Killing a King: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel (15 page)

Other groups coordinated their strategies either with the YESHA Council or with Mate Hamamatz, a steering committee that issued some of the harshest invective against Rabin. Zo Artzeinu launched a campaign of civil disobedience that mostly angered the public. In early 1994 the group, headed by a settler named Moshe Feiglin, announced a plan to grab land in the West Bank and quickly erect 130 new communities, doubling the number of settlements. Since Rabin had frozen settlement construction at the start of his term, the wildcat initiative would involve bypassing Israeli authorities and confronting soldiers sent to evacuate the activists. But the plan fizzled early in the process.

The failure of these initiatives to make any real impact contributed to Amir’s notion that the protesters lacked resolve and discipline. Whenever policemen or soldiers broke up a protest or prevented a land grab, as they did with Zo Artzeinu’s settlement-duplication campaign, Amir maintained that the government was stifling legitimate dissent.
Din rodef
required the bystander to try to stop the pursuer by “lesser means” before resorting to killing him. For Amir, these protests counted as the lesser means. In their futility, he saw mounting evidence that nothing short of killing Rabin would fulfill the decree.

At the end of the summer, Amir and Holtzman took a weeklong trip to the Sinai Desert in Egypt, their first vacation together and the longest stretch they would spend in each other’s company, day and
night, since the start of their relationship. Amir took along a backpack with several shirts, a heavy jacket for the cool desert nights, a hiking hat with snaps on the sides, and an electric shaver. Since the trip involved crossing a border, he left his Beretta at home. Holtzman brought along a girlfriend who would serve informally as a chaperone. For an unmarried religious couple to travel alone would have been unseemly.

Israel had captured Sinai in the 1967 war and then returned it to Egypt under the terms of their 1979 peace treaty. The agreement included a provision for reciprocal tourism but it took some years before Israelis felt safe enough to venture back to Sinai in large numbers. By 1994, about 200,000 Israelis entered the peninsula every year, most by crossing the border on foot at the southern Israeli town of Eilat. On the Egyptian side, Bedouins waited with their sand-beaten cars to taxi the Israeli tourists to pristine beaches in towns along the Red Sea, including Nuweiba, Dahab, and Sharm el-Sheikh. The cross-border tourism offered Israelis quick and cheap getaways and Egyptians a small revenue stream.

Amir, Holtzman, and the friend headed south along the Red Sea but then had the driver cut west, toward St. Catherine, a town in the parched interior of the desert. Far from Sinai’s beaches, St. Catherine offered a different attraction. It was situated at the foot of what some religious scholars thought might be Mount Sinai, the spot in the Bible where Moses, having led the Israelites out of Egypt, received the Ten Commandments from God. The Egyptians had established a tourist village at the site in the 1980s and named it for the monastery there, built in the sixth century and still active. About 4,000 Egyptians lived in St. Catherine.

The three Israelis spent the week hiking and camping. Holtzman would say later that Amir made occasional comments about the political situation, describing the government as illegitimate because it lacked a Jewish majority in parliament. But he seemed to fixate on Rabin less when he was with her than with his other friends. He made no mention of
din rodef.

The Israelis hired a Bedouin guide, who led them on a hike, their
food and gear strapped to the back of a camel. They stopped at a watering hole to snap pictures and relaxed in a cave while the guide prepared flat bread on an open flame. In one photo of the four of them, Amir is kneeling in the foreground while the mustachioed guide stands behind him, his dark hands resting on Amir’s shoulders. Amir, whose facial hair grew dark and stubbly after just a few days, shaved in the mornings and then dusted his face with baby powder. Holtzman spent much of the trip in a white T-shirt and a loose-fitting pair of genie pants, her long brown hair hanging freely below her shoulders.

When they got back to Bar-Ilan for the first week of school in October, Holtzman broke up with Amir. She told him the emotional connection felt precarious. If Amir took it badly, he confided his feelings to no one. He told his parents that he was the one to break it off and Geulah responded with relief. She’d envisioned a marriage in which Holtzman constantly pecked at her son and made him miserable. To Hagai, Amir said he no longer wanted to date women as long as the political situation remained dire. In what must have sounded like a dramatic pronouncement, he said relationships would only cloud their judgment when it came to making life-or-death decisions and they needed to stay unattached. For Hagai, who was too shy to engage with women and found them generally inscrutable, it made little difference. “Girls are weird,” he would write in a diary later. “They’re impossible to understand. Whoever thinks he understands them should brace for disappointment.”

In time, Amir’s father would come to think of the breakup as a turning point. Had his son stayed with Holtzman and perhaps married her, the relationship might have distracted him from his vendetta against Rabin. Holtzman, for her part, started dating another second-year law student at Bar-Ilan almost immediately, a former paratrooper who attended study sessions at the
kolel
with Amir. They would be married by spring.

HIS VOW OF ABSTINENCE
notwithstanding, Amir could not stifle his interest in women. One friend at school, Nili Kolman, felt he was pursuing her and distanced herself to avoid leading him on. Before pulling away, though, she visited him several times at his home in Herzliya, where Hagai worked on her car. Amir told Kolman that he’d been seeing someone but broke it off because she was shallow. In an evident dig at Holtzman, he said he was looking for a woman genuinely committed to her beliefs and not superficial. Kolman felt a certain warmth in the house and got the impression Geulah was an affectionate mother. But Amir’s extremism put her off.

Amir also befriended a first-year law student named Margalit Har-Shefi, whose life would be shaped by the acquaintance. Tall and thin, with long hair she often wore in a single braid down her back, Har-Shefi grew up in the West Bank settlement Beit El, opted for a year of national service instead of enlisting in the army, and then enrolled at Bar-Ilan. At nineteen, she was younger than most law-school students and eager to fit in. In her first weeks at the university, she met Ohad Skornik, who had studied with Amir in the Kerem Be-Yavne seminary during his army service and was now a first-year law student himself. Skornik introduced her to Amir.

The three of them shared a deep disdain for Rabin and his peace process but together they made an odd triad. Skornik exuded urban superiority—having grown up in Tel Aviv—along with the self-assurance that comes with pedigree: his father was a doctor at Ichilov, the country’s busiest hospital. Har-Shefi also had an illustrious lineage. Her mother was related by marriage to the Elon family, whose kin included a member of parliament, a well-regarded rabbi, and a Supreme Court justice. In the national religious world, the Elons were settler royalty.

And yet, it was Amir, shorter than both of them and the son of Yemeni immigrants, who dominated. Har-Shefi had attended an all-girls high school. In her religious community of a few thousand residents, she’d been insulated from the wider currents of Israeli society. Now she was away from home, mixing with young men and enjoying the interaction. She found Amir’s capacity to be at once affable and assertive deeply appealing.

The three of them spent much of the first month of the semester planning a student weekend at Netzarim, an isolated Jewish settlement in the Gaza Strip. Built in 1972, Netzarim had foundered for years, struggling to attract newcomers to a place where coming and going required military escort. Some twenty-five religious families inhabited the settlement when the Gaza-Jericho agreement was signed—among the most ideologically committed of all the settlers. Though Israeli troops continued safeguarding the residents, Arafat’s rule in Gaza had increased the feeling of isolation. Amir wanted students to connect with the settlers and offer support. And he hoped the signup sheet would provide a pool from which he might recruit people to his militia.

At one point, Amir and Har-Shefi sat alone on a patch of grass on campus. Bar-Ilan stretched out over several city blocks, with lawns and open areas sandwiched between low-slung buildings. Har-Shefi lived with a roommate on the second floor of a girls’ dormitory at the university and returned to Beit El only on weekends. She often wore headphones on campus, which connected to a portable tape player she kept in her black bag. Amir, who had made several more trips to Hebron since the Goldstein funeral, turned to her and asked what she thought of the shooting spree at the Cave of the Patriarchs months earlier. It was a kind of litmus test for Amir, an issue that divided the milksops from the genuine right-wingers.

Har-Shefi thought for a moment, then said she opposed the killing of innocents. But she wasn’t firm about it. The narrative that Palestinians had stored armaments at the shrine and planned a large-scale attack against Jews had become accepted wisdom among settlers, even the moderate ones. That authorities refused to acknowledge it underscored their determination to besmirch the settlers. Amir spotted an opening. Goldstein sacrificed himself to save Jews, he told her. There were plenty of instances when Israelis had to kill Arabs preemptively. Amir hammered on until Har-Shefi felt worn down by his utter certainty. From that point on, she would mimic his defense of the Hebron carnage in conversations with others.

The weekend at Netzarim drew several dozen students, including Avishai Raviv, who organized food for the trip. Dror Adani joined
the group, though he was not enrolled at Bar-Ilan—he studied at a yeshiva at Kibbutz Shaalavim, about halfway between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Hagai came along as well but hardly spoke during the weekend. The only impression people seemed to form about him had to do with his appearance. Students kept telling him he resembled his younger brother. The group prayed together, toured in and around the settlement, heard from Netzarim members about life under siege, and departed by bus on Saturday night. To Hagai it seemed most people attended in order to meet other singles. Still, a spirited defiance hung in the air.

Sometime after that weekend, Amir started talking to Adani about the militia. The next stage in the peace process would involve a broad Israeli pullback in the West Bank and the handover of more territory to the Palestinians. Negotiating teams were already meeting to thrash out the complicated details of what would come to be known as Oslo II. After the withdrawal, Amir explained, his militia would act as a kind of strike force against the Palestinians, conducting reprisal raids whenever settlers were attacked. He told Adani about Hagai’s stash of armaments and the ideas they had discussed, including downing power lines in Palestinian areas. Adani, who had been pondering on his own what could be done to stop the government, agreed to join without hesitation. Later, he would lend his army-issue Uzi to Hagai, who measured the barrel in order to fit it with a hand-crafted silencer.

At one point the conversation turned to
din rodef
. Adani told Amir he’d approached a rabbi at Shaalavim sometime in the preceding year and asked whether the decree applied to Rabin. The rabbi’s response included a nuanced exegesis of the Talmud. The ceding of land to the Palestinians did indeed make Rabin a
rodef
, he said. But the law of
rodef
was only relevant to individuals, and since Rabin represented an entire constituency, there was no practical way to apply the edict. “It’s not so simple,” Adani now said. The yeshiva at Shaalavim had a reputation for extremism. That its rabbi was hedging seemed noteworthy to Adani. But not to Amir, who dismissed the explanation contemptuously. The rabbis were too scared to interpret the law honestly, he told his friend. They’re paid by the state and fear for their jobs.

The conversation gave Amir an opportunity to talk about the discussions he’d had with Hagai on murdering Rabin. Amir had said aloud many times by now that Rabin needed to be stopped or even killed. Students at Bar-Ilan had heard the pronouncements and so had his own father. But this was the first time he’d told anyone that he and Hagai had actually discussed ways to do it—that they were plotting Rabin’s murder. If the revelation surprised or disturbed Adani, he made no show of it.

Amir approached Ohad Skornik next. In conversations with Hagai, Amir had resolved to recruit only veterans of combat units. Skornik had spent his service with the desk jockeys in military intelligence, not exactly hardened fighters. But Amir and Skornik had been best friends at the seminary. The two would take long hiking trips together on their days off, sometimes with one of Amir’s sisters. And Skornik’s contempt for Rabin matched his own. He talked about moving to one of the settlements when he graduated from law school.

Amir made the militia pitch much the way he did with Adani, describing it as a strike force against Palestinians. Skornik knew Amir was militantly anti-Arab and that he and Hagai had a fixation with guns and other weapons. On one of their trips together, Amir brandished his Beretta and explained how the gun’s double-action mechanism allowed him to both pull back the hammer and drop it with just a squeeze of the trigger. The feature made it quicker to draw and fire. Skornik would say later that he thought Amir intended the militia to be a kind of civil guard that would operate within the bounds of the law. But Amir felt certain he got his message across. To him, Skornik seemed enthusiastic.

Amir now counted four people on his mercenary roster, including himself and his brother. As a settlement protection force, the way Amir sometimes described his aim, it was a ridiculously small group. But for vigilante attacks against random Palestinians that would deepen the hostility and roil the peace process, four could well be enough. Amir considered the so-called Jewish Underground from the 1980s to be his model. The group, only somewhat larger, had managed to kill several Palestinians and nearly blow up the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem,
Islam’s third holiest shrine. In fact, Hagai worried that adding more people would raise the risk of being discovered by Shabak. He pressed his brother to keep quiet about the group.