TOM PUTNAM: Good evening, everyone, and welcome. I’m Tom Putnam, Director of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. And it’s my pleasure to welcome everyone and just reinforce what a wonderful partnership the Kennedy Library has had over the years with WBUR. We’re proud to host so man…
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Join Today WBUR PRESENTS IRA GLASS ON THE ASSASSINATION OF YITZHAK RABIN OCTOBER 18, 2015 TOM PUTNAM: Good evening, everyone, and welcome. I'm Tom Putnam, Director of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. And it's my pleasure to welcome everyone and just reinforce what a wonderful partnership the Kennedy Library has had over the years with WBUR. We're proud to host so many programs with them. They are sponsors of our Forum programs, and we are especially pleased to have you all here this evening, along with our distinguished panelists. And it's now my job to certainly just turn the program over now to Sam Fleming of WBUR to give the proper introduction. [applause] SAM FLEMING: Hi, thanks for coming. What a special treat we're in store to hear tonight. This American Life, I think many of you probably heard the program this weekend. And to have our colleagues from This American Life here this evening, at this time, with this incredibly special book hits the shelves is just such a treat. Ira Glass, I do not need to introduce him; everybody knows about Ira. But I just want to say he's one of the most generous pioneers, innovators and really just has done things that nobody else has ever thought of in terms of storytelling and promoting public radio. And for us at WBUR, we are ever so grateful for you, and to Ira Glass, who is here with us this evening. [applause] IRA GLASS: I swear, this will be the last introduction before the evening begins. Thanks, Sam, so much. I'm always very, very happy to be doing an event with WBUR, because it's one of the best public radio stations in the country. [applause] Great local programming. And it's an honor to be here in the Kennedy Library talking about this other event. The Rabin assassination was seen in Israel as their Kennedy assassination. When it happened, people were shocked that such a thing could happen, that a Jew would kill another Jew in this kind of thing, kill the prime minister. People just hadn't imagined that it could be. One of the things that Dan Ephron and Nancy Updike reported out in doing this is that the security details that were protecting the prime minister the day of the assassination, they didn't have a scenario which involved another Jew killing the prime minister, much less an Orthodox Jew, a religious Jew. What they thought were protecting the prime minister from was Palestinian terrorists or Palestinians. So without further ado, let me invite to the stage Nancy Updike, who's been one of the producers of our show since the show began, and Dan Ephron, former bureau chief from Newsweek, Jerusalem bureau chief, to talk about this stuff. [applause] Hi, guys. NANCY UPDIKE: Hi. DAN EPHRON: Hi, Ira. IRA GLASS: Okay, so Dan, I think you should talk about what prompted you to write the book. Before you do, I just wanted to get a sense, because we've tried to bring in stuff that was not in the radio show. Can I get a sense from the audience? How many of you actually heard this week's episode. Okay, good. We have all sorts of stuff to play you and to talk about that was not in the show. So Dan, why did you decide to dive so deeply into this? DAN EPHRON: So I have been a reporter for more than 20 years, and I've spent a lot of that time in the Middle East and in Israel. And I was actually, I reported in Israel in the mid-'90s, and I attended that rally where Rabin was assassinated. I covered it for Reuters at the time. And political rallies are not usually news for the foreign press. It's speeches and songs, and that's it; there's not much to write. But this was this period when Rabin was in the middle of a series of peace deals with the Palestinians, the Oslo deals. And his popularity rating, Rabin's, waxed and waned, based on essentially the success or failure of this agreement. And the rally was supposed to gauge the extent to which he still had public support for this peace deal. That's how we foreign correspondents saw it. So I did go cover it. I left when it was over. I started walking back to the apartment where I was living in Tel Aviv. I was a few blocks away. I got a beeper message that said "shots fired in the area of Rabin, go back." And I ran back to the scene and heard witnesses say that it looked like Rabin had been hit. I then covered the trial of Yigal Amir, and lived in Israel for a period after that. But eventually left Israel, and spent time in Washington, covered national security, which meant Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo. And in 2010, Newsweek sent me back to Israel to be the bureau chief. And I think we've talked about this. I am sort of relentlessly optimistic by nature; I always think things are going to work out. And I think I had that view about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as well. Which I know sounds funny generally, and maybe particularly funny in the last few weeks. But I always felt that even in the period of the Second Intifada, where there was a lot of violence and suicide bombings regularly, that it was a matter of time for the right leaders to be elected, and for an agreement to be completed between the two sides. And when we moved there in 2010, I think that optimism drained out of me very quickly. IRA GLASS: Why? What did you see? I was just about to say, we don't have to talk about why [laughter], but– IRA GLASS: Just summarize it quickly. DAN EPHRON: Israel in 2010 was in some places a much better place than it had been when we lived there years earlier. We lived there, Nancy and I, during the Second Intifada, during this period where there was a lot of violence. And it was very clear when we went back that– the cafés we used to spend time at that had armed guards outside, the armed guards were gone. The economy was good. And this was 2010 when the economy in the rest of the world is taking a dive. It was as good place to live. We lived in Tel Aviv. We had lived in Jerusalem earlier. Tel Aviv in a lot of ways, lifestyle, is a terrific place. So Israel had sort of managed to achieve the situation that it wanted for a long time, kind of get the dividends of peace without actually having to reach a peace agreement. And that was a huge disincentive to then do something with the peace process. IRA GLASS: In other words, there weren't suicide bombings or anything like that. It wasn't violent. And so, they had no incentive to actually make a deal with the Palestinians, because they had what they wanted. DAN EPHRON: On the other side of that, there were plenty of disincentives, because every peace process had set off suicide bombings, had set off violence from the Israeli right, had created political instability. So for an Israeli leader to initiate a process where they're negotiating with the Palestinians, he has to take into account that his coalition might collapse, that there would be a backlash from, if he's a rightwing prime minister, from his constituency. And then, of course, the assassination scenario, to this day, looms. And it looms in the minds of Israeli politicians, in the minds of Israeli security chiefs. IRA GLASS: You mean literally, like people think, in doing this calculation, you think they think, Well, look at what happened to Rabin; he reached out to the Palestinians and he got shot by a fellow Israeli? DAN EPHRON: I think it's one more disincentive. There was a poll published in one of the Israeli newspapers two weeks ago that said something like 65% of Israelis believe that an assassination could happen again. This was a country that had no tradition of political assassinations. So yeah, that moment in history looms large, even today. IRA GLASS: And so, you moved back in 2010. What brought you back to the assassination? What brought you back to that night 20 years ago? DAN EPHRON: So if the chances of peace had decreased quite a lot over the years, and that was my perspective in 2010, this moment 15 years earlier in 1995, where certainly I remembered it has a very hopeful moment, the tragedy of the assassination seemed that much bigger. And because I had covered it, and because I was a young journalist at the time, and it had a big impact on me, I looked for ways to go back and write about the assassination. And at some point, I was doing that thing on YouTube that you do, where you click, and then you click, and then an afternoon goes by. [laughter] NANCY UPDIKE: You're like, Oh, there are a lot of cat videos online. [laughter] Right. And the pizza boxes are piling up. And eventually I found a short clip, a 20-second clip of the interrogation of Yigal Amir. IRA GLASS: Yigal Amir, again, the assassin who was convicted of the crime. DAN EPHRON: Right. And this was an interrogation that happened maybe 20 minutes or a half hour after the assassination itself. And it was a very short clip. The quality is terrible. We can show it. But it was mesmerizing, because Yigal Amir, he commits the murder and he sort of disappears. He disappears into the Israeli prison system, which means– journalists aren't allowed into prison to interview Israeli prisoners, for the most part. So he hasn't been heard from. The question of, who is this guy who committed an act that really sort of changed the course of history; it tilted the slope of history in Israel, I was very curious about. And here was this little 20-second window. And I think what occurred to me right way was, if there's 20 seconds, if the police went to the trouble of recording a little bit of it, they've probably recorded all of it. And if it's somewhere in the country, someone has hours of interrogation video with Yigal Amir. I think that was the first moment where I thought, if I can get that, maybe there is the basis for a long article or a book, or something like that. IRA GLASS: So why don't we play or show people some of what you're talking about? DAN EPHRON: Again, the quality here is terrible, but you'll see Yigal Amir– I'm sorry. Okay, so Yigal Amir is on the left, he's in the shadow. And he's sitting at a table. And what he's saying here, it's very short, he says– [video played] What he's saying is "everything I did"– and he's explaining why he killed Rabin not 30 minutes earlier. "Everything I did, I did because of my religious obligation." And he's speaking very slowly because the way the interrogations are conducted, the police officer who's sitting on the right side of the table there is taking down every word by hand. And so, often Yigal Amir is speaking too quickly and the policeman says "slow down." Or just now you heard, there was a little section where he says, "Did you get that down? Did you take that down?" NANCY UPDIKE: You can also sometimes hear the policeman repeating what he says. So you'll hear Amir say it, and then the police says it as he's writing it down. And then Amir will go on. And so, there's another chance to hear what's happening. IRA GLASS: And I know that you did manage to track down all the video of it, and you watched it. You had covered the trial, you had seen him in court. How did it change your picture of who he was, to look at all the video? What did you learn? DAN EPHRON: I think I thought that Yigal Amir was a marginal character. Marginal in terms of, from the margins of society. IRA GLASS: Like a crazy? DAN EPHRON: Not crazy. I think it was pretty clear in the trial that he was not insane. He was just deeply ideological and extremist. But that he wasn't a particularly smart guy. That maybe he was a ruffian. In the mold of other Israelis who had committed extreme acts of violence again, usually Palestinians, or against the left. There have been very few incidents like that. There's no tradition of political assassination. IRA GLASS: You pictured him as kind of a violent bully. Right. IRA GLASS: And what did you learn watching the video? DAN EPHRON: He's a very smart guy. And deeply ideological. I think the thing that was most striking in the hours of the interrogation that followed the assassination– so the assassination occurs just before ten p.m. in the evening. It's after a very large peace rally. Rabin is coming off the stage. He's addressed the rally. There were 100,000 people there. He's coming off the stage to his car, into a parking lot. It's an open area parking lot. And he's surrounded by bodyguards. And then there's a ring of policemen around him. And the shooter, Yigal Amir, has managed to get into this parking lot area that's supposed to be secure and wait for him. And he's got a gun; he's got a Beretta. And he sees Rabin walk past, very close to him. And Amir circles behind him, finds a gap between the bodyguards and shoots him. That incident caused– you talked about this being the Israeli Kennedy assassination. I think in most ways it's not. But the ways that it is the Israeli Kennedy assassination is the impact on the country. I think there was a deep sense of trauma as a result. The prime minister had been assassinated, and he had been killed by a fellow Jew. So Israel is traumatized. And in the police station, Amir is about as calm and as articulate as you can imagine. And he's calm and articulate, it becomes very clear, because he believes that what happened in the parking lot is that God created a situation where he can get close enough where there'll be a hole between the bodyguards. Because it's terribly unlikely– the fact that he could get into the parking lot at all is a surprise. The fact that he can spend 40 minutes there waiting for the prime minister to come down. Israeli secret service is very well trained. So the idea that he could outmaneuver them. And then survive; he's not shot dead. IRA GLASS: But one of the things you say in the radio show is that he tells the interrogators that he would go to the rally, and if God wanted him to kill Rabin, he would give him a sign. And the sign would be, he would have an opportunity to do it. So when he gets the opportunity, when he's able to stand there, and when he's able to get in so close, he's like, Oh, that is the sign. God wants me to do this. And so, he does it. DAN EPHRON: Yigal Amir had stalked Rabin for about two years, which meant that he had gone– every couple of months he would read in the newspaper that Rabin was going to appear at some public event. And Amir would go there and wait. Three times it happened before the assassination. And each time it happens, something went wrong. Either Amir got there early, or Rabin canceled and didn't come at all. And Amir saw this as a sign that God didn't want him to do it at that moment. Or that something would have gone wrong and God saved him by preventing the event from happening. IRA GLASS: And just to say, for the people who didn't hear the radio show and don't know this story so well, the reason why he was killing the prime minister was because of the peace treaty. He saw it as a violation of Jewish law, basically. DAN EPHRON: Right. So the Oslo peace deals called for Israel to withdraw from parts of the West Bank. And these were staged peace deals, so there was a process where, at the end of the process, certainly the Palestinians hoped they would get a state of their own in all or most of the West Bank and Gaza. For religious Jews or rightwing religious Jews, for many of them anyway, this was really a betrayal of Judaism, because that land, that land certainly in the West Bank and the West Bank and Gaza, to many Jews, is land that God promised to the Jews; it's the Jewish birthright. And Amir was one of them. He saw what Rabin was doing as a betrayal of Israel and a betrayal of Judaism. IRA GLASS: So Nancy, I should say the two of you are married, and you see Dan writing this book. At what point did you think this could be a radio story as well? NANCY UPDIKE: All of the documentation that Dan – I call him Danny – that Danny found, just voluminous – documents and video and diaries. But yeah, some of it was video, and video of key moments. There's a video of the assassination. There's a r… truncated (37,650 more characters in archive)