Adventures in Correspondentland Read Online Free PDF

even be aired. A giant red banner had just appeared on the bottom of the television screen in our hotel room, pulsating with the words ‘BREAKING NEWS’.
    Moments later, America’s top official in Iraq, ‘the American Viceroy’ L. Paul Bremer, stepped beaming before the cameras (prematurely, the Bush White House would later complain) to deliver a six-word announcement: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, we gothim!’ All that night, and well into the next week, the bulletins would be dominated by the extraordinary sight of a one-time dictator with a ragged grey beard having a swab of DNA taken by a US military doctor wearing white rubber gloves and wielding a wooden spatula. Saddam Hussein had been captured, and the headlines belonged to another corner of Correspondentland.

Even for a novice, it was easy to see how the details of Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination would lend themselves to immediate legend and nourish the belief that his death was somehow preordained. On that balmy November night in 1995, the Israeli prime minister had attended a peace rally in front of the City Hall in Tel Aviv, where 100,000 people had gathered in placid rebuttal to the Jewish nationalists and extreme right-wing Zionists who in the weeks before had held a string of protests at which they brandished placards depicting Rabin wearing an Arab headdress and, worse still, a Nazi uniform.
    â€˜I have always believed that the majority of people want peace and are ready to take the chance for peace,’ said the former general, who two years earlier had shaken the hand of the Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, on the South Lawn of the White House.
    As they stood together on stage, looking out over the largest rally that Tel Aviv had witnessed for more than a decade, the Israeli foreign minister Shimon Peres raised the possibility of an assassin lurking in the crowd. Ever the soldier, Rabin did not seem perturbed. Nor did his wife, Leah, who was asked by a radio reporter if her husband had taken the precaution of wearing abullet-proof vest. ‘Have you gone crazy?’ she scoffed. ‘What are we – in Africa?’
    The rally reached its climax with Rabin mumbling his way through an unfamiliar peace song, the words and music of which had been handed to him beforehand by a diligent aide. Then, as he got down from the stage and walked towards his prime-ministerial limousine, he spoke briefly to a radio reporter, not knowing that this would become his valedictory interview: ‘I always believed that the majority of the people are against violence.’
    Moments later, a young assassin stepped forward and fired four times from a Beretta semi-automatic pistol. By the time the 73-year-old reached the hospital, the doctors could not detect any blood pressure or heart beat. Still inside his jacket pocket was the music of the peace song, now spattered with his blood.
    When work called late that Saturday night, I did not even bother asking who was the assassin. Here, I repeated the same mistake as Rabin’s Shin Bet bodyguards, who had not been prepared psychologically for anyone other than an Arab gunman carrying out the killing. Yet the murderer was a 25-year-old student named Yigal Amir, a former Israeli soldier who lived with his strictly Orthodox parents and claimed to be acting ‘on God’s orders’.
    Later, the Israeli police discovered that he had been ejected from a Rabin rally in September for screaming about the abandonment of over a hundred thousand West Bank settlers. They found on his bookshelf at home a copy of The Day of the Jackal . Proudly, Amir told police that he had tried on two previous occasions to get close enough to the prime minister to kill him, and now, unlike Frederick Forsyth’s failed assassin, he had finally achieved his goal. Israel’s favourite son, the great hero of the Six Day War,had been slain by a fellow Jew – an act of fratricide immediately comprehensible in