Killing a King: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel - Softcover

Dan Ephron

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393353249 ISBN 13: 9780393353242

Publisher: WW Norton & Co, 2016

Synopsis

The assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin remains the single most consequential event in Israel's recent history, and one that fundamentally altered the trajectory for both Israel and the Palestinians. Killing a King relates the parallel stories of Rabin and his stalker, Yigal Amir, over the two years leading up to the assassination, as one of them planned political deals he hoped would lead to peace, and the other plotted murder. Dan Ephron, who reported from the Middle East for much of the past two decades, covered both the rally where Rabin was killed and the subsequent murder trial. He describes how Rabin, a former general who led the army in the Six-Day War of 1967, embraced his nemesis, Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat, and set about trying to resolve the twentieth century's most vexing conflict. He recounts in agonizing detail how extremists on both sides undermined the peace process with ghastly violence. And he reconstructs the relentless scheming of Amir, a twenty-five-year-old law student and Jewish extremist who believed that Rabin's peace effort amounted to a betrayal of Israel and the Jewish people. As Amir stalked Rabin over many months, the agency charged with safeguarding the Israeli leader missed key clues, overlooked intelligence reports, and then failed to protect him at the critical moment, exactly twenty years ago. It was the biggest security blunder in the agency's history. Through the prism of the assassination, much about Israel today comes into focus, from the paralysis in peacemaking to the fraught relationship between current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Barack Obama. Based on Israeli police reports, interviews, confessions, and the cooperation of both Rabin's and Amir's families, Killing a King is a tightly coiled narrative that reaches an inevitable, shattering conclusion. One can't help but wonder what Israel would look like today had Rabin lived.

About this title

Review:

"Stunning...a chilling reminder that sometimes an assassin's bullet really can alter the course of history. By unearthing previously confidential police and court records, Ephron gives us the definitive account of a fatal turning point for Israel. Killing a King is thorough, even-handed, and absolutely authoritative."

-- Kai Bird, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, and author of The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames

"The killing of Yitzhak Rabin by a Jewish fanatic helped derail the promising but fragile Middle East peace process and plunged Israelis and Palestinians into a nightmarish era of political violence and recrimination that haunts them still. In Killing a King Ephron digs up important details that give new understanding to those terrible events and their enduring impact. His authoritative account is both a sharply etched political thriller and a meditation on all that has gone wrong in the Promised Land."

-- Glenn Frankel, former Jerusalem bureau chief for the Washington Post and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting

"With remarkable reporting, Dan Ephron has written an epic story, honestly and skillfully. Killing a King is not just about Israel's past. It's also an important read for anyone who wishes to truly understand the country's disturbing present and unsettling future."

--Etgar Keret, author of The Seven Good Years: A Memoir

"Exceptional....an electrifying political narrative twinned with an old-fashioned crime story--of the sort that ought to be taught in journalism schools for its restraint, pacing and expert creation of suspense....The book is a Greek tragedy told in split screen, a frame-for-frame chronicle of a deplorable death foretold."

-- The New York Times

"...enthralling...One of the strengths of Ephron's book is its ability to shed light, in almost a thriller-like style, on the two parallel existences of Rabin and the people around him on the one hand and the assassin and his collaborators on the other...[Killing a King] documents this tragic sequence of events vividly."

--The Royal Institute of International Affairs

"a riveting new book" -- The Guardian "vividly written and sharply insightful"

--Literary Review

"...compelling..."

--Jewish News

"...a narrative that is carefully reported, clearly presented and gripping."

--The Washington Post, Notable Nonfiction of 2015

About the Author:

An award-winning writer, Dan Ephron has served as the Jerusalem bureau chief for Newsweek and the Daily Beast and now lives in New York City.

About this edition

• Publisher: WW Norton & Co
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0393353249
• ISBN 13: 9780393353242
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304