Professor Joseph Klausner remembers everything about that day. “I will never forget it until my last breath,” he tells me in his office on the seventh floor of Ichilov, Tel Aviv's largest hospital. The day the doctor will never forget is November 4, 1995. Klausner—a world-renowned internist and oncologist—was then the head of surgery at the hospital. At 10:02 p.m., he was at home when he received a call. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin had arrived at the hospital: he had been shot and was in serious condition, his deputy, Motti Gutman, told him. "It usually took me 35 minutes to get to the hospital by car, but that evening it took me 14. When I arrived, everyone was already in the operating room. It was full of the hospital's best doctors. They had opened his chest and abdomen to try to control his blood pressure. They thought he would make it, but I knew immediately that it was over. I was the head of surgery, so it was up to me to decide. I asked Gutman to stop, but he didn't want to, and neither did the others. They were hoping for a miracle. I told him again to stop, and as soon as they turned off the machines, it was clear to everyone that Rabin was already dead." It was 11:02 p.m., eighty minutes after the shooting. “I saw surgeons throwing themselves to the ground, crying, collapsing with their heads in their hands. It's not uncommon to witness tragedies in the operating room, but I've never seen anything like this.”
Dr. Klausner sighs and looks up at the sky: he doesn't like journalists, but he makes an exception with me because he says he loves Italy. When he looks down again, his eyes fill with tears. "I'm crying now because I couldn't then. It was up to me to take control of the situation. That day,“ he whispers softly, ”I realized that the death I was certifying would have a huge impact on the country. What I couldn't know was how long that impact would last, or how deep it would be”.
The end is a beginning
Thirty years have passed since Yigal Amir, a 25-year-old law student, supporter of Meir Kahane’s far-right Kach party—already outlawed for its racist and violent ideas—and supporter of the settler movement, changed the course of history in Israel and the Middle East with three shots from a Beretta. Two bullets hit Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in the back— killing the man behind the Oslo Accords and the handshake with Yasser Arafat, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, and a former general who chose the path of peace.
Rabin had just finished speaking in Tel Aviv at what was then called Kings of Israel Square during a large gathering of the “Peace Front.” With Rabin, that day also marked the end of the dream for a different Israel—one willing to make painful compromises to reach an agreement with the Palestinians. His torch was passed to the foreign minister—also a Nobel Peace Prize winner—Shimon Peres, but his government lasted only six months. In the May 1996 elections, a young, ambitious leader led the right to a narrow victory: his name was Benjamin Netanyahu, and that victory began an era that would see him become the longest-serving prime minister in the country's history.
The anniversary Israel is about to mark is unlike any other. It comes worn out and scarred from three years of internal conflicts: first, debating the pros and cons of judicial reform, then the shock of October 7 and the Gaza war. But most of all, it stands isolated, on trial for the atrocities carried out in Gaza in response to the Hamas attack. A nation that can no longer see ‘the other,’ let alone find common ground with them, as Rabin once did.
We have no more words
“It hurts to say it, but that day Yigal Amir decided the history of an entire country,” says David Grossman, the last remaining member of a generation of literary giants who, in different ways, tied their destinies to Rabin's dream—he, along with Amos Oz and Abraham Yehoshua, who passed away a few years ago.
Grossman, like Dr. Klausner, remembers everything about that evening. When he talks about it, like the doctor, he doesn't just recount it. He relives it. "I was in the square with tens of thousands of people. I left before the end because I didn't want to get stuck in traffic on my way back to Jerusalem. I turned on the radio in my car. Shortly afterward, they said there had been shots, that someone had been shot. I was working at the radio station at the time. From the tone of my colleagues, I immediately understood that something serious had happened: the way they were talking was strange, too strange. I had just entered my house when the announcement came: Rabin was dead. I remember that I started crying. I cry very rarely, but that evening I cried. And I wasn't the only one: the house was filled with people. Everyone was crying.“
Hundreds of thousands of Israelis were in tears: those who were in the square, like Grossman, and others who had not gone but understood that this death changed everything: ”The assassination created a divided world: right and left. Religious and secular," writes American journalist Dan Ephron in Killing a King, his book dedicated to Rabin's death. The rift has never been repaired since then.
In what is now called Rabin Square, the wound still bleeds. The huge esplanade in the heart of Tel Aviv is scarred by the construction of the light rail, which has been ongoing on for years. But if you walk past it and cross the parking lot where Amir, the assassin, waited undisturbed for 40 minutes four meters from the prime minister's car— “4 by 40” is the code for the most notorious mistake that Shin Bet, Israel's internal security service, has been teaching its agents ever since – you are confronted with images of that evening, played on a loop on a screen in front of Rabin's bust. Noa singing, Rabin speaking, the applause: then the confusion, the tears, and the candles. “In this place, Yitzhak Rabin was killed in the battle for peace,” reads the plaque. A few meters away, at the exact spot where Amir fired, there is an expanse of black stones surrounded by Israeli flags and a wall covered with graffiti and photographs: the handshake between Rabin and Arafat, Clinton's smile, the Nobel Peace Prize— images of a future that became the past before it even became the present.
Yigal Amir did not belong to any party, but he was close to the followers of Kach, who for months had been accusing the prime minister of treason for seeking agreement with the Palestinians. On October 6, 1995, the right wing organized a large protest in Jerusalem. On that occasion, the prime minister's car—he was not inside—was attacked by the crowd, who tore the emblem off the armored Cadillac before the driver managed to drive away. “If we've come this far, we can get to Rabin,” said a 19-year-old Kach supporter, showing the logo on television. His name was Itamar Ben Gvir, and today he is the minister of Internal Security in Netanyahu's government. A man who never condemned Rabin's assassination, instead rather repeatedly defended those who had called for it, even going so far as to request the release of Amir, who is serving a life sentence. “This is one of the reasons why so many of us struggle to find the words,” Grossman concludes, heartbroken.
Gasoline on the fire
In Israel, everyone remembers where they were on the evening of November 4, 1995. “In a small street leading to the square, with my son on my shoulders,” replies Meron Rapoport, now editor-in-chief of the progressive website Local Call, without hesitation. “I wanted to go to the rally, but not in the chaos. At one point, I went to my parents' house, which was nearby. There, I heard the news on the radio: I left the child and ran to work.” There is one detail that Rapoport cannot forget: "I was working at Yedioth Ahronoth. I remember the editor saying that morning that we didn't have any big news in the paper. I replied, ‘Don't worry, someone will be killed at the rally tonight’. I never thought it would be Rabin. But the atmosphere was very tense, it was clear that the tension would explode."
Adding fuel to the fire was the opposition leader and head of the Likud party, 46-year-old Netanyahu: on the evening of the attack on the Cadillac, he spoke at a rally, once again condemning the Oslo Accords: “Death to Rabin,” “We will drive him out with fire and blood,” shouted the crowd. The future prime minister did not bat an eyelid, did nothing to calm the spirits. Because of this, when Rabin was killed, no one thought Netanyahu could survive politically. The right, the entire right, was in the dock. Consensus for peace seemed impossible to undermine. “I want to believe that we will wake up from this nightmare to a better world,” said his widow, Leah, a week after her husband's death. “There is no alternative to a compromise between Jews and Arabs,” wrote Amos Oz at the same time.
What if...
They were both wrong: the suicide attacks carried out by Hamas and Islamic Jihad in the following weeks changed everything. In May, Netanyahu won the elections. “The seeds of violence were already there— says the filmaker Amos Gitai, who is dedicating a show to Rabin tonight in Tel Aviv, a stage adaptation of the 24 hours leading up to the assassination —when Rabin was elected, there was great euphoria, but at the same time, there were terrorist attacks all over the coutry. Hamas and the Jihad placed bombs in buses 50 meters from here, in the heart of Tel Aviv: and these dialectics weakened Rabin's position. Hamas, Fatah, Islamic Jihad: they all bear responsibility for Rabin's killing. They didn't kill him physically, but they contributed to the weakening of his position”.
“Still, the chance for peace until then, was real,” explains former minister Yossi Beilin, the enfant prodige of the Rabin government, the architect of Oslo, the man who, together with Abu Mazen, had developed a road map that addressed all the outstanding issues. “I had an appointment with Rabin to present the plan to him. Perhaps it would not have been the definitive solution, but I am certain it would have been the basis for the definitive solution,” he tells us today. “Rabin's death was the worst thing that could have happened to Israel. It changed history forever, leaving us here wondering what would have been if...”.
At Rabin Square today, that “if” feels real, it is a tangible reality: it takes less than ten minutes to reach Hostage Square from here, the site of Israel's most recent nightmare on October 7, 2023: 1,200 dead, 251 kidnapped. This was followed by the war in Gaza, which resulted in 67,000 deaths. Would we have reached that point anyway if someone had stopped Yigal Amir thirty years ago? Today more than ever, Israel is asking itself that question.
(As published on Il Venerdì di Repubblica on october 31st 2025)
