A still from the movie “Rabin, the Last Day”.
The late Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin was shot in the back 20 years ago this fall, but he should have seen it coming.
He was just two metres from his car's open back door that November Saturday evening, bidding good night to a group of Israeli supporters following a peace rally, when three bullets cut him down.
The man who fired those shots, a 25-year-old religious law student named Yigal Amir, objected to Mr. Rabin's plan to allow a Palestinian state in part of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in keeping with the Oslo Accords signed two years earlier on the White House lawn. The assassin said later he wasn't sure he'd have the opportunity to kill the Israeli leader that night, but had gotten lucky. He found himself able to wait near the car, amidst the political aides, drivers and security people, without arousing suspicion.
Mr. Amir had taken the trouble to load his Beretta 84F semi-automatic pistol with a mix of hollow-point and regular ammunition, ensuring that at least one of the bullets would tear apart the insides of his target.
Make no mistake, in the months before that fateful day, Mr. Rabin, a highly decorated Israeli military commander and two-time elected prime minister, had been branded by many of Israel's religious extremists and diehard settlers as a traitor to his country for agreeing to the establishment of a Palestinian state on what they viewed as part of the Land of Israel.
I was coming to the end of my first four-year posting in Jerusalem and was taken aback by political posters across the country depicting the Israeli leader in an Arab head scarf or a Nazi uniform, often within the crosshairs of a gun sight.
So-called religious edicts were declared – the Jewish version of Islamic fatwas – calling for the death of the man who dared to hand over Jewish land (the West Bank and Gaza Strip) to non-Jews (Palestinians).
Israel's domestic security service, the Shin Bet, was aware of these threats, and even had an agent inside the religious cabal from which Mr. Amir took his inspiration.
Yet on the evening of Nov. 4, 1995, chaos and confusion at the scene allowed Mr. Amir to lay in wait, gun in his pocket. An amateur video shot that night shows the killer was remarkably calm. He had hidden his religious nature – shaved his short beard and pocketed his black yarmulke – and blended in with the small crowd. It was all over quickly – Mr. Rabin was dead on arrival at the nearby hospital – and Israel would never be the same again. Its governments moved further and further right; its West Bank settlements more and more entrenched.
In Rabin, the Last Day, recently shown at the Toronto International Film Festival, producer/director Amos Gitai takes the viewer inside the commission of inquiry that investigated the murder as well as into the extremist camps that initiated it.
With a mix of documentary footage and skillful re-enactment – all the dialogue is drawn from actual testimony or recorded notes – the film has a stunningly powerful effect, gripping the audience for pretty well all of its 2 1/2 hours.
Even the scenes of militant rabbis meeting in secret are based on actual gatherings, helpfully recorded by religious and settler publications or in intelligence reports given to the commission of inquiry.
"For every word spoken in the film we have the documentation," said Mr. Gitai in an interview last week at TIFF. The research took two years, he said.
A number of Mr. Gitai's films are based on his own experience – in Kippur, for example, he tells the gruesome story of the 1973 Arab-Israeli War through the eyes of a rescue helicopter pilot shot down over the Golan Heights.
In the case of Rabin, the Last Day, Mr. Gitai says he was driven to make the film – in time to mark the 20th anniversary of the assassination – "as a concerned Israeli, more than as a filmmaker."
He said he "wanted to expose how this terrible thing" that altered Israel's history for the worse "was allowed to happen."
He masterfully brings to life the rabbis and settlers who justified any attempt to kill Mr. Rabin, and he exposes the failings of the Shin Bet, leaving the impression that the security service was remarkably incompetent – hinting even at the possibility that some of its members may have turned a blind eye to what was happening.
The killer, Mr. Amir, says he is proud of what he did and would do it again, while many of the rabbis call every year for this "hero" to be released from his life imprisonment. (Though still behind bars, Mr. Amir has been allowed to marry and has a son born in 2007.)
Mr. Gitai said he is most perturbed by the legitimacy the extremists enjoyed.
For example, then-opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu was a speaker at a 1995 rally summoned by these extremists in which he called for more settlements to be constructed contrary to Prime Minister Rabin's announced policy of ending such construction according to the Oslo agreement.
Even a shocking midnight assembly outside the Prime Minister's residence during which the extremists cried for Mr. Rabin's death and damnation was tolerated by the authorities. Known as a Pulsa diNura, this Kabbalistic curse took place on the eve of Yom Kippur, less than a month before the assassination.
In what other country would such incitement be tolerated, mused Mr. Gitai.
"I look at today's situation in Israel – such religious extremists are more powerful than ever – and realize that the only alternative to what is happening now is to follow the example advocated by a dead man [Mr. Rabin]," the filmmaker said.