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As a public service, IMW views the following article from The Jerusalem Report, November 9, 1998, as in the interest of visitors to our web site. |
Three years after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, Yossi Klein Halevi grapples with the role of Avishai Raviv, one of its most controversial players.
The benches in the marble and white-stone courtroom in Jerusalem's Supreme Court building are filled with the hostile and the curious, gathered to glimpse the resurfacing of one of Israel's most elusive men. Avishai Raviv, 32-year-old former far-right thug and Shin Bet agent, code-named "Champagne," is being forced out of seclusion for the first time in two years, for a court hearing to determine whether he should be tried for alleged crimes committed while working undercover for the Shin Bet internal security service. Though he'd been a central figure in media reports of violent right-wing demonstrations, he has appeared publicly only once since the Rabin assassination three years ago, as a witness at the complicity trial of Haggai Amir, brother of Rabin assassin, Yigal Amir.
The hearing on this recent fall morning has been summoned by two right-wing activists who want a reluctant state prosecutor to try Raviv for perjury - for denying under oath at Haggai Amir's trial that he'd been a Shin Bet agent. Though Ami Ayalon, head of the Shin Bet, says he no longer opposes indicting Raviv, the State's Attorney's Office remains hesitant, saying it isn't yet sure it has a sustainable case. Right-wing activists, who accuse the prosecutor of a cover-up, counter that there is a long list of alleged offenses, besides perjury, on which Raviv could easily be tried - including violence against Arabs and Jews, incitement to murder Rabin and failure to report Yigal Amir's murderous plan to his own handlers.
The right-wingers hounding Raviv hope that a trial will expose what they believe to be the real, hidden scandal: that Raviv was an agent provocateur, whose purpose wasn't so much to gather intelligence on extremists as to incite violence that would blacken the credibility of the entire right and enhance electoral support for the left.
Some on the left reply that the right's real agenda is to exonerate itself for the long months of anti-Rabin incitement preceding the assassination by blaming that campaign largely on Raviv.
Raviv enters the courtroom, alongside his lawyer. He is tall and well built, with a handsome, empty face: close-cropped hair and a thick, defiant jaw, mouth slightly open as if ready for an argument.
He and his lawyer sit next to me on a front-row bench. Raviv refuses to answer my questions, staring straight ahead.
The three-judge panel, headed by Supreme Court president Aharon Barak, is seated. "You must be a pretty important guy if Barak himself is hearing your case," I say to Raviv. He responds with a big grin, apparently pleased that I've grasped who Avishai Raviv really is. In that grin is the essence of Raviv's story: the bully who wanted to be somebody.
Barak quickly dispenses with the hearing: He accepts the prosecutor's request for an additional few months to determine whether or not to try Raviv. "Another great day for Israeli justice," says one right-wing activist with a bitter, knowing smile.
WHATEVER THE TRUTH ABOUT Avishai Raviv - whether he was simply an agent who wasn't properly controlled, in the words of the Shamgar Commission which investigated the Rabin assassination, or whether he was the "biggest agent provocateur in the history of Israel," as Likud deputy minister Michael Eitan insists - the "Raviv affair" is bizarre even by Israeli standards.
Essentially two main questions about Raviv await convincing answers. The first is whether he crossed the line from legitimate undercover agent to political provocateur: whether the dozens of acts of violence which he inspired were supported, even encouraged by the Shin Bet and the Labor government which had controlled it. The second concerns Raviv's connection to Yigal Amir: whether he incited Amir to murder, whether he knew of Amir's intention to kill Rabin and withheld that information from the Shin Bet - or whether, as right-wing conspiracy theorists believe, Raviv was somehow involved in the assassination itself, with the active approval of his handlers.
Raviv was recruited by the Shin Bet in December 1987, apparently enticed by a combination of flattery and money and the glamor of life as a secret agent. He was not a plant but a genuine, if ideologically primitive, right-wing militant. The child of secular Labor party supporters in the town of Holon, near Tel Aviv, he joined the far-right Kach movement at age 14, after hearing a neighborhood talk by its late leader, Rabbi Meir Kahane. Later he drifted through right-wing groups like the short-lived Tehiyah political party and the fringe Temple Mount Faithful. "He was obsessed with Jewish traitors," recalls former Tehiyah activist Yisrael Medad. "Everyone was a traitor, even people on the right who didn't agree with everything he said."
Those who know him describe him as shrewd but not smart, a loner with a slight stutter and no charisma, restless and childish and brutal. "He has the personality of a skinhead," says Shaya Rothberg, who was his Talmud study partner for several months in the yeshivah at Bar-Ilan University, where Raviv was apparently dispatched by the Shin Bet. "He loves violence. He can't concentrate on an argument and is incapable of intellectual subtlety.You'd have to be a total imbecile to choose Raviv as a secret agent."
In a recent interview with Yediot Aharonot, Hezi Kalo, who headed the "Jewish division" of the Shin Bet and was Raviv's supervisor, called Raviv a valuable agent "who provided hundreds of intelligence tips. His warnings prevented violent acts like attacks on Arab property, attempted attacks on Arabs, attacks on mosques, including the Temple Mount, attempts to attack Jewish left-wing leaders and similar things." Kalo conceded that there were some acts Raviv committed that "we couldn't accept," and said Raviv was repeatedly warned to desist.
In exchange for his tips, Raviv received cash and almost-unlimited immunity. Of 16 files opened against him over the years on charges ranging from assault to conspiracy to commit arson, Raviv was tried on only one count: physically attacking Communist Knesset Member Tamar Gozansky. (He was given a nine-month suspended prison sentence.) Kalo says only a few files were closed expressly on Shin Bet orders, the rest by police on their own initiative.
Raviv's favorite pastime was attacking Arabs in Hebron. According to one of the participants in the rampages, Benny Aharoni, Raviv would gather his few followers - invariably teenagers considered misfits even on the far-right - for what he liked to call "a getting-acquainted tour" and smash windows in Arab homes and beat up Arab storekeepers. One rug merchant was beaten after trying to prevent Raviv's boys from dragging his carpets through the muddy street; an old man was beaten for daring to look a Raviv follower in the eye.
Raviv's other main activity was creating front groups that claimed credit for acts of violence they didn't commit and whose names were affixed to leaflets inciting against Israeli "traitors." Groups like "Sword of David," "Sword of Gideon," "Fascist Zionist Youth" and, most of all, "Eyal" (an acronym for Jewish Fighting Organization), were treated by the media as credible threats, when they were all the creation of Raviv and largely one-man operations. Raviv recruited the handful of teenagers who hung around him for a staged graveyard swearing-in ceremony in mid-1995, complete with blood oaths, which received enormous coverage, creating the erroneous sense of a widespread right-wing terrorist network.
One of Raviv's strangest acts was claiming that he'd held a series of meetings, in the fall of 1995, with leaders of the terrorist Hamas and Islamic Jihad groups in Gaza - "to know the enemy." Those alleged meetings - whose existence was strongly doubted by the Shamgar Commission - were cited by Yasser Arafat as "proof" of his persistent claim that Israeli rightists were behind the Palestinian suicide bombings.Troubling questions also surround the Halhoul incident. On September 7, 1995, a Palestinian in the town of Halhoul near Hebron was murdered. Two of Raviv's front groups, Eyal and Sword of David, immediately claimed responsibility. Government ministers bitterly denounced the settler community. "Whoever thinks that an attack on an innocent Palestinian will stop the [Oslo] process is mistaken," Rabin told his cabinet. Nine days after the killing, police arrested the self-confessed murderers - four Palestinians who'd been surprised by the victim during a robbery.
Reuven Pedatzur, a columnist who specializes in security issues for the daily Ha'aretz, claims that three days after the Halhoul murder, senior Shin Bet officials briefed Rabin's cabinet about the incident. According to Pedatzur, the officials lied -- stating that signs pointed to right-wing Jewish involvement, and citing Eyal as a prime suspect. "The Shin Bet knew for certain that Eyal, which was run by the Shin Bet, didn't commit the murder," wrote Pedatzur in a Ha'aretz column last year. And, Pedatzur insists, the Shin Bet could have told the ministers the truth, that Eyal was not involved, without compromising agent Raviv. By deliberately exposing the right to left-wing political attack over this incident, he concludes, "the Shin Bet apparently crossed the line into dangerous involvement in the political arena."
Carmi Gillon, who headed the Shin Bet at the time, says in response: "I'm forbidden to discuss proceedings of cabinet security meetings."
So: What was the Shin Bet's relationship with Raviv? Was the agency protecting a valued agent, as Kalo's esteem for Raviv implies? Or had his handlers become politicized, and found it convenient to let Raviv go on with his antics, as that alleged false cabinet briefing might suggest?
One problem with the latter theory is that Raviv was recruited in 1987, under a right-wing government, and five years before Rabin and Shimon Peres - the two implicit "villains," whom the right-wing conspiracy theorists accuse of orchestrating his provocations - took power. Another problem is that the Shamgar Commission rejected that scenario, even though it did blame the Shin Bet for inadvertently allowing Raviv to smear the entire right. The commission didn't insist on any firings within the Shin Bet, implicitly accepting the security service's argument that there was no political dimension to their employment of Raviv, and that his value as an agent simply outweighed his liabilities.
Right-wingers like Shaul Yahalom, the minister of transport from the National Religious Party, are now demanding the creation of a new commission of inquiry, claiming that the Shamgar panel didn't seriously investigate the agency's problematic handling of Raviv. "To say that Raviv wasn't properly controlled, and leave it at that, is a joke," says Adir Zik, a DJ and commentator on Arutz Sheva (Channel 7), the settlers' pirate radio station, who has led the campaign to have Raviv put on trial. "We're talking about an agent provocateur who worked for eight years. Where was he that he couldn't be controlled all that time? In Uzbekistan?"
Notes former Raviv handler Kalo: "An agent often operates in a gray area. To infiltrate the extreme right, you need a certain kind of person - a person like Raviv. Even if mistakes were made in running him, 'Champagne' was only a drop in an ocean of [anti-Rabin] incitement."
And then, there is the assassination. Directly or indirectly, Raviv was involved in some of the worst right-wing incitement against Rabin. At mainstream right-wing demonstrations, he would lead his little band of followers in chanting "Death to Rabin." In September 1994, a leaflet, signed by one of Raviv's fictitious front groups, was left on the grave of Hebron mass murderer Baruch Goldstein, and read: "A dictator traitor has arisen in our nation by the name of Yitzhak Rabin... His sentence is death." And it was Raviv who, during a right-wing demonstration in Jerusalem's Zion Square shortly before Rabin's murder, handed a TV correspondent the infamous little poster showing the prime minister in an SS uniform.
(Right-wingers insist Raviv was behind the poster; the Shamgar Commission dismissed that claim, noting that two ultra-Orthodox teenagers without any connection to Raviv were responsible.)
According to Benny Aharoni, Raviv told him directly that Rabin had to be eliminated, "even through a suicide attack." And about two months ago, three young women, all former right-wing activists, testified before the state prosecutor that they'd heard Raviv taunt Amir, "If you were a man, Yigal, you'd kill Rabin."
Raviv and Amir met at Bar-Ilan University, where the two jointly led student demonstrations and weekend solidarity visits to West Bank settlements. According to the Shamgar Commission, "Raviv was connected to Amir more than to any other person in everything related to organizing student demonstrations, organizing weekends in West Bank settlements."
Amir himself described Raviv to his police interrogators as "childish," but "kind-hearted." And though he told them that Raviv was more an ordinary friend than a "soulmate," Amir has clearly retained his affection for him despite his Shin Bet role: Last year, Amir wrote a letter appealing to Benny Aharoni to stop threatening revenge against his former leader, Avishai Raviv.
Still, most observers - even rightists like Adir Zik - dismiss the notion that Raviv influenced Amir's decision to kill Rabin. "Raviv is a thug on an intellectual level of zero," says Alex Lubotzky, an Orthodox MK from the centrist Third Way party. "Amir is a graduate of an elite yeshivah, an intellectual. He didn't need Raviv to tell him what to do."
Yet rightists do want Raviv tried for failing to prevent a crime - allegedly knowing about Amir's plans and not divulging them to his handlers. Just recently, Amir's friend Margalit Har-Shefi was sentenced to nine months in prison for that very offense. The Shamgar Commission indicated that Raviv must have heard "the well-known expressions of Amir about his intention to attack the prime minister, which Amir expressed more than once in his circle of friends." Some rightists place Raviv at the center of wild assassination conspiracy theories. Elements within the Shin Bet, they charge, knew all about Amir's plans -- from Raviv. Those elements, according to the scenario, allowed Amir to proceed, while intending to substitute blanks for the bullets in his gun. The purpose was to stage a fake assassination, using an unwitting Amir, to discredit the right. Perhaps Raviv was supposed to place the blanks in Amir's gun - which is why someone apparently shouted "Blank! Blank!" immediately after the assassination - but the plan went amiss.
According to Haggai Amir, brother Yigal did in fact consider involving Raviv in the assassination. But Haggai, who had heard rumors suspecting Raviv of being a Shin Bet agent, vetoed the idea. And ex-Shin Bet agent Kalo says he is certain that Raviv knew nothing about Amir's plans.
Amir Gilat, a journalist for the Ma'ariv daily, isn't so sure. Minutes after the assassination, recalls Gilat, he received a call from Raviv, who provided him with Yigal Amir's name, age and residence. He says: "No one without inside information knew the identity of the assassin at that point. Raviv knew. I'm wary of conspiracy theories, but there are unaswered questions here."
The growing debate over Avishai Raviv is a battle over history: whether the right, especially the religious right, will continue to be blamed for the incitement that preceded the assassination.
Adir Zik - himself accused of having been among the major inciters for routinely referring in radio broadcasts to Rabin's government as "the government of treason" - readily admits his agenda in trying to bring Raviv and his handlers to trial: "We [religious Zionists] fought and died for this country, and the left tried to de-legitimize us. I want to redeem the good name of religious Zionism."
Counters Yossi Sarid, leader of the left-wing Meretz party: "Through Raviv, the settlers want us to forget Moshe Levinger of Hebron who delivered his own brand of justice against Arabs, [Kahanist] Baruch Marzel and his flock, the [1980s terrorist] Jewish underground and the settlement rabbis who called to resist army orders."
Some on the left have joined the calls for Raviv to be tried, including Labor MK Ofer Pines and Meretz MK Ran Cohen. But Likud MK Gideon Ezra, former deputy head of the Shin Bet in charge of Arab affairs, opposes trying Raviv. "If he was promised immunity, that has to be honored," he says.
Nor does he think Raviv's handlers should be tried: "I don't believe there was a deliberate attempt to blacken the right, but an attempt to get information at any price from an agent who in the end couldn't deliver the goods [on Yigal Amir]. But at the very least, people like Kalo, who failed to prevent the assassination, should sit quietly and not make big pronouncements to the press."
Since the assasination, Raviv has worked as a bouncer in Tel Aviv-area bars. Zik claims that, to this day, 9,500 shekels (over $2,000) is deposited monthly in Raviv's account. (Sources within the Shin Bet say that Raviv was paid no more than a total of 30,000 shekels since 1987.) Meanwhile, he keeps a very low profile: One source who knows Raviv says he fears physical attack from the right.
At the recent Supreme Court hearing, I asked Raviv whether he'd heard a radio broadcast by Zik, who urged him to protect himself from a possible Shin Bet attempt to silence him by recording "everything you know" on a video cassette and entrusting it to a journalist. Raviv's lawyer, Eyal Shomroni-Cohen, answered for him. "What makes you think," he said to me with a small smile, "that we needed Adir Zik to give us that idea?"
It was a stunning admission. For Avishai Raviv - living in fear not only of the former extremist comrades who feel that he betrayed them, but also of the Shin Bet handlers discredited by their association with him - there is, perhaps appropriately, no one left to trust.
IMW is a registered non-profit organization whose major aim is assuring the ethical and fair conduct of the Israeli media.
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