Killing a King: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel (13 page)

Rabin spoke at the ceremony that evening but made no mention of the bombing. At the funerals for the victims the next day, crowds chased away the one Labor Party member who tried to attend. Funerals
for victims of Palestinian violence often included fiery speeches and attacks on the government. In this case, the context of the bombing—that it came in response to a massacre perpetrated by a radical settler—became predictably obscured by grief and rage.

By the time Rabin convened his cabinet in the aftermath of the violence, the tension climbed even higher. A Palestinian from Gaza somehow crossed into Israel with an automatic rifle and sprayed bullets at a bus stop near the southern town of Ashdod, killing one Israeli. In Hebron, a visit by Jesse Jackson, the American minister and civil-rights activist, turned violent. Jackson had been invited to attend a PLO event in Jerusalem but Israel canceled it as part of its policy of preventing Palestinian political activity in the city. Instead, Jackson traveled to Hebron, where he led several hundred Palestinians to the Tomb of the Patriarchs for prayer.

Israel had allowed Jews to continue praying at the shrine after the massacre in February but kept Muslims away until authorities could put a new worship regime in place—adding further insult to Palestinian injury. When soldiers now blocked the group from passing, Jackson held a prayer service there at the entrance, along with a Hamas preacher, Taysir Tamimi. To the soldiers and settlers, the scene must have looked surreal, with Jackson chanting the slogan that electrified delegates at the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta six years earlier, “Keep Hope Alive,” and Palestinians echoing his words and clapping. But when Jackson got back on the bus to leave, Palestinians hurled stones at Israeli soldiers, who responded with gunfire, wounding eight of them. The clashes lasted some thirty minutes, with Palestinians at one point using Jackson’s bus for cover.

Rabin now faced questions about how Palestinian assailants were managing to get through Israeli checkpoints. The closure that the army imposed on the West Bank and Gaza after the massacre had still been in effect. Under pressure to protect Israelis from additional bombings, the cabinet decided to extend the closure indefinitely. Since the measure would harm Israeli farmers and building contractors who relied on cheap Palestinian labor for their enterprise, it also decided to offer visas for large numbers of foreign workers, mainly from Eastern Europe and the Far East. The twin decisions would
cost many thousands of Palestinians their livelihood—60,000 had permits to work in Israel. In the months since the signing in Washington, a perverse reality had emerged. The process that was supposed to enhance Israeli security and give Palestinians more freedom and prosperity was undermining all three.

CHAPTER 4

Din Rodef

“My own morality doesn’t matter. It is determined solely according to the Torah itself.”

—
YIGAL AMIR

T
he Goldstein massacre captivated Amir and also taunted him. Amir regarded himself as a doer and others as talkers and compromisers. He once described Kahane supporters to a friend as “children.” Though he respected the settlement movement, he suspected most settlers would abandon the West Bank and Gaza if the government offered them enough money to forfeit their land to the Palestinians. The problem, he often told people, was that Jews lacked the zealous devotion to the cause that Israel’s Islamic enemies, Hamas and Hezbollah, demonstrated regularly. But Goldstein had not been a talker. He was not one of those self-appointed settler spokesmen who courted the media. He had taken action knowing he would likely be killed. If Amir thought sacrificing himself might be a courageous way to derail the peace train, Goldstein had beat him to it.

Amir had been studying in the
kolel
at Bar-Ilan the morning of the massacre. He heard the news on the radio, realized the significance of the event—initial reports estimated an even higher death toll—and
decided to attend Goldstein’s funeral over the weekend. On campus, where opinions had hardened in the preceding months, few people rushed to condemn the shooting. The rumor that Palestinians had been storing weapons at the shrine and planning to attack the Jews of Hebron had spread quickly from the settler enclaves outward, despite denials from the Israeli military. How the killing of innocents was meant to thwart this attack went unexplained. Still, the Amir brothers (and many other people) embraced the account. “It would have been ungrateful of me not to support him because he did it for all Jews,” Hagai would say years later. “You don’t see a lot of people willing to sacrifice their life in this country. A person who is willing to go against everyone and give his own life, that’s something.”

The funeral allowed Yigal Amir to take in the complexity of Kiryat Arba. The town included some of the most hardline settlers in the West Bank, but it was hardly homogenous. Goldstein had belonged to the Kahanists, a group of mostly American and Russian immigrants in the town. A core of secular right-wingers included Elyakim Haetzni, the lawyer and propagandist who made the film about the fictional battalion commander and his refusal to evict settlers from their homes. Members of the Hasidic movement Chabad made up a third group. The sect owned properties in Hebron dating back to the nineteenth century and its members made regular pilgrimages to a certain grave in Hebron’s Jewish cemetery. Avishai Raviv, the radical Bar-Ilan student Amir had considered for his militia, circulated in the mass of skullcaps and beards. Raviv seemed to have several residences, one at a settlement north of Jerusalem and another in a suburb of Tel Aviv. Now he told people he was moving to Kiryat Arba.

Goldstein’s wife and children, all four under the age of twelve, huddled over the grave. To leave them behind must have been a painful decision, Amir thought, yet more evidence of Goldstein’s saintly devotion to the cause. But he told a friend later that he would have chosen a better target, one with lasting impact.

The spring semester brought changes to Amir’s routine on campus. He had been working toward a minor in criminology but found it tedious and dropped it. Instead, Amir took up computer science, a
surprising choice for him. Amir told people he had an irrational fear of computers; he found them intimidating. But he liked the idea of facing down his phobias. One of his early projects was to make a spreadsheet and input contacts. He included the names and numbers of some 350 people who attended the weekly protests on campus.

He also started dating Nava Holtzman, the pretty economics student who took part in the protest weekend outside Rabin’s building on Rav Ashi Street. Holtzman would later recall a “deep emotional bond” between them, visits to Amir’s home, and even a peek into Hagai’s toolshed in the backyard, where he modified bullets and made timers for explosives. But the relationship suffered problems from the outset. Amir’s mother found Holtzman cold and bossy and thought she was a terrible match for her son. She regarded her Gali as handsome and full of charisma, a prize for any woman. Holtzman’s parents also had misgivings. “[They] were against my relationship with Yigal but not over ideology. In any event, they never even got to know him. My mother only saw him once for a few minutes,” she related later.

Their qualms might have had something to do with Amir’s skin tone. The Holtzmans traced their roots to Europe, making them Ashkenazi, the elite ethnic group in Israel roughly analogous to America’s WASPs (white Anglo-Saxon Protestants). Amir was Mizrahi—the term for Jews who came from Arabic-speaking countries—and not just Mizrahi but Yemeni, the darkest shade on the ethnic palette. Though mixed couples were certainly part of the social tableau in Israel in the 1990s, disapproving parents formed a part of it as well. Holtzman’s parents might have been especially concerned. At Bar-Ilan, religious couples in a relationship for just a few months often ended up married.

In what was now Israel’s fifth decade of existence, the ethnic tension seemed at times to be waning. The grievances of Mizrahis (the term means literally “easterner” and is frequently interchanged with the word “Sephardi”) were rooted in events long in the past—their mistreatment as immigrants in the early years of Israeli independence and lingering traces of discrimination. But it could also flare over contemporary issues in ways political parties were quick to exploit.
Around the time Amir and Holtzman started their relationship, an event transpired that would bring these tensions to the surface, especially for the Yemeni community.

The event revolved around the demands of a certain rabbi from the community, Uzi Meshulam, to have the disappearance of several hundred and perhaps thousands of Yemeni babies and toddlers in the 1940s and ’50s investigated by a judicial commission. The story of the missing children had long been a source of anguish and suspicion for Israel’s Yemeni Jews. Many in the community believed that in the chaos of their absorption in Israel, government agents stole the children and gave them to Ashkenazi families in Israel and abroad. Though never proven, the suspicion seemed to be reinforced by the government’s broader mismanagement of Mizrahi immigration at the time—its high-handedness toward the immigrants, its policy of settling them in far-flung areas, and, most of all, its attitude toward the newcomers as primitives who needed to be reeducated.

In early May, following a dispute with a building contractor, Meshulam barricaded himself in his home in the town of Yehud, along with about a dozen armed followers. The rabbi had been known to police as an eccentric—he wore a large wig and had a record of disputes with neighbors. For several days, police kept troops posted around the house in a standoff reminiscent of the Waco siege in Texas a year earlier. As neighbors gathered to watch the events unfold, Meshulam’s supporters buttressed the house with sandbags. When Meshulam left his home one night to negotiate with the police commissioner, officers stormed the house and killed one of the armed men inside. The rest, Meshulam included, were arrested and later sentenced to months or years in prison.

The Rabin government responded to the incident by granting Meshulam his wish—a judicial commission to investigate the fate of the missing Yemeni children. But the Amir brothers saw the raid as one more way Rabin silenced truth-tellers and shut down dissent. Amir was now going to every large antigovernment protest he could reach by bus or in Hagai’s old Beetle. He complained to friends that police were cracking down brutally against right-wing protests and
that the media, mobilized on behalf of the government, was playing down the scope of the dissension.

The same week as the raid on Meshulam’s home, Rabin and Arafat at last finalized the Gaza-Jericho agreement. They signed the deal in a ceremony in Cairo (though only after an embarrassing last-minute dispute). The start of Palestinian self-rule first discussed in secret talks sixteen months earlier and almost derailed by violent extremists on both sides was finally going forward. Israeli troops had already begun their withdrawal from military bases they’d occupied for decades. They would be out of Jericho and most of Gaza—except for the settlement areas and some key roads—by July.

With the drawdown a reality now, Amir shifted strategies. Instead of encouraging students to protest on campus or outside Rabin’s apartment building, he helped organize trips to the West Bank and Gaza. He now wanted to spend as much time as he could in the territory that Rabin, in his contempt for the Jews’ biblical birthright, was willing to surrender. And he hoped other students would forge their own connection to Judea and Samaria, as many had come to refer to the territory. Though Israel had been occupying the West Bank and Gaza for more than a quarter century, Israelis who didn’t live in settlements rarely ventured across the green line, except where it bisected Jerusalem. Even many right-wingers who argued Israel should never cede an inch had seen the territory only on the nightly news.

Amir and other students started with a trip to Jericho, the desert city on the road to the Dead Sea that would soon come under Palestinian control. To draw a large group, they billed the trip as a singles event with a prayer service to be conducted at the remains of a Byzantine-era synagogue in the city. Several dozen students signed up. But sleepy Jericho, with its shabby Arab bazaar and its parched landscape, offered little to connect to.

On a day off from classes, Amir joined a religious group on a trip to a shrine on the outskirts of Nablus, another Palestinian city in the West Bank. Aboard the bus, he spotted a young man he’d served with in Golani, Dror Adani. Short and lean with a wide, crocheted skullcap, Adani had made a strong impression on Amir. Though he
wasn’t the brawniest soldier in the unit, he had grit and stamina and liked to help others. On long, grueling hikes, he would walk behind the weaker soldiers and push them forward. Adani had also grown up in Herzliya with parents who’d emigrated from Yemen. Amir quickly sized him up: here finally, was a good candidate for the militia. On the trip, Adani introduced Amir to his sister, Rachel. Ten years his senior, she maintained an unusual lifestyle for a religious woman. Rachel was single, lived on her own in Tel Aviv, and made her living as an astrologist.

A few weeks later, Amir and Adani attended a rally together in Tel Aviv. Several groups were now sponsoring antigovernment events every week, including the YESHA Council, Netanyahu’s Likud Party and a growing list of ad-hoc movements. When it was over, Amir suggested they stop at Rachel’s home. Amir had dabbled in Jewish mysticism and was constantly looking for signs that God intended something special for him. Maybe he would find it in astrology.

At her apartment, Rachel provided a basic reading based on his birth date: what signs in the zodiac he was compatible with, how the coming weeks would look for him, dangers that lurked. When Amir pressed for more, she told him she could draw up a detailed chart but only once he provided his specific time of birth. He promised to come back with it.

Amir also asked her about Rabin—whether Rachel could predict his future. She told him that sometime in the past two years, she had prepared an astrological chart for a woman who worked as a typist in Rabin’s office. The woman wanted to know whether she would get promoted. Based on the chart she drew up, Rachel told the typist that her connection to Rabin was strong, and that she helped foster a sense of tranquility in the office. The woman seemed pleased. Rachel also told her that Rabin was a Pisces, and that people under his sign would undergo three difficult years.