Barry Chamish (born January 13, 1952) is a Canadian-Israeli writer and public speaker. Chamish is known for his controversial views regarding the assassination of the Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.[1]
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Barry Chamish was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada.[2]
In the first half of the 1970s, Chamish had three novels and a book of short stories published in his native Canada.[3] His novel Mack won a Canada Council Award worth several thousand dollars.[4] In 1976, his book Alice in Newfoundland won a Manitoba Arts Council Award.[5]
Chamish earned a Bachelor of Arts degree at the University of Manitoba in 1974.[2] In 1975, Chamish moved to Israel, where he attended the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he received a Master of Arts degree in 1979.[6]
Following graduation, Chamish was conscripted into the Israeli Defense Forces, and served as a regular from 1979 to 1981.[4][5] He was mobilized as a reservist in 1982 and fought in the 1982 Lebanon war, in which he operated a Redeye anti-aircraft missile.[4]
Chamish began to work as a free-lance writer, publishing material in a range of publications including The Atlantic, National Review, and the New York Newsday.[3] Chamish established a news service to distribute his work called "Profiles of Israel," which he continued throughout the decade of the 1980s.[4]
During the 1990s, Chamish wrote extensively on Unidentified Flying Objects, investigating a spate of sightings in Israel during that period.[7] Chamish's work was featured on four episodes of the NBC-TV program Sightings as well as a half-hour of primetime coverage on FOX-TV.[7]
From the 1990s, Chamish began publishing a series of books charging acts of treachery against the state of Israel, including Traitors and Carpetbaggers in the Promised Land (1997), The Final Days of Israel (2000), Israel Betrayed (2001), and Bye Bye Gaza (2006). In these and similar works, Chamish charged that an array of external and internal forces had "corrupted the country's leaders" and engaged in a "determined agenda aimed at the demise of the Jewish state."[8]
Chamish wrote a book, Who Murdered Yitzhak Rabin? (1998) in which he challenged the official account of the event placing blame on a lone Zionist gunman. One of the central assertions of Chamish's book was that Rabin was not shot twice in the back as the government concluded, but was actually shot three times—with the fatal wound being fired from the front.[7] By the end of 2005 the book had sold 39,000 copies and had been published in seven different languages.[7]
In 2008 the Magistrate Court in Jerusalem summoned Chamish to pay Itamar Ben-Gvir defamation damages of 36,000 NIS (roughly US$10,000) after repeatedly calling him an agent of the Shin Bet.[9]
Chamish was the winner of the 1987 Israeli Scrabble Tournament and the runner-up in 1988.[4]