
 killed Rabin. It included the testimony of Dr. Skolnick of Ichilov
 Hospital who operated on Rabin and claims his wounds were not
 consistent with the official story that Rabin was shot from a meter
 away by Amir. Skolnick explained that the size of the wound and the
 pattern of burn and powder marks were those of someone shot from point
 blank.       
 
 By mid-May twelve doctors and staff who were on duty when Rabin was
 brought in were receiving anonymous death threats. In June, a closed
 door session of the Supreme Court heard testimony from a cab driver.
 On the day Amir was convicted, his passenger showed him an ID card
 from Ichilov Hospital which identified him as a pathologist. He told
 the driver that Amir's conviction was a scam and that Rabin's wounds
 were from point blank shots.
 
 Amir's lawyers pointed out that the bullets may have been tampered
 with since there are no record of what happened to them between the
 time they were removed from Rabin's body on the night of November 4th
 and the time they were delivered to the Abu Kabir Forensics Institute
 at noon on November 5th. 
 
 The medical reports indicated that Rabin was killed by a bullet fired
 from a gun against his flesh- not from five feet away. 
 
 Amir's attorneys cited the evidence of police ballistics expert Baruch
 Glatstein who said his laboratory tests of Rabin's clothing showed
 that the first bullet to hit him was fired from a distance of less
 than 25 cm., while the second was fired with the gun actually touching
 his clothing. Glatstein pointed out that the marks made by the second
 bullet could only be made by a gun fired while touching the clothing.
 Glatstein also examined the shirt of Rabin's bodyguard, Yoram Rubin,
 and found traces of lead and copper in the bullet wounds. According to
 forensic evidence gathered by Glatstein, the bullets which wounded
 Rubin could not have been fired from Yigal Amir's gun. Amir's bullets
 were made of pure copper while Glatstein found traces of lead mixed
 with copper in the bullet hole in Rubin's shirt. 
 
 One of the very first media reports on the murder was an eyewitness
 account given to Israel TV by Miriam Oren. She said when she saw Rabin
 get into the car "he did not look at all like he was shot. He climbed
 in on his own." When Kempler's film begins again after the shooting it
 shows Rabin's car speeding off. Just before the car leaves the back
 passenger door (Rabin entered the car through the rear driver's side
 followed by Rubin) closes. Someone was already in the car waiting for
 Rabin and as the Prime Minister entered, grabbed the car door and shut
 it from the inside. 
 
 Amir's appeal was also based on the testimony of dozens of eye-
 witnesses who testified that Amir was never close enough to Rabin to
 have fired these shots. The eyewitnesses say that the gunshots had an
 odd, distinctive sound, whereas tests of Amir's gun showed that its
 sound was perfectly normal. In July, police officer Yossi Smadja was
 quoted in Maariv as saying that he was almost next to the
 assassination site and heard five shots, three clear and two muffled.
 
 What these people heard were the muffled shots of the bullets that
 killed Rabin coming from inside the car. Amir told the police
 immediately after the event that he had put nine bullets in his gun.
 Since four bullets were fired at Rabin, two which hit him, one which
 hit Yoram Rubin, and one which missed both men but was later found at
 the site, there should have been five bullets left in Amir's gun.
 However, there were eight. 
 
 Then there is the testimony of Shimon Peres who saw Rabin's body in
 the hospital. He claimed in Yediot Ahronot in late September that
 Rabin's forehead was swollen and bruised, he thought from being pushed
 on the pavement after he was shot. This is in direct contradiction to
 the eyewitness report of Miriam Oren who was beside Rabin after Amir
 pulled the trigger. She told Israel Television news moments after the
 incident that Rabin walked into the car under his own power. Where,
 and how then, did the bruises that Peres claims he saw occur?
 
 Finally, there is the indisputable proof offered unintentionally by
 Rabin's aide Eitan Haber. While Rabin was being operated on at Ichilov
 Hospital, for reasons unexplained to this day, Haber rifled through
 his suit and shirt pockets looking for something and pulled out the
 songsheet Rabin had held at the rally. Haber produced it for the
 cameras as he announced Rabin's death and it clearly shows a bullet
 hole through the bloodstains. Unless Rabin put it in a non-existent
 back pocket of his suit, he was shot from the front.
 
 On September 20, two Israeli newspapers printed interviews with most
 unexpected subtle advocates of the conspiracy thesis. After nine
 months of silence Shlomo Levy gave an interview to Yerushalayim. Levy
 was an associate of Amir's who was a soldier in the Intelligence
 Brigade of the IDF. After hearing Amir's threats to kill Rabin, he
 reported them to his commander who told him to go to the police. The
 police took his testimony very seriously on July 6, 1995 and
 transferred it to the Shabak where it was ignored until three days
 after the assassination.
 
 The report concludes, "Levy's was only one of a number of reports the
 Shabak ignored about Amir...The fact that the Shabak let the reports
 gather dust until Rabin was murdered lends credence to numerous
 conspiracy theories."
 
 Levy was asked, "If you did the right thing, why have you been hiding
 in your home out of fear?" He replied,"The Shabak is big and powerful
 and I'm a little guy. The assassination is an open wound with them and
 who knows how they'd react if I let myself be interviewed." 
 On the same day, Rabin's son Yuval was interviewed in Yediot Ahronot.
 Asked if he believed his father was killed in a conspiracy, a question
 that said much about the public's interest, he replied, "I can't say
 yes or no. It's not hard to accept it... One thing is certain, no one
 was punished. The worst that happened to any Shabak agent was he lost
 his job."
 
 Considering the evidence, Yitzhak Rabin was not killed by Yigal Amir.
 It's possible that most of Rabin's security guards and most likely
 Rabin himself, thought it was going to be an elaborate plan to catch
 the "right wing radical," Yigal Amir, red handed. Amir himself may
 have been drugged or duped into believing that his bullets were real
 and that he really did kill Rabin. He may have be programed to take
 the blame. 
 
 Whoever was behind this coup also had the help of the Shamgar
 Commission whose conclusions merely reinforced the manufactured media
 image in the Israeli public's mind that radical Jewish extremism was
 responsible for the murder. The cover up was as insidious as the
 crime. 
 ----------------
 Barry Chamish is the editor of Inside Israel, a political intelligence
 report on Israeli affairs
https://www.prismnet.com/~patrik/rabin.htm