Killing a King: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel (8 page)

Among the students, one did stand out, a blue-eyed firebrand with a slight stutter named Avishai Raviv. In their first conversation, Amir learned that Raviv had been active in Kahane’s Kach movement as a youngster, then joined a combat unit hoping to see action but suffered a leg wound when a fellow soldier discharged his gun accidentally.
He liked rolling up his pant leg to show people the scar. With a physical-disability discharge, Raviv cycled through a series of extremist groups, including a quasi-apocalyptic one dedicated to rebuilding the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem. Recently, he had founded the Jewish Nationalist Organization, a group with sharply anti-Arab positions that went by the acronym EYAL. Pleasant-looking but rough around the edges, Raviv had caught the attention of the media as an agitator who craved attention and controversy.

Raviv boasted to Amir that he’d been investigated for a series of alleged crimes, including running a training camp for Kach-affiliated youngsters and assaulting a left-wing Knesset member. Yet somehow he managed to avoid prison—so many times that some people on the right wondered what pull he had with the police or the Justice Department. Though he seemed to have no paying job, Raviv owned a car and a cell phone, both of which he put to use in the organizing of rallies—of a kind that even some fellow rightists found gratuitously provocative. He rarely showed up for class.

Amir made a mental note to talk to Raviv about the militia. He also told himself not to let school get in the way of the plans he made with Hagai. First-year students in his program carried a heavy load of courses, including Jewish law, the penal code, contracts, and constitutional law—
konstee
, as people in the department referred to it. But since professors almost never took attendance, Amir figured out quickly that he could skip most lectures and study from the notes of more diligent students. One of them was Amit Hampel, whom he’d met through a mutual friend in Tel Aviv years earlier. Amir noticed that Hampel showed up to class every day and had almost perfect handwriting—neither too sloping nor too tightly packed. Hampel took notice of Amir as well—ambling into class from time to time, muttering something sarcastic, and ducking out before the end of the lecture. He agreed to let Amir pick up his notes before tests and photocopy them at a shop near his home in Tel Aviv.

The arrangement allowed Amir to spend his time organizing weekly rallies on campus and studying Talmud at Bar-Ilan’s seminary, known informally as the
kolel
. A long stucco building square in the middle of the university, the
kolel
played no official role in the student
curriculum. But it functioned as a gathering place for men to pray and conduct study sessions with rabbis. Many of the young men at the
kolel
were law students like Amir, and most viewed the Oslo Accord not just as a political misstep but a sin against God. As the semester progressed, Amir would return to the same questions in the study sessions—all revolving around situations where Jews endangered other Jews. What preventative action would Jewish law countenance?

Somehow, the inquiries did not strike the rabbis as odd. They perceived them as Amir’s attempt to understand the present reality through the lens of scripture; as a natural blending of religion and everyday life. But while other students probed in similar directions, Amir stood out for his sheer fervor. Rabbis and students at the seminary came to view him as stubborn and obsessive.

By early winter, the Students for Security were staging rallies against the Oslo Accord every week outside campus, drawing several hundred people to a spot along one of Israel’s busiest highways and waving signs at passing cars. The pictures and slogans became increasingly aggressive, depicting Rabin with blood on his hands, comparing him to Philippe Pétain, the leader of Vichy France who collaborated with the Nazis, or declaring him a traitor outright. But the students also socialized during the outings and kept the event to thirty minutes before heading back to class—all of which irritated Amir.

One week, he and other students persuaded the group to step out onto the highway and stop traffic for several minutes. The event showed remarkable recklessness and almost ended in tragedy. The highway ran four lanes in each direction, with no stoplight for miles. The first wave of cars came at the protesters so fast that some thought they would be run over. But the action paid off. An Israel Radio reporter who happened to be attending a symposium on campus broadcast the chaotic moments live through his cell phone. Suddenly, Students for Security had name recognition.

Police detective Yoav Gazit would occasionally watch the students gather for the weekly protest from a pedestrian bridge above the highway. A fifteen-year veteran of the force, Gazit was on sabbatical in 1993, taking classes at Bar-Ilan toward a bachelor’s degree in a program geared toward members of law-enforcement agencies.
Gazit had worked on a series of high-profile investigations over the years, including a corruption case against Ariel Sharon, the right-wing Knesset member. Short and stout with a warm face and a shock of black hair, he specialized in cultivating a rapport with suspects until they delivered their confessions. Most of the student protesters struck Gazit as harmless; young idealists stirred to action by a policy they opposed. But a few had lashed out at policemen on campus over crackdowns against right-wing protests around the country. In the vicious outbursts and the twinning of politics with this fanatic strain of religion, Gazit sensed trouble.

Amir had settled into a routine. He left the house in Herzliya around six on most mornings and came home after dark. Before exams, he would spend hours sitting at a plastic patio table in the front yard, marking up Hampel’s notes with a highlighter. Most teachers allowed students to flip through their books and notes during the tests. Amir was scoring 80s and 90s, among the highest grades in the class.

Near the end of autumn, Amir attended the wedding of a friend in Tel Aviv, an event that would shape his thinking in the coming years. Ariel Schweitzer, a fellow student at seminary, was marrying a certain Shira Lau at one of the city’s most opulent wedding halls, Gan Ha’Oranim. The wedding drew publicity because of Lau’s pedigree: Her father, Israel Meir Lau, had recently been named Israel’s Ashkenazi chief rabbi and was renowned for his story of survival during World War II. Separated from most of his family at age five and sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp, Lau evaded the death march at the end of the war by hiding under a heap of corpses. He emigrated to Palestine a year later and became an ordained rabbi. Not long before his daughter’s wedding, Lau traveled to the Vatican for a meeting with the pope, the first of its kind in Israel’s history.

Amir drove to Tel Aviv in his brother’s Beetle, the four-cylinder engine wheezing along the highway. In the hall, he sat with friends from the seminary, young men in white dress shirts and black skullcaps. A sliding partition separated them from the women. Soon Amir was taking stock of the prominent figures around the room, including Knesset members and ministers in Rabin’s cabinet. Then he spotted Rabin himself, sitting at a table with just one bodyguard at his side.
The sight of him flooded Amir with adrenaline. The prime minister was so close at hand and so manifestly mortal, just flesh and blood. Amir had his Beretta jammed in his belt, covered by his shirt. He contemplated walking over to Rabin and shooting him in the back of the head. Other people approached to shake hands with the prime minister. A photographer snapped pictures from across the room.

A minute elapsed and then another. Amir told himself he would come to regret passing up the opportunity. But he also felt a stitch of hesitation. Did God put him in the same room with Rabin so that he could eliminate the Israeli leader and his Oslo process? Or would Amir be imposing his own plan on God? He thought about the bullets in his magazine, the hollow points and the regular rounds. Then he turned his gaze back to Rabin and watched him leave the hall; Amir had missed his chance. But he gleaned valuable information. Rabin was hardly protected. If protests didn’t stop the peace process, killing him might be a viable alternative.

At home, he related the events to Hagai. It was too early, he told his brother. He needed to build his inner readiness.

THE ENCOUNTER WITH
Rabin electrified Amir and he yearned to relive the experience. Hoping to get a glimpse of him again, he joined a group of people who demonstrated outside Rabin’s home on Rav Ashi every Friday. The protesters would gather across the street from the building at two in the afternoon, usually numbering no more than a few dozen. Eran Fogel, a senior in high school who lived next door to Rabin, liked to count them from his eighth-story window, knowing that a demonstration of fifty or more required a police permit. They seemed to know it as well, rarely exceeding the permissible number.

Some of them had been motivated to attend by the continuing violence, which was now making headlines almost every day. In late October, Hamas gunmen posing as Jews picked up two reserve soldiers at a hitchhiking post near a settlement in the Gaza Strip. After
a short ride, the Palestinian on the passenger side spun toward the backseat and shot both of them several times. A few days later, Palestinians lured a resident of the settlement Beit El near Ramallah, Haim Mizrahi, to a chicken coop where he regularly bought eggs in order to resell them to Jewish vendors and pocket the profit. The men stabbed him to death, put his body in the trunk of his car, and drove off with it. They ditched the vehicle near Ramallah and torched it, along with the body.

But the core members of the protest group were ultra-nationalists who opposed the Oslo deal from its very inception. They included Rehavam Ze’evi, a retired general who headed the Moledet Party and had served with Rabin on the military’s general staff in the 1960s. Ze’evi often held up a poster of Rabin’s mug with two words at the bottom:
THE LIAR
. Avishai Raviv, Amir’s friend from Bar-Ilan, showed up from time to time in his favorite blue pullover with the Adidas logo on his chest. When camera crews came to film the event, he usually found some way to stand out.

Rabin mostly ignored the protesters, parking his car in the open-air lot alongside the building and walking to the entrance with his head down. He told reporters that the hecklers had no effect on him and certainly would not cause him to change course. When protesters spotted his car, they would launch into menacing chants, including “Rabin is a traitor,” and “Rabin is a murderer,” and also “Rabin is a drunk”—a reference to the rumors of his heavy drinking. In fact, Rabin had a low tolerance for alcohol. He liked wine with his meals. “Water is for horses,” he would say. But heavier drinks made him drowsy. Rabin liked to joke that if Edgar Bronfman, who ran the Seagram alcoholic beverage company and gave money to Jewish causes, knew how much soda he poured into his whiskey, the Canadian philanthropist would stop supporting him.

But Leah, who heard the protesters chanting under her window all afternoon, every week, felt intimidated. When they caught sight of her either entering or leaving the building, someone would shout something menacing about the Rabins being destined to meet the same fate as Mussolini and his mistress, who were executed toward the end of World War II, or the Ceau
escus, the repressive Romanian
dictator and his wife who were shot by a firing squad during the collapse of Communism in 1989. The commotion underneath her bedroom window would sometimes keep Leah from sleeping on a Friday afternoon, a coveted siesta hour for many Israelis. It could also make for some comical moments. When Rabin walked in the door one Friday, Leah broke into a chant of her own from the bedroom: “Rabin is a traitor, Rabin is a traitor.” It took her husband a moment to get the joke.

But the events, like the protests outside campus, left Amir feeling restless. They gave opponents of the deal a sense of power but changed nothing. On a winter weekend, he invited several students to spend the entire Sabbath with him on Rav Ashi, from Friday afternoon to Saturday night. At the very least, he would learn something about the prime minister’s comings and goings. Amir drew people mostly from the leadership of Students for Security, but he also invited Nava Holtzman, a first-year economics student who showed up occasionally to political events on campus. Amir had met Holtzman a year earlier in a chance encounter in the southern town of Mitzpe Ramon, where she was doing her National Service, a yearlong volunteer program offered to religious women in lieu of military duty. Fair-skinned and pretty, with green eyes and below-the-shoulder hair, Holtzman drew attention at Bar-Ilan. Amir spotted her on the way to class one day and urged her to come along for the weekend.

By now, at age twenty-three, Amir had had several girlfriends, including a nonreligious one he dated in high school and a young German woman he met during a trip to Europe in the summer before his army service. The German kept in touch and later visited Amir in Israel. (Geulah, who took a liking to the young woman, had hoped she would convert to Judaism and marry her son.) But he had engaged in little or no physical intimacy with any of them, in keeping with the Orthodox prohibition on sexual contact before marriage. Since Orthodox Jews tended to marry relatively young, Bar-Ilan served as a venue more for matchmaking than the time-honored college hookup.