Poster by agent provocateur Avishai Raviv showing Yitzhak Rabin in a Nazi uniform
…the Shin Bet head during the time of Rabin’s assassination, Carmi Gillon, warned on Wednesday that “price-tag ‘incidents’ could lead to assassination attempts on prime ministers in the future.”
Speaking at the Holon Technical Institute, Gillon said: “Today it is called ‘price-tag’ because currently there is no real threat of returning land [to the Palestinians], but this is where the ideals for the next assassin of a prime minister who chooses to return land are formed.”
Yes, he is correct. It is a bad idea to incite hatred.
Carmi Gillon should know. Under his direction, the Shabak paid agent provocateur Avishai Raviv to tar the Right with the brush of violent extremism. Here is a description, short and not so sweet:
Under orders from the Shin Bet Raviv created [the fake right-wing organization] Eyal to perpetrate acts of violence to discredit the Israel right wing. Raviv recruited Yigal Amir, a religious law student from Bar-Ilan University, who fiercely opposed the Oslo Accords.
At one protest, Raviv was filmed with a picture of Rabin in an SS uniform prior to Rabin’s murder. Raviv allegedly knew of Yigal Amir’s plans to assassinate Israel’s prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, based on a controversial classification of handing over “Jewish land” in the category of “din rodef” (“law of the pursuer”). … Uri Dan, a journalist close to Ariel Sharon, wrote that witnesses heard Raviv tell Amir: “Be a man! Kill him already!”
After Rabin was assassinated, the journalist Amnon Abramowitch revealed that Raviv was an agent of the Shabak.
Raviv was brought to trial in 2000 for not preventing Rabin’s assassination. Raviv mounted a successful defense on the grounds that he had just been doing his job and events had spun out of control.
Gillon resigned after the assassination, taking responsibility for the failure to protect Rabin. When asked later what the Shabak’s fatal mistake was, he said,
Yigal Amir is alive today due to a mishap … He should have died that night after firing the first shot, definitely after the second.
I’m sorry to say the security guards did not act in accordance with the lessons we taught them. They failed, because they didn’t shoot him like a dog, like any despicable terrorist. From a security point of view, it was a failure. …
If they would have killed him on the spot, he wouldn’t have become a symbol for the radical right. By becoming a symbol, he pours fuel on the fire, giving energy for the next political murder.
My personal view is that the fatal mistake was made long before Amir fired his shots. The mistake was to in effect create violent extremism in an effort to discredit the very legitimate opposition to Oslo, which — in hindsight — was quite correct.
Would Amir have murdered Rabin if there had been no Avishai Raviv? Who knows?
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