President Shimon Peres’ Office has asked the Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet or Shabak) to investigate a years-old website that says Peres murdered Former Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin.



Mabat, the nightly news program on government-owned Channel One television, ran the story as its second story on Tuesday night.

The Hebrew website in question, yigalamir.com, is owned and operated by David Rutstein of Jerusalem, a website designer who immigrated to Israel from the United States several years ago.

Asked about the Shin Bet investigation, Rutstein told Israel National News, “Apparently what happened is that Channel One discovered my site, which has been up for years, and asked the President’s Office for a response, and then the President’s Office passed it on to the Shabak for investigation.”

Meital Yaslovitz, the President’s spokesperson, told Israel National News, “The information about the site reached the security director of the President’s Residence, and was passed on to the Shabak.”

The website openly and repeatedly accuses Peres of being behind the murder of then-Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin in 1995.  It features the famous video of the assassination taken by amateur photographer Ron Kempler, and points out scenes Rutstein says clash with the official version of the killing. For one thing, convicted assassin Yigal Amir is seen shooting with his left hand, when in fact he is right-handed. In addition, Rabin appears to be unhurt after the original Amir shots -- as an eyewitness repeatedly says just minutes after the shooting. Furthermore, a door in Rabin’s limousine is seen closing – apparently by an unaccounted for person who was already inside the car – after Rabin gets in.  

At Amir’s trial, a forensic expert said his investigation showed that Rabin was first shot from about 25 centimeters away, and then from point-blank range – while Amir clearly was not within a meter of Rabin. Other questions about the official version concern the yelling of "Fake bullets!" clearly heard after the shots were fired, the long amount of time it took the car carrying Rabin to reach the close-by hospital, and more.

Rutstein says that the story given to various newspapers in order to have them drop their interest in the case was that Amir managed only to paralyze Rabin, who would have been left a vegetable, and that therefore additional, lethal shots were fired at him in the hospital. Rutstein says he has videotaped evidence of an eyewitness to back this up. However, based on the above and other evidence, some allege that Rabin was in fact killed by someone within the car, a particular security guard who was never heard from again.

The Mabat news program emphasized that incitement is only prosecutable if it is deemed to lead to a clear and present danger, and is otherwise protected by the rights to free speech.

Rutstein: My Site Ended State-Sponsored Anti-Semitism

Rutstein is happy that his allegations against Peres over the years “eventually led to the end of the State-sponsored anti-Semitism, in which the religious-Zionist camp as a whole was hostilely and repeatedly blamed for the murder. Notice that those smears have stopped.”

The unabashed Rutstein says that even though he widely publicized his accusations against Peres, “he never sued me. In fact, I sued him when he called me a psycho and said I should be institutionalized.” That case was dropped, Mabat reported, when Rutstein “lost interest in it.” But, Israel National News learned that in fact a payoff was made to get Rutstein to drop the case.