‘They’re blanks!’
Who Murdered Yitzhak Rabin?
Barry Chamish
Brookline Books, PO Box 1046, Cambridge, MA 02238, USA, $15.95
This is an interesting and important book. To its content I will return. But who is the author? Chamish is one of those names you cannot avoid if you potter around in the American conspiracy sections of the Internet; and bits of this book’s thesis have been posted here there and everywhere in the last few years. This is Chamish’s account of himself:
‘Israeli journalist Barry Chamish is the most outspoken and document-laden of the dozens of Rabin murder “conspiracy theorists”. The Canadian-born Chamish moved to Israel in 1975, got an MA at Hebrew University and in ’82 fought in the Lebanese War. Following the critical success of his book, The Fall of Israel, a stinging exposé of Israeli political corruption, Chamish established a newsletter, Inside Israel. Over time, he discovered the reason for the criminality of the Israeli political system; it had been co-opted at the top by elements of the New World Order, especially the Council on Foreign Relations.’
‘New World Order’ and ‘Council on Foreign Relations’? Yes, Chamish is an anti-New World Order Zionist. Is the picture becoming clearer?
Extracts from Chamish’s version of the New World Order conspiracy theory as it applies to Israel can be read elsewhere. They are not terribly original: he sounds a bit like any other incompetent who has acquired a garbled version of the Round Table-CFR-RIIA narrative. It is only his application of this to the history of the Middle East which is original. In a recent short version of this on the Net, having run through the Round Table-CFR conspiracy to hand Israel over to the Arabs he continued:
The first step was the corruption of the IDF [Israeli Defence Force]. Ben Gurion was ordered to advance his weakest officers and prepare them for public service. He realised the long term plan and as usual, compromised. Thus utterly inappropriate officers like the unabashed antiquities thief Moshe Dayan and Yitzhak Rabin………. rose to the highest military and political ranks and once there, appointed the same kind of weaklings to further high posts. These men owed their power to the CFR, which continued to finance and groom their rising careers’ (emphases added).(1)
And there I was thinking Moshe Dyan was an Israeli war hero and national icon!
The official version of the murder of Rabin is that he was murdered for making concessions to the Palestinians. On the evidence presented by Chamish this is about as accurate as saying that JFK was murdered by Oswald working for the KGB. Chamish shows in some detail that the Rabin killing was a variation on the Sirhan Sirhan attack on Robert Kennedy. Yes, Rabin’s ‘assassin’ was firing at him at close range; but he didn’t fire the fatal shots. Chamish shows that the ‘assassination’ was meant to be a phoney. That is, the assassin thought he was killing Rabin but his gun was actually loaded with blanks. When he began firing Rabin’s security people began shouting, ‘they’re blanks’.
This was a stunt mounted by a section of the Israeli security forces which had created and was running, an extreme, anti-Arab, anti-peace process ‘pseudo gang’ which had staged a number of well-publicised anti-Rabin demos in the run-up to the shooting. One of the dupes who joined this pseudo gang was persuaded to ‘shoot’ Rabin in an attempt to discredit the anti-peace process forces. (Chamish supports the anti-peace process wing of Israeli politics.)
All this is established; proven to all intents and purposes. The book describes how Chamish found this out; how the cover-up was mounted; and how, slowly, it is being broken down. En route he portrays Israeli politics as at least as corrupt and at least as spook-ridden as that of the United States: security forces out of control; a judicial system which can be bought or bent; a political system afraid to confront the reality of the state of which they are nominally in charge.(2)
Knowing nothing about Israeli politics, I found some of this difficult to follow – lots of new names of people and parties – and Chamish’s cartoon-like conspiracy theory about the CFR/Round Table does not give me a lot of confidence in his judgements. Nonetheless, in the key areas of the thesis, the role of the Israeli security service in staging the phoney assassination, the subsequent cover-up and bogus inquiry, I think he makes his case.
What is not clear is what happened after the phoney assassination attempt – and why. Chamish shows – I think – that Rabin was pushed, unhurt, into his car, driven off to arrive with gunshot wounds at a hospital. Chamish argues that he must have been shot in the car and in the last paragraph he identifies the assassin – a first, I think, in assassination literature.
On his account someone hi-jacked the phoney assassination. But why this was done and by whom, he doesn’t know.
Notes
- From ‘The Israeli Army can’t win’ by Barry Chamish, distributed on the Konformist, 22 November, 2000.
- Come to think of it that does also sort of describe Britain.