Killing a King: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel (9 page)

On the appointed Friday, the group took part in the usual protest outside Rabin’s building and stayed on after the regulars departed, chanting into the evening. Amir had his Beretta with him, as always.
When he was bored, he liked to let the magazine drop from the handle, pull the rounds out one by one, and then reload them. From across the street, he noticed that only two guards secured the building. He also saw that Rabin’s official car was not in the parking lot—that on weekends, his driver dropped the prime minister at home and drove off. If Rabin went anywhere on a Friday night, Amir thought, he probably took his own car. He hoped to confirm the premise by seeing it for himself, but Rabin stayed home the entire evening.

Since most of the students were religious and would not drive on the Sabbath, Amir had arranged for the group to spend the night at homes within walking distance from Rav Ashi—the women in one apartment and the men in another. When they reconvened outside Rabin’s building the next morning, Amir struck up a conversation with Holtzman about kabala, a form of Jewish mysticism he had studied in seminary. In the classroom, Amir had heard stories about autistic children who could relay messages from God. But he became skeptical after visiting a center for youngsters with communication disorders in Bnei Brak.

By afternoon, Amir grew tired of waiting for Rabin and so did the others. They walked to the beach, watched the sun set, and took buses home. For Amir, the preceding months felt like a failure. He envisioned a million people taking to the streets and forcing Rabin to dissolve his government. Amir divided Israelis into two camps: leftists who wanted Israel to be like every other Western country in the world, and religious idealists who were guided by the laws of God. But even the latter group, even the settlers and the right-wing politicians, seemed lackluster to him, unwilling to risk their position and status. His plan to assemble a militia had also stalled; Amir had yet to recruit a single member. The one person who seemed suitable was Avishai Raviv, but Amir had begun to think this student who never went to class, who wore a skullcap but seemed casual about his religious observance—might be an undercover agent.

Hagai fared no better in his recruiting effort. At his college in the settlement Ariel, he shared trailer number 89/1 with another student but did not bother hanging things on the wall or fixing it up in any way. The few personal belongings he brought from Herzliya—clothes,
a spare magazine for his gun, and boxes of cartridges—he kept locked in a metal cabinet on his side of the room. Hagai was too shy to make friends at Ariel and too guarded to discuss the militia idea with other students. He spent much of his free time at the library, looking in chemistry books for bomb-making recipes.

Among other things, he learned that he could make a crude napalm bomb from ingredients found around the house. The concoction had two advantages over a regular petrol bomb: When the mixture stuck to a target—a person or a car—it was almost impossible to peel off. And it burned for a long time. He experimented with the solution in the backyard of the house in Herzliya.

Hagai copied other recipes into a small spiral notebook he could fit in his breast pocket, including one for gunpowder and another for nitrocellulose—a lightweight combustible explosive. On a page titled “Dynamite,” he noted to himself in tight little handwriting: “Mixture is very dangerous. Make in small amounts and test before making large amounts.” Lower down on the page, he wrote: “The mixture does not dissolve in water and can be submerged in water in order to cool.” Other pages included instructions for making blasting gelatin and also nitroglycerine, which Hagai notated with the molecular formula C
₃
H
₅
O
₃
(NO
₂
)
₃
+3H
₂
O.

For all the complacency Amir attributed to the opponents of Oslo, the leadership body of the Jewish settlers known as the YESHA Council (YESHA being the Hebrew acronym for Judea, Samaria, and Gaza) was quietly plotting its strategy. At a meeting just weeks after the signing in Washington, members of the council discussed a range of measures, including taking over the army bases Israel would evacuate, calling on soldiers to refuse withdrawal-related orders, staging mass demonstrations around the country, and burning Palestinian orchards. When the plan leaked, the Israeli media called it a blueprint for a “Jewish intifada.”

But snags in the negotiation between Israel and the Palestinians gave rightists some hope that perhaps the agreement would never be implemented—and may have dulled their zeal for immediate action. The Oslo deal had set December 1993 as the target for finalizing the details of Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza and Jericho. One set of talks
took place in Taba, the resort town just across the Israeli-Egyptian border. Other teams were meeting regularly in Paris to formulate an economic agreement between Israel and what would be the Palestinian Authority. When the December deadline came around, the two sides were still arguing over the status of the Gaza settlements, the size of the Jericho enclave, and the precise security arrangements in both areas. Nahum Barnea wrote in
Yedioth Ahronoth
that it wasn’t just Israel fretting about whether Palestinians could assume control of the territories; the PLO itself wondered whether it had the money and wherewithal to do it.

One way or another, Amir doubted the YESHA Council’s resolve. These settler representatives had gone soft, compromised by the comforts of their suburban life in the big settlements. On a Saturday afternoon, sometime after the weekend he spent on Rav Ashi, Amir asked his brother if he wanted to scout out Rabin’s neighborhood. Amir had been contemplating whether he could target Rabin in or around his home. Though he hadn’t decided yet whether he would try to kill the prime minister, he wanted to put Hagai’s technical mind to work on the issue.

The two waited until well after sundown—the Sabbath ends only when three stars appear in the sky—and set out in Hagai’s Beetle. The traffic from the suburbs into Tel Aviv could get heavy on a Saturday night, with young people pouring into the city to dance at the clubs along the beach or eat al fresco at one of the many restaurants. In the car, Amir raised the ideas he’d been mulling: planting explosives on Rav Ashi and setting them off when Rabin’s car passed or, better yet, attaching a bomb to the car and triggering it remotely.

Once in the neighborhood, Hagai drove slowly past Rabin’s building and then turned onto Oppenheimer, where Peres lived across from a small strip mall. He sized up the buildings on both streets, the trees and hedgerows that framed them, looking for a place a sniper could position himself. The bombing idea seemed out of the question to Hagai. The explosives he knew how to build would be bulky things, too hard to hide on the street or under the car. A more realistic plan might be for his brother to stand far from the target and fire a long-range rifle equipped with a scope, or an antitank missile. Hagai could
wait for him in the car along Highway Two, the main north-south thoroughfare just down the road from Rav Ashi, for a quick getaway.

But on the ride home, Hagai listed aloud all the ways the operation could fail. Even if his brother managed to kill Rabin, his chances of surviving were slim. Hagai couldn’t face the idea of having to tell his parents their favorite son—the boy his mother and father affectionately called Gali—died in a plot they hatched together. He told Amir they needed a better plan.

CHAPTER 3

A Stray Weed

“The extremists [among the settlers] are getting stronger. . . . The struggle is moving towards militancy.”

—
YOEL BIN-NUN

T
he secure phone rang in Rabin’s apartment at a few minutes after six, an inauspicious start to the morning of February 25, 1994. The prime minister had returned the previous day from a trip to Spain and Portugal, the first official visit by an Israeli leader to each of the two countries. He had been in a reflective mood on the way home, chatting with journalists on the plane about the months that had passed since the signing in Washington. Countries that had shunned Israel were now seeking a role in the peace process and inquiring about investments. The Tel Aviv Stock Exchange had soared since September, gaining more than 80 percent in value. Negotiations over the ground-level details of Arafat’s rule in Gaza and Jericho were finally close to conclusion. Only the violence marred the process. Palestinians had killed twenty-one Israelis in the preceding six months, nearly one a week—a painful toll that was steadily eroding support for peacemaking. Israeli troops had killed a similar number of Palestinians in military operations, a violent cycle Rabin hoped
Arafat could arrest once he took control of the territory. For the time being, the Palestinian leader remained in Tunis.

The secure line had two extensions in the apartment, one in the kitchen and another in the den. Predictably, the phones in both rooms were red. They linked Rabin with a small number of other top officials, including the chiefs of Mossad and Shabak. In the years Rabin had been defense minister in the 1980s and now prime minister, he came to recognize the ring as a harbinger of bad news.

He picked up the receiver and heard the raspy voice of his military secretary, Danny Yatom. He was calling from Hebron in the West Bank, a Palestinian city with a combustible set of ingredients—a religious population that identified largely with Hamas, a small but exceedingly radical settler community living in the very heart of the Arab populace, and a shrine, the Cave of the Patriarchs, that was sacred to both groups, the Muslims and the Jews. Yatom got right to the point: a Jewish settler committed a horrible massacre at the shrine earlier in the morning, he told his boss.

Friday mornings were usually reserved for meetings with defense officials, including a weekly forum Rabin convened with the heads of the intelligence agencies and the chief of staff. It was his favorite part of the week. Though a quarter century had elapsed since Rabin shed his military uniform, he still found himself more comfortable with soldiers than politicians—and more trusting of them. Only Yatom took notes at these meetings and nothing ever leaked.

On this Friday, Hebron scrambled Rabin’s agenda and instantly plunged his eighteen-month-old administration into crisis.

Though the city was only about fifty miles southeast of Tel Aviv, it could not have been more different from the freewheeling Israeli metropolis on the Mediterranean. Gray and cold, with a population of 130,000 Palestinians, Hebron was the largest city in the West Bank, an urban clutter of winding streets and stone bazaars laid out over a series of rocky hills. It boasted a university, two hospitals, and two rundown hotels but, in keeping with the conservative spirit of the city, not a single movie theater. The shrine, a towering Herodian structure set in the center of Hebron, was its showpiece—and also its curse, a pilgrimage site fought over for thousands of years.

The shrine derived its sanctity from the Book of Genesis, which recounts how Abraham bought the cave from a certain Ephron the Hittite (for “four hundred shekels of silver”) as a burial site for his wife, Sarah. Eventually, Abraham is interred alongside his wife and later other Hebrew patriarchs and matriarchs are buried there as well—Isaac, Jacob, Rebecca, and Leah. Over the centuries, the appeal of this Old Testament narrative to all three monotheistic religions made the cave a trophy for competing empires. It served as a Jewish shrine under Herod the Great, who surrounded it with huge stone walls, a basilica in the Byzantine era, and a mosque after the invasion of the Muslims. The Crusaders made a church of the site in 1100 but it reverted to a mosque when Saladin conquered the area in 1188.

By the early twentieth century the Cave of the Patriarchs and the city around it were one more flashpoint for the rivaling Jewish and Arab nationalist movements. In 1929, Palestinians killed scores of Jews there in a rampage fueled by false rumors that Jews were killing Arabs in Jerusalem. The massacre effectively ended centuries of Jewish presence in the city. Thirty-eight years later, when Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War brought the West Bank under Israeli rule and unleashed a messianic fervor among religious Jews, the first place these Jews pushed to colonize was Hebron. They formed a settlement adjacent to the city in the late 1960s known as Kiryat Arba and a settler community inside Hebron itself in 1979.

Yatom had boarded a helicopter for the city as soon as he got word of the shooting. At the site, he received a briefing from military commanders and relayed the information to Rabin. The Israeli who committed the massacre, Baruch Goldstein, entered the shrine around five in the morning dressed in the army uniform he kept as a reservist and carrying a military-issue assault rifle. At the top of the stairs, he pushed past the worship area designated for Jews and entered the Ibrahimi Mosque (Ibrahim being the Arabic name for Abraham), where hundreds of Palestinians engaged in morning prayers. Friday marked the midpoint of Ramadan, a month of daytime fasting and praying. It was also Purim, the day Jews commemorate having been saved from extermination in the ancient Persian Empire.

As the worshippers knelt and bowed to touch their foreheads to the
carpet, a practice known in Arabic as
sujud
, Goldstein fired more than a hundred rounds from behind the crowd, spraying bullets from side to side. Throngs of people rushed the doors of the mosque, creating a bottleneck; Goldstein fired on them as well. Only after he emptied three magazines was there a pause in the shooting. While he tried to load a fourth one in his gun, one of the Palestinians struck him with a fire extinguisher and then others rushed the shooter and beat him to death. In less than two minutes, he’d managed to kill twenty-nine Palestinians and wound more than one hundred. Among the dead were eight teenagers.

The bodies were gone by the time Yatom entered the hall but the spent shells still lay scattered across the carpet. During a thirty-year military career that included a rotation as commander of Sayeret Matkal, Yatom had seen his share of carnage. The sight in the mosque rivaled the horrors he’d witnessed in battle: streaks of blood in almost every corner of the chamber, the great marble pillars of the mosque chipped and pocked, lights on the chandeliers shot out. The bag Goldstein had carried into the mosque still had a handgun in it and three fully loaded magazines. He’d brought seven in all.