Adventures in Correspondentland Read Online Free PDF Page B

the frenzied aftermath, given the fury aroused by the peace process, but unthinkable just a few seconds earlier.
    By now, our Jerusalem bureau had been fully mobilised, and, as ever in these circumstances, the BBC newsdesk at base bolstered its numbers with fly-ins from London. By happy chance, I was fully sober and, in the days before mobile phones were standard issue, close to an old-fashioned landline. It helped, too, that more senior colleagues of Nokia ranking were too drunk to notice their phones were ringing and vibrating, then ringing and vibrating again. Hard though it is to recall in this age of hyper-connectivity, it was possible back then as a journalist to be spectacularly out of the loop, and to remain so for many hours. As a result, I suddenly found myself leapfrogging others on the call list who simply could not be raised, such was the rush to get anyone on a plane to the Middle East who could wield a microphone.
    Violent deaths of beloved leaders always resonate in the national imagination, inviting not only mass mourning but also mass hysteria. Yet as soon as we touched down at Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv, it became immediately clear that there was something very solid about the emotional response. It was almost as if the mourners themselves were aware that Rabin, the cranky chain-smoker, would have frowned upon any sentimental excess.
    By far the biggest vigils were held outside Rabin’s home, and at the Kings of Israel Square in Tel Aviv, where his final peace rally had been held. But all across Jewish Jerusalem, Israelis sat in small huddles, young people especially, clutching peace candles, praying and intoning psalms so quietly that our intruding microphones struggled to register any sound. The lines outside the Knesset, where Rabin’s body lay in rest in a simple coffin drapedwith the Israeli flag, stretched for miles down a road lined with Cyprus trees and pines, and within 36 hours a million Israelis had filed solemnly past. When his remains were borne on a military command vehicle through the streets to the burial site, again tens of thousands stood weeping.
    Breaking with the Jewish tradition of burial before sundown the day after death, the funeral had been pushed back until Monday so that international leaders could make the journey to Jerusalem, and not since the funeral of the Japanese emperor Hirohito had so many gathered in one place. Heading a delegation that included two former presidents, Jimmy Carter and George Herbert Walker Bush, and 40 members of Congress, Bill Clinton traced a line back to the assassinations of Lincoln, the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King, who in Memphis also appeared to have a rendezvous with death. He characterised Rabin as a ‘martyr for peace’.
    For once, the American president was completely upstaged by Arab leaders, who were making their first visit to Jerusalem since it had been conquered by Israeli forces in 1967. King Hussein of Jordan, wearing his red-and-white-checked headdress and regularly wiping away tears, called Rabin a ‘friend’ and ‘brother’, and sighed, ‘You lived as a soldier. You died as a soldier for peace.’ The Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, who had shunned Israel since taking office, was less generous, but prepared still to don a blue baseball cap handed to him by Israeli officials when Rabin was laid to rest, in deference to the Jewish tradition of covering the scalp at religious ceremonies.
    The emotional punch, meanwhile, came from Rabin’s 17-year-old granddaughter, Noa Ben-Artzi, whose freckled beauty and fierce determination that this solemn national occasion shouldalso have the character of a more intimate family farewell made her its unlikely star. ‘Forgive me, for I do not want to talk about peace,’ she said. ‘I want to talk about my grandfather.’
    Alas, everyone else did want to talk about peace, and the possibility that Yigal Amir had succeeded in his