Most recent “theories” of conspiracists in Israel have focused on the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin by Yigal Amir. The “theorists” use precisely the same “tools of analysis” as those used by their cousins overseas, mainly the non sequitur. While a number of copycats have emerged, the leading conspiracist about the Rabin murder is the Canadian-born Israeli Barry Chamish, who insists that Amir fired blanks at Rabin, serving as a “patsy” in a plot on the part of the Israeli secret service and intelligence agencies to murder Rabin at the behest of Shimon Peres. At this writing, Chamish’s website features a cartoon of Shimon Peres with blood on his hands and dripping from his mouth, and banner headlines proclaiming him a murderer.
While he himself is not a Holocaust denier, his articles appear on neo-Nazi and Holocaust revisionist websites including the Australia-based Adelaide Institute, whose home page last month wished readers “Merry Christmas from Adolf Hitler.” The Adelaide Institute website carries more than 40 articles and citations from Chamish.
Before taking on the Rabin assassination, most of Chamish’s “theories” on politics involved supposed conspiracies involving the Council on Foreign Relations or CFR (a bipartisan foreign policy debating society with offices in New York and Washington that publishes the journal Foreign Affairs). Chamish claims that most Israeli leaders are secret agents of the CFR, and that the CFR itself blew up the World Trade Center from the inside. Because of Daniel Pipes’s work against conspiracism, Chamish claims Pipes is an “agent” of the CFR, a group that in fact has no agents. Because I myself have dismissed Chamish’s “theories” as rubbish, Chamish has published a claim that I am an “agent” of the Federal Reserve Bank (which also has no “agents”), sent to Israel to disrupt the economy.
Chamish, who’s spent years “documenting” the presence of UFOs on earth, sees conspiracies almost everywhere. He believes that most Israeli politicians are secret worshipers of the 17th century false messiah Shabbtai Zvi; that Shimon Peres engineered the crash of the plane flown by John Kennedy Jr.; that the accidental drowning of former Israeli cabinet minister Rafael Eitan was a “hit” ordered by Ariel Sharon; that the singer Ofra Haza was infected with AIDS on the orders of Shimon Peres, who, Chamish implies, was Haza’s lover. He’s also claiming that Ariel Sharon’s recent strokes were – you guessed it – part of a conspiracy.
Shortly after Rabin was assassinated, Chamish started spinning theories about the murder. Over time, segments of the Israeli public, especially among the anti-Oslo Right, were taken in by these claims. As a result, a number of mainstream journalists, notably Tom Segev, have called for the release of all records and materials related to the assassination, if for no other reason than to silence the conspiracists. Some of the records, especially minute details about Rabin’s injuries and medical condition, have been withheld to date, mainly out of respect to Rabin.
All the facts concerning the assassination were weighed carefully by an Israeli state commission of inquiry headd by retired chief justice Meir Shamgar, a non-partisan and extraordinarily distinguished jurist. After carefully reviewing the evidence, including the charges raised by the conspiracists, the commission saw no evidence of any conspiracy, dismissed the innuendos and “theories” of the conspiracists, and pointed the finger at Yigal Amir alone.
In contrast, Israeli conspiracists, obsessed with proving that some manner of conspiracy was behind the Rabin assassination, have never produced a single shred of real evidence to back their arguments. Instead, their investigations consist of combing through public records, photos, and reports about the assassination and asking questions about seeming inconsistencies. The problem is that asking a question about a “seeming inconsistency” is not the same thing as producing evidence to back a conspiracy theory, and all such seeming inconsistencies were considered and dismissed by the Shamgar Commission.