CHAPTER 2
To Fathom God’s Will
“Hit them hard, hit here, push there. Destroy stuff.”
—BOAZ NAGAR
By the time the Israeli delegation landed, a wraithlike stillness enveloped Israel, the kind that precedes religious holidays and imposes itself on the observant and nonobservant, Jews and non-Jews alike. Shops and restaurants closed early for Rosh Hashanah, public transportation stopped running, and traffic on the highways became sparse. The military order preventing Palestinians from crossing into Israel remained in effect.
Three more funerals were held for victims of Palestinian violence while Rabin was away, soldiers caught in a Hamas ambush in the Gaza Strip. Still, the agreement signed in Washington suffused Rosh Hashanah with hopeful anticipation—not just for a new year but a new era. Newspapers printed for the holiday, with more sections than on any other day of the year, included pages and pages of speculation about the potential dividends of the peace deal. The daily Ma’ariv ran a large map showing roads Israel might soon build from its main cities to the capitals of Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. Yedioth Ahronoth published a section in its business pages titled “Peace and Your Pocket: Investments, Prices, Real Estate, Markets, Restaurants.” Rabin had told reporters on the way home that he spoke by phone to other Arab and Muslim leaders who might soon forge ties with Israel. A headline on his return announced that the Foreign Ministry was hoping to recruit more Arabic-speakers for possible postings in the region.
Other issues occupied Israelis as well. The country would soon be marking twenty years since the Yom Kippur War, a surprise assault by Syria and Egypt that killed thousands and, for a few critical hours, appeared to threaten Israel’s very existence. In a front-page story, Yedioth Ahronoth published long excerpts of a new book by the man who’d served as the head of military intelligence during the war, Eli Zeira. His assessment at the time that war was improbable accounted for the government’s disastrous decision not to call up army reservists ahead of the invasion. Also on the front page was a prison-cell interview with a convict nicknamed Ofnobank, a serial bank robber whose motorcycle getaways had made him something of a folk hero to Israelis. In one of the inside sections, a feature story described the changing sexual norms of Israelis. For women, the ideal male was no longer the coarsely textured hard charger but the sensitive type with a strong feminine side. Yet somehow, Israeli women felt simultaneously drawn to and contemptuous of this new man.
Jewish New Year is not the carousing party night that December 31 is for Americans. Israelis tend to spend the evening with family. And so as the sun dipped into the Mediterranean, Rabin and Leah headed across town to the home of daughter Dalia’s in-laws. The idea that the prime minister faced some new danger to his life for entering into a peace process with Arafat would not seriously dawn on the people around him for some time to come. Instead of summoning his driver, Rabin was in the habit of driving himself to private events on the weekends, protected by just a small security detail.
Yigal Amir read the newspapers that day with a sense of scorn for the optimism they exuded. He was also spending the holiday with family, including seven brothers and sisters. At twenty-three, he had recently moved back to his parents’ two-story home at 56 Borochov Street in Herzliya, having completed five years of army service and seminary study in a program geared to observant Jews. A civilian again, he was now working odd jobs and growing out his black curly hair. He planned to continue living with his parents once he started law school in a few weeks, which in the Israeli university system—more akin to Europe’s than the American one—was open to undergraduates.
Amir was short and thin and had the kind of dusky complexion that identified him to other Israelis as Teimani—of Yemeni extraction. Among a certain segment of Ashkenazim—those Jews of European origin who regarded themselves as the country’s cultural elite—the skin tone suggested inferiority, a stereotype that Amir took great pleasure in disproving. In school and in the army, he showed himself to be smarter and tougher than most of his peers. An IQ test administered years later placed him in the upper tier of intellectual aptitude; he scored 144 on the verbal section. His dark eyes and broad smile, which could be either warm or menacing, made him alluring to women.
Two days earlier, Amir watched the televised handshake between Rabin and Arafat. He decided instantly that the Oslo deal was not just a calamity for Israel but an act of treason by Rabin, the land he would be handing over to the Palestinians having been promised by God to the Jews. Amir had been a supporter of Moledet, an ultranationalist party whose leader, Rehavam Ze’evi, advocated a kind of self-deportation for Palestinians—with Israel providing both negative and positive inducements. Among Israeli political figures, only the late Meir Kahane, the American-born rabbi and agitator who preached a xenophobic hatred toward Arabs, articulated more extreme positions. Amir favored Kahane but a judicial panel had ruled his Kach Party too nakedly racist to compete in elections.
Amir’s political extremism arose from a somewhat unusual upbringing: an ultra-Orthodox education but also a day-to-day exposure to the material world of secular Israelis.
His father, Shlomo, had emigrated with his family from Yemen in 1942 and attended a Haredi yeshiva in Bnei Brak, “Haredi” being the Hebrew term for the most devout and “god-fearing”—the literal definition of the term—among the Jews. Shlomo dressed in dark suits and wide-brimmed hats, the outfit of the ultra-Orthodox, and worked as a religious scribe, copying by hand Torah scrolls and other religious texts in ornamented calligraphy. The home where Amir grew up had the trappings of religious piety, including portraits of rabbis on the walls and Talmudic volumes lining the shelves of an old bookcase in the living room.
But the neighborhood itself, Neve Amal in Herzliya, was comprised mostly of nonobservant Jews. Shlomo had purchased the home for a good price in 1964, when it consisted of just two rooms on a single floor. He moved in at the end of the Six-Day War with his bride, Geulah Shirion, whose family had also emigrated from Yemen. Gradually, they expanded it outward and upward. Elsewhere in the country, ultra-Orthodox Jews tended to cloister themselves in homogenous neighborhoods. The Amirs, on their tree-lined block, with a small market at one end and a grassy playground at the other, were an anomaly.
From his father and from the Haredi grade school he attended, Amir soaked up the strictest version of Jewish orthodoxy, including a provision that every word of the Torah is divined truth. But he also absorbed influences from the neighborhood. Geulah ran a day-care center in the backyard of the home, opening her door to children mostly of secular families—and the cultural winds that blew in with them. Books that made their way to the house included the novels of the German author Karl May, whose stories about life in America’s Old West appealed to Amir. At some point, Geulah allowed television in the house—an appliance frowned upon in ultra-Orthodox communities—including a set in Amir’s room. He and Hagai, the eldest among the siblings, liked to watch thrillers and westerns borrowed from a video rental shop in the neighborhood.
The secular influence could, in theory, have moderated Amir’s worldview. Certainly it influenced his outward appearance. Amir dressed in jeans and T-shirts, with the ritual fringes that observant Jews wear under the shirt, known as tzitziot, tucked into his pants instead of protruding ostentatiously. But far from tempering Amir’s political outlook, it produced an internal discord that seemed to radicalize him, in the view of a clinical psychologist who would evaluate him some years later. “There’s a strong conflict inside him between the longing for sensual and emotional satisfaction and his commitment to a religious and ideological way of life—an ideology that demands sacrificing all material pleasures,” the psychologist Gabriel Weil would write after spending several hours with Amir over two days. “He feels a sense of guilt about the longing.”
The dissonance would increase in Amir’s teen years. At age eleven, he pressed his parents to send him to a secondary school in Tel Aviv, Israel’s secular heartland. The school belonged to the Haredi education system but offered a broader curriculum than just Torah and Talmud. Crucially, it prepared students for university instead of a life in the yeshiva. Shlomo and Geulah balked at the idea. Getting to school would require their seventh-grader to travel on a public bus for almost an hour each way. But Amir was nothing if not willful. He locked himself in his room and announced he would not emerge until his parents relented. The standoff lasted a day and a night, an eternity for Geulah, who spent the time talking first herself and then Shlomo into giving the school a try. By morning, Amir had prevailed.
The high school Amir went on to attend in Tel Aviv, HaYishuv HaHadash, had a snooty prestige to it and brought Amir into contact with the children of Orthodox nobility. A student several grades ahead of Amir would become the chief rabbi of Israel, the country’s highest religious authority. Geulah recalled years later that the principal of the boarding school initially snubbed her son, perhaps because of his skin tone, but came to respect his solid command of scripture. When Amir graduated four years later, he declined the service exemption available to most Haredis and signed up for the army.
It was now 1988, the first full year of the Palestinian uprising. In the Gaza Strip, where Amir spent long stretches, Palestinian youths would gather in huge numbers to taunt soldiers and throw stones. Though the level of violence would remain relatively low in this first “intifada” (a second insurrection years later would include dozens of suicide bombings), it affirmed for Amir the notions he’d held for years: that Arabs would kill Jews at every opportunity and that only ruthless reprisals would deter Palestinians.
Amir had volunteered for the Golani Brigade, a unit with a reputation for dealing harshly with Palestinians. In dispersing large protests, it was not uncommon for soldiers to separate individuals from the crowd and dispense harsh beatings. Private Amir, Company C, 13th Battalion, seemed to take special pleasure in it, as a member of his unit, Boaz Nagar, would later recall. “Yigal was the enforcer with a capital E. Hit them hard, hit here, push there. Destroy stuff. He enjoyed badgering them just for fun.” The behavior drew mostly praise from Amir’s officers.
There were other forms of harassment as well. Amir told friends later that on patrols in Gaza, he and his buddies liked to drive their jeeps straight at oncoming Palestinian vehicles in order to provoke a response. If a driver didn’t swerve to get out of their way, the soldiers would interpret the behavior as hostile and shoot at his windshield. Most of the time, the Palestinians would pull well off the road to let the soldiers pass.
The growing brutality of soldiers serving in the West Bank and Gaza raised enough concern for the government to commission an internal study in 1989 on how the intifada was affecting troops. It concluded, perhaps not surprisingly, that soldiers often became violent at home as well and cultivated a deep hatred for Palestinians.
For Amir, the power felt invigorating. A photo from this period shows him standing on a dirt road, in front of a row of tanks. He has one arm propped on his hip and the other draped over the shoulder of a somewhat taller soldier. Both men are smiling, but Amir’s expression is tighter and more controlled. His Galil assault rifle hangs across his torso and the signature brown beret of the Golani Brigade is folded into his epaulette. A clump of dark chest hair projects from his open shirt.
Amir’s regular evaluations were so positive that one of Israel’s intelligence agencies approached him about a mission overseas. The agency, Nativ, had been sending Israelis to the Soviet Union for short periods going back decades—to smuggle books to Zionist activists who faced government harassment, teach them Hebrew, and lift their spirits. With the Communist era now over and Jews free to leave, the mission evolved. Amir was tasked with persuading these potential emigrants to choose Israel over other destinations, including Germany and the United States. He spent several months in Riga with a second emissary, Avinoam Ezer, who came to regard him as exceptionally smart and capable. By the time they left, Amir had learned enough Russian to communicate basic ideas.
Sometime during his service Amir gravitated toward a more provocative form of fundamentalism. Whereas his Haredi upbringing taught him that God alone determined the destiny of the Jews, he now bristled at the passiveness of this approach. Instead, he embraced the idea that Jews “must learn to fathom God’s Will” and act accordingly. Amir had read the line in an introduction to a book of essays by Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, the spiritual leader of the settlers in the West Bank and Gaza. While Kook seemed not quite fiery enough for Amir, the author of the introduction, the far-right politician Binyamin Elon, had captured something profoundly meaningful to the young extremist. “Contrary to the secular, activist approach, which holds that history is determined by man’s actions alone, and contrary to the passive [religious] approach, which holds that Divine Will is the sole instrumentality, we must learn to fathom God’s Will and ‘come to the help of the Lord’ [Judges 5:23] and ‘act with God,’ ” he wrote in his own essay. Elon meant the passage as an exhortation: Jews must settle the West Bank and Gaza rather than wait for God to secure their sovereignty over the territory.
But Amir read it as a broader theological doctrine, one that empowered him to judge for himself—to “fathom God’s Will”—whether political leaders were honoring the Bible or violating it. Amir felt uniquely qualified to execute the doctrine. In his own view, he knew God’s writ better than most Jews, even most rabbis. And he was a doer—the characteristic that defined Amir more than any other, that distinguished him from his peers in school and in the military. If a leader of Israel strayed from the core tenets of the Bible, Amir had his own notions about how to “come to the help of the Lord.”
At home, these notions helped draw a line between his father’s Judaism and his own. Amir had already told his brother Hagai cryptically that it might be necessary to do something about Rabin. When he repeated the words one day at the dinner table, his father responded with a line he would deliver again and again in the coming years. “Only through prayer and Torah study will the government collapse. And if it doesn’t, it’s not God’s will,” he said.
To Amir it was a meek and submissive Judaism his father was preaching, one he had already left behind.
SOMETIME AFTER THE holiday, Amir and his brother set out for Shavei Shomron, a Jewish settlement surrounded by Palestinian villages in the West Bank. Hagai had finished his own army service several years earlier and had been working in trade jobs, first as an electrician and now as a metalsmith. With the money he’d saved, he bought an off-white Volkswagen Beetle, a 1976 model. He also put several thousand dollars in a savings account and bought shares in a company that quickly lost most of its value. He hadn’t bothered cashing out.
The two brothers looked alike, held the same extremist positions, and confided in each other about almost everything, having shared a room since birth. But they were different in significant ways. Amir engaged easily with people, including girls, while Hagai mostly kept to himself. Hagai had watched his little brother stand up to older and bigger boys if they tried to bully him on the playground but lacked the fiery temperament to do it himself. He also lacked his brother’s aptitude in school. Geulah thought of her two sons as the thinker and the tinkerer, Hagai being the one who could fix appliances in the house, who liked taking apart old radios to see how they worked.
Hagai was also less crafty. Geulah kept the boys mostly indoors or in the backyard. “You wouldn’t see them just walking the streets,” she would recall years later. She also kept them from participating in sports, which involved dressing immodestly and mingling with girls, whether on the team or on the sidelines. Instead, the two burned their schoolboy energy around the house. Hagai liked to sneak up on his brother and knock the book he was reading from his hand, a provocation that invariably ended in a chase and a broken window. (The neighborhood glazier, a survivor of Nazi concentration camps, made a regular portion of his living from the Amirs). But Amir almost never got punished. “Hagai would get yelled, at but Yigal was clever. He would get away with things,” Geulah said. Like his brother, Hagai had also served in an infantry unit and spent time in the Gaza Strip. During a grueling five-month boot camp, he trained as a sniper, learning how to stalk a target, where to position himself, and how to breathe while shooting. He also developed an interest in explosives, reading about them in army manuals and pilfering munitions whenever he could. On isolated operating bases, it was not difficult to do. The ammunition was often stored in a tent and guarded by the soldiers themselves. If Hagai did three hours of guard duty at the tent, he might leave with a pocketful of fuses or detonators.
At home, Hagai figured out how to wire explosives to a timer and a battery. He also learned to make amateur hand grenades, with iron pipes and a propellant. By the time he left the army, his munitions stash included timers, fuses, TNT sticks, ammonal powder, and several blocks of the explosive C-4, one of which he’d received recently from a friend on active duty, Arik Schwartz. He hid the items in a few places around the house, including the attic and the shed in the backyard, where he kept his tools and did his tinkering. He also punched a hole in the wall of his room and stored the more dangerous materials in the cavity of a cinderblock. He then plastered it shut and repainted the wall to hide any trace of the opening.
Hagai meant for the materials to serve his hobby; he began collecting them long before Rabin’s peace deal with Arafat. But already in the coming weeks they would figure in the plans he and his brother would draw up to undermine the deal.
Shavei Shomron lay about an hour east of Herzliya and some fifteen miles into the West Bank—a territory that Israelis had increasingly taken to calling by its biblical name, Judea and Samaria. Perched on a hill overlooking the sprawling Palestinian city of Nablus, the settlement consisted of mostly single-family homes with red-tiled roofs, an eye-catcher in the otherwise rocky monochrome of the West Bank. Its 600 or so residents included Israel Shirion, a man in his late thirties who oversaw security and maintenance at the settlement and also transported schoolchildren to and from the surrounding communities. Shirion was the younger brother of Geulah Amir and the uncle of Yigal and Hagai.
The two brothers visited him regularly at the settlement, which had a swimming pool, several synagogues, and a large contingent of young people. With its population of mostly Orthodox Jews and its rural isolation, the town exuded an almost mystical serenity on holidays and weekends.
It also radiated a pioneering militancy, its residents having lived for the first years in trailers or prefabricated structures, the men all armed with automatic rifles. Shirion had been among a group of founders who left their homes inside Israel in 1977 to spearhead the colonizing of Samaria, the biblical term corresponding to the northern half of the West Bank. Until then, Israelis had confined their settlement-building mostly to the area known as Judea south of Jerusalem—around Hebron and what Israelis called the Gush Etzion Bloc. International law expressly bars countries from colonizing territories they capture in war. But since Jewish communities had existed in both Hebron and Gush Etzion prior to Israel’s independence in 1948, left-leaning Labor governments argued that construction there amounted to a “reclamation” project.
The right-wing Likud Party that replaced Labor in 1977 enacted a much more aggressive settlement policy, authorizing new communities deep in the West Bank. Israelis who would populate these new outposts were motivated not by the prospect of improving their standard of living—the incentive that would draw tens of thousands to the settlements in subsequent years. These early settlers felt Jews had a singular right to the territory and that Palestinians—1 million of them in 1967, growing to 2 million by 1993—were essentially squatters. A steady expansion had brought the settler population to 140,000 in 1993, scattered across the territory in configurations strategically designed to block Palestinian contiguity.
Nothing divided Israelis more sharply than the settlement enterprise. To supporters, the settlers were rekindling that old Zionist spirit, bolstering Israeli security by putting themselves on the front lines, and bearing the brunt of Palestinian violence. To detractors, their very presence in the West Bank and Gaza amounted to a provocation. It violated international law and gradually foreclosed on the possibility of peace between Israel and the Palestinians. The religious among the settlers, including Shirion, added a messianic element to the enterprise. For them, the incredible conquest of 1967 could only have been the work of God and a sign that the messiah—the great Jewish leader who would redeem the world from war and suffering and rebuild the ancient Jewish Temple—would soon appear. Settling Judea and Samaria, the heart of biblical Israel, was a way to hasten the coming of the messiah.
Shirion was fifteen years older than Hagai and seventeen years older than Amir. More of an older brother than an uncle, he liked to mentor the two, not always to their father’s liking. When the boys were teens, he would take them to a firing zone near his home to squeeze off rounds from his handgun, an Italian-made .22 caliber and later a Glock 19. When their father counseled them to continue studying the Torah in the yeshiva instead of joining the military, Shirion told them that service in the army, preferably in a combat unit, was the real way to fulfill the Zionist ethic. After their service, he helped both young men obtain gun licenses by having them change their official residency from Herzliya to his home in Shavei Shomron. Israel had strict gun laws. Only people who could show they genuinely needed one to defend themselves received licenses. Living on a settlement surrounded by Palestinians meant almost automatic approval.
On trips to Shavei Shomron, the two kept their guns wedged in their pants. Both had purchased 9mm Berettas, the standard sidearm of the US Army at the time, from a gun shop in Herzliya. The permits they held limited the number of shells they could buy each year. But the shop owner, a former policeman, sold them as many as they wanted—in Hagai’s case, a good lot. On recurring visits to the store, he bought boxes of regular rounds and hollow points in equal numbers, sharing the supply with his brother.
Hagai liked to stack the shells alternately in his fifteen-round magazine, starting and ending with a hollow point, a technique he also taught his brother. Palestinians regularly stoned Israeli cars on the road to Shavei Shomron and elsewhere in the West Bank and Gaza, but drive-by shootings were also a threat. The hollow points, which expanded on impact and tended to lodge in the body, would blast a stone thrower clear off the road. But their scooped-out tip made them less effective than regular rounds at penetrating the steel frame of a car. Hagai figured that having both shell types in the magazine prepared him for any threat.
Sometime during the visit, or perhaps a bit later, Amir outlined to Hagai what he had in mind. Rabin would be putting settlers in jeopardy by ceding parts of the West Bank to the Palestinians. To counter the plan, the two would recruit young men for a militia that would carry out harsh reprisals in response to any attack on Israelis—shootings and bombings but also broader action like the downing of power lines in Palestinian areas. The spiraling violence would surely rupture the peace process. Amir would focus on students at Bar-Ilan University, where his semester would begin in a few weeks. Hagai’s role was to target students at the college in Ariel, one of the West Bank’s largest settlements. He had already registered for prep courses there, intending to major in physics.
The two discussed the criteria for membership in their militia. The recruits would have to be graduates of combat units in the army, comfortable with both guns and explosives. They would need to show a zealous commitment to the settlement project in Judea and Samaria and to ousting the Rabin government with its leftist agenda. Hagai’s stash of munitions would serve as a start. More would have to be collected.
If the idea seemed outlandish, it certainly did not faze Hagai. There were precedents for what Amir was suggesting. A decade earlier, a band of settlers had carried out a string of terrorist attacks against Palestinians, including a shooting spree on a college campus and bombings targeting the mayors of Nablus and Ramallah. Israel’s internal security agency, Shabak (a Hebrew acronym that stands for General Security Service), thwarted the group’s most ambitious plan: to blow up the venerated Muslim shrine known as the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem so that Judaism’s ancient temple could be rebuilt on its ruins. Though the plot could well have ignited a regional war, most of the militia members received presidential pardons after serving short prison terms.
Amir regarded the Jewish Underground, as the media dubbed the group, a model for his militia. But he also had the grandiosity to think of himself in historical terms—as a link in a chain of Jewish rebellion and zealotry, from the Maccabees, who revolted against the Seleucid Empire in the second century BC, to the Jewish armed groups that operated in Palestine before Israel’s independence. He and Hagai had both read The Revolt, a kind of manual for guerrilla warfare written by Menachem Begin, who headed the pro-independence Irgun Zvai Leumi (or Irgun, for short) in the 1940s and later became Israel’s prime minister. The group distinguished itself by carrying out devastating attacks against both Palestinian civilians and British administrators of Palestine, including the 1946 bombing of Jerusalem’s King David Hotel that killed ninety-one people. Amir viewed the Rabin government much the way Begin regarded the British Mandate and the Maccabees saw the Seleucids: as intruders, purveyors of a foreign culture and a threat to Jewish existence. It mattered not that Rabin himself was Jewish, the hero of 1967, and the elected prime minister of Israel.
With the conciliation process between Israelis and Palestinians only just getting under way, the Amir brothers made a commitment to each other: they would risk spending years in jail in order to prevent Rabin from surrendering parts of Eretz Israel—the Jewish homeland—to Arafat. Hagai drew the line there, telling his brother he would not die for the cause.
IN THE FOLLOWING weeks, every day seemed to bring some nugget of news that suggested Israel had altered its troubled trajectory with the signing in Washington. Jordan’s King Hussein agreed to a common agenda for peace talks with Israel after decades of quiet contacts. Two African nations, Gabon and Mauritius, established ties with Israel—not exactly a diplomatic triumph but noteworthy enough to be heralded on the front page of Israeli newspapers.
Rabin brought his deal with Arafat to lawmakers on September 23 and won their endorsement by a comfortable margin, 61 to 50. In an embarrassment to Benjamin Netanyahu, three members of his Likud Party abstained instead of opposing the agreement. Netanyahu had taken control of Likud just six months earlier and struggled to impose discipline. But Rabin had problems of his own. One of his coalition partners, the ultra-Orthodox Shas Party, failed to support the deal, forcing him to rely on the votes of Arab-Israeli parliament members to clinch an absolute majority in the 120-member legislature known as the Knesset. Opponents of the agreement would seize on this to discredit the approval process, advancing the unsavory argument that Jewish votes alone should count when broad national issues are at stake. Netanyahu told reporters after the parliamentary session that Rabin’s coalition “stood on chicken legs.”
More distressing for Rabin was the surge in attacks on Israelis by Hamas and Islamic Jihad—a smaller Palestinian group that had also vowed to resist the peace deal. The violence included a fatal stabbing on September 24 and an attempted car bombing a week later that went awry. But it was the brutal killing of two Israeli hikers in a scenic gorge in the West Bank on October 9 that prompted many Israelis to begin questioning whether the core transaction of the deal—security for territory—was even realistic. A squad of Palestinians shot the two young men, slit their throats, and then bludgeoned them with rocks as other hikers looked on from ridges high above the canyon. The killers had no ties to Arafat’s PLO, and Arafat himself was still in Tunis. It would take him another nine months to relocate to Gaza and deploy his forces. But Israelis had watched the dramatic handshake in Washington and expected immediate results. That internal Palestinian divisions might hamper the deal seemed to be an afterthought.
Amir started classes at Bar-Ilan days after the double murder; the mood on campus was palpably glum. The university he had chosen was the academic bastion of the Israeli right, including the Orthodox establishment and the settler movement. Most senior faculty members regarded the Oslo deal as a terrible turn for Israel and a potential disaster for the settlements—where some of them lived. The few professors who supported the agreement did so quietly, to avoid trouble with their tenure boards.
The religious stream of the Zionist movement had founded Bar-Ilan in the 1950s as an alternative to the prestigious—and very much secular—Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Its board of governors usually included the country’s top rabbis and Orthodox politicians. Though the campus was open to all applicants, the criteria for acceptance favored graduates of religious schools, a policy that guaranteed a largely religious student body. Bar-Ilan was the only university in Israel to include Jewish studies in its required curriculum.
The Six-Day War marked a turning point for the university. The religious stream of Zionism had long associated the return to biblical Israel with the coming of the messiah. Now that Israel had restored its rule in Judea and Samaria, the messianic age had clearly arrived, a premise that stirred both excitement and extremism on campus. In 1980, a campus rabbi published an article in one of the university’s student journals predicting an inevitable holy war for the “annihilation of Amalek,” a clan described in the Old Testament as an enemy to the Jews. The remark was widely understood as a call for ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians or, worse, genocide. The university eventually fired the rabbi but the air of extremism remained strong on campus. In a book years later, an Israeli legal scholar referred to the rabbi as the “evil in the heart of Bar-Ilan.”
Already in the first weeks of the school year, activists formed a group to oppose the Oslo deal—Students for Security. Amir spotted their booth at the entrance to campus one day and stopped to give it a look. The students had hung posters on the booth and around campus depicting Rabin shaking hands with Arafat while handing him a gun or Rabin clad in a kaffiyeh, Arafat-style. But the people Amir encountered seemed tepid, not quite the stalwarts he hoped to enlist for his militia. Still, he put his name to a petition on the table calling for Rabin to step down and volunteered to join the rotation of activists manning the booth.
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.
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 C3H5O3(NO2)3+3H2O.
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.