Two years later, the Rabin plot thickens

Two years after an Israeli named Yigal Amir stepped out of the shadows by the public telephones beneath Tel Aviv city hall and fired twice from point-blank range into the unprotected back of his own prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, the conspiracy theorists are having a field day. No matter that the ballistics tests confirmed which gun had fired the fatal bullets, from what angle, at what proximity. No matter that the murderer confessed - that he insisted, drowning out his defence counsel, that he was proud of what he had done, and would have no hesitation in doing it again. No matter that he was seen pulling the trigger by dozens of eyewitnesses standing mere metres away, or that the killing was caught by an amateur cameraman filming from just above the crime scene.

One gentleman gives lectures wherever they'll have him insisting that it was another gunman, not the self-confessed assassin, Amir, who carried out the murder - that while Amir was shooting blanks from the rear, the lethal fire hit Mr Rabin from the front.

Another has written a book which, obscenely, has it that Shimon Peres - the architect of the peace process with the Palestinians, who was Mr Rabin's political rival for many years and who took over as prime minister after the assassination - colluded in the killing: that Israel's Shin Bet domestic intelligence service knew in advance of Amir's plans, that it decided to switch Amir's live bullets for blanks and let him fail in his assassination bid, but that Mr Peres, in partnership with a top-ranking Shin Bet officer, had the original bullets restored to the gun.

Still another has made a film which, while casting little doubt on Amir's role, argues that the killer acted less out of opposition to Mr Rabin's policy of trading West Bank land for peace with the Palestinians than out of a desire to impress a trio of young women who were the objects of his unrequited affections.

It comes as no surprise that some of the most active conspiracy theorists hail from the far-right of the Israeli political spectrum, the very camp that spawned Amir and that led the poisonous opposition to Mr Rabin. It is no surprise either that the first daily newspaper to give unsceptical prominence to the outrageous notion of Mr Peres colluding in the assassination was Hatzofeh, the mouthpiece of Israel's National Religious Party. The NRP is the political grouping most closely associated with the settlers, whose dream of maintaining Israeli rule throughout the West Bank and Gaza Strip was demolished by the Israeli troop withdrawals of the Rabin-led Oslo peace accords.

And yet there is one aspect common to some of the conspiracy theories that does merit serious attention and investigation: the part played by a close acquaintance of Amir's, a mysterious figure named Avishai Raviv.

Mr Raviv, it now appears certain, was a paid agent of the Shin Bet, codenamed "Champagne" - one of a network of informers planted in right-wing circles by the intelligence agency, which was fearful of the rise in extremist right-wing opposition to Mr Rabin's peace policies with the Palestinians.

Mr Raviv disappeared soon after the assassination, but he recently, briefly, resurfaced. And a newspaper article and a documentary in which he featured appear to confirm that Mr Raviv was charged by the Shin Bet with setting up a fake extremist right-wing organisation, which was designed to attract the most volatile activists like Amir, to enable the intelligence services to keep tabs on them.

Mr Raviv was questioned, in the wake of the killing, by a commission of inquiry headed by Meir Shamgar, the former president of Israel's Supreme Court, which investigated the security failures that enabled Amir to carry out his mission. But although much of the commission's proceedings and findings were eventually made public, those sections relating to Mr Raviv were not.

The assassin's mother, Geula Amir, argued in a US magazine article earlier this year that Mr Raviv goaded her son into killing Mr Rabin - that he was, in short, an agent provocateur. Some of the conspiracy theorists support this claim, asserting that Mr Raviv, acting on Shin Bet orders, deliberately incited Amir to murder, and that the plan, approved by Mr Rabin himself, was to substitute blanks for live bullets, allow Amir to shoot fruitlessly at his target, and then be able to tarnish the entire right-wing opposition as murderers-in-waiting.

According to some theories, Amir, aware of what was going on, replaced his original live bullets and had the last, murderous laugh. According to others, Mr Raviv, or another agent in the chain, betrayed his handlers, and neglected to insert the blanks.

The most generally accepted explanation of Mr Raviv's role is that, while he was closely monitoring Amir, he failed to recognise that here was a potential assassin, and thus failed to warn his superiors of the tragedy that was to unfold on the night of November 4th, 1995. But Mr Raviv comes from a diverse personal background - he grew up in a left-wing household, but in his teens was propagandising for the racist Rabbi Meir Kahane - diverse enough to allow for virtually any possibility. And his mysterious presence is giving the crucial, if faint, whiff of plausibility to some of the conspiracy theories surrounding the assassination.

Since Mr Raviv, even on his brief recent re-emergence, remained extremely secretive about his precise activities, the only way to dispel the mystery would be for the Shamgar commission of inquiry to publish its findings on "Champagne". Conspiracy theorists thrive amid dark rumours of cover-ups and of information being suppressed by higher authorities. Two years on, the continuing uncertainty over what exactly Avishai Raviv was up to in the months, weeks and days before Yigal Amir shot Yitzhak Rabin is affording them plenty of scope.

David Horovitz is the managing editor of the Jerusalem Report