“There was a lot of intelligence noise. This was one more item.”
The Nobel ceremony gave Yigal Amir one more reason to brood. If he thought the international community would conclude from the suicide bombings that Oslo had been a mistake, it had done the opposite: honored the dealmakers with one of the world’s most prestigious prizes. In his own mind, Amir was doing everything he could to educate people about the evils of the so-called peace process. Yet he’d racked up nothing but failures: the failure to draw millions to the streets; the failure to form a serious militia; and the failure to stop Rabin.
On the Bar-Ilan campus, the first weeks of 1995 frothed with political activity. Some students had joined a hunger strike outside Rabin’s office in Jerusalem. Others took part in a campaign to heckle Rabin wherever he appeared around the country. On January 22, the prime minister was scheduled to speak at Yad Vashem to mark fifty years since the liberation of Auschwitz. Shmuel Rosenbloom, the law student who had taken up with Nava Holtzman after she severed ties with Amir, organized a bus from Bar-Ilan to the memorial in Jerusalem. Amir decided to go along.
The students intended to protest Rabin’s continuing partnership with Arafat in the face of Hamas violence. But they were also seething about something else: the government’s decision to exempt most visiting foreign officials from touring Yad Vashem. The visits had been an unvarying ritual for decades. But by the 1990s, many Israelis felt the emphasis on Jews as victims had come to seem trite and manipulative.
To the students, the decision marked one more way the government was trying to dim Israel’s Jewish heritage. A petition they circulated on campus featured a cartoon of Deputy Foreign Minister Yossi Beilin, the architect of the new policy (and of the Oslo talks), dressed as a traffic cop, directing people to Palestinian landmarks instead of Israeli ones. “How can the foreign ministry showcase Israel without showcasing the moral underpinnings of its very existence?” the petition asked. “People who don’t go there won’t understand why we are here.”
On the morning of the rally, Amir woke up early at the house in Herzliya and walked to the neighborhood synagogue as usual. But during the service he did something out of the ordinary: quietly and alone, he recited the vidui, a confessional prayer that Jews say when they are preparing to die. Without much fanfare, Amir had decided he would try to kill Rabin at Yad Vashem, even if it got him killed. The prayer had different versions, usually beginning with an acknowledgment that God alone had dominion over life and death: “May it be Your will that You heal me with total recovery, but, if I die, may my death be an atonement for all the errors, iniquities, and willful sins that I have erred, sinned and transgressed before You, and may You grant my share in the Garden of Eden, and grant me the merit to abide in the World to Come which is vouchsafed for the righteous.”
At home, Amir slipped the Beretta into his pants, then left for campus. Along the highway, from Herzliya south to Bar-Ilan, the bright bloom of the almond trees stood out against the gray of winter.
By now, sixteen months after the start of the deal with the Palestinians, Shabak had a file on Amir. It wasn’t long—just a few sentences on a single page. It included references to the student weekends he’d been organizing in the settlements and also something about his idea of recruiting people for attacks against Palestinians. The agency had compiled a list of several dozen extremists overheard talking about the need to kill Rabin. From time to time, a Shabak officer would summon one of them for a meeting, warn him that he was being watched, and perhaps revoke his gun license, if he had one. In internal documents, the agency referred to these potential assailants as b’dukaim—literally, people who warranted scrutiny. But Amir’s name was absent from the list. On campus and at the settlement weekends, Amir had been saying openly for some months now that din rodef applied to Rabin and that the prime minister needed to die. Smaller groups of people had heard him talk explicitly about killing Rabin with his Beretta. But somehow, Shabak knew only about his incipient plan to form an anti-Arab militia.
The Shabak officer in charge of thwarting Jewish extremism was a wiry man in his mid-forties, Hezi Kalo, who had spent most of his two-decade career in the Arab Affairs Department, battling Palestinian terrorism. In the agency hierarchy, Arab Affairs stood above everything else. The big budgets went to fighting terrorism, and the prestige lay with recruiting and running Palestinian agents in the West Bank and Gaza. The Jewish Affairs Department, by contrast, was the place where careers often stalled. Investigating settlers or rabbis meant tangling with their powerful patrons in government—and suffering the consequences.
Kalo took a sabbatical in 1992 to polish his Arabic and study Arab literature. He intended to return to the Arab Affairs Department. But by the end of his year away, the Oslo deal had transformed Israel’s security landscape and shifted priorities in the agency. A withdrawal from parts of the West Bank and Gaza would rouse Jewish radicals and Shabak now wanted its most experienced officers to work the Jewish side as well. Kalo began his term as head of the Jewish Affairs Department in September 1993, the month Rabin and Arafat signed their deal in Washington. “We understood we were facing a major escalation,” he recalled.
In his new role, Kalo found himself trying to infiltrate the very communities he’d spent years protecting—settlements where extremists were now plotting against Palestinians. In December, just three months after the start of Oslo, masked gunmen pulled three Palestinians from a car near Tarkumiya and shot them to death. Shabak suspected settlers but never solved the crime. Two months later, Goldstein committed his massacre in Hebron. Kalo quickly realized that Jewish extremists had advantages over Palestinian militants when it came to planning and perpetrating attacks. Most had military training and easy access to weapons. As Israeli citizens, they could travel anywhere without arousing suspicion. Around the time of the Hebron killing spree, Kalo drafted an internal memo outlining some worst-case scenarios. One was an attack on Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock, an event that would undoubtedly ignite the entire Muslim world. The other was an assassination attempt against Israeli political figures—chiefly, Rabin and Peres.
The memo coincided with some disturbing trends in the national religious community, including the rabbis’ call on soldiers to defy their commanders should they be ordered to dismantle settlements. But it received little attention in the agency. Right-wing extremists tended to point their guns at Arabs, not Jews. The last time a Jewish leader had been assassinated was in 1933, murdered on a Tel Aviv beach in a crime that remained unsolved six decades later.
Still, Kalo and a few others in his department believed the rising radicalism among settlers made it conceivable at least that someone might take a shot at Rabin. Support for the theory came from the informants Shabak ran in the settlements. Several of them reported to their handlers starting around the summer of ’94 that Jewish radicals were discussing openly whether it was permissible under Jewish law to kill a political figure in order to stop the peace process. One of the officers serving under Kalo, Yitzhak Fantik, relayed the information directly to Rabin in a meeting in July. Fantik had begun to regard all the ideological settlers—or many of them, anyway—as potential subversives. “At the moment of crisis, when there’s a clash between the laws of the state and the laws of the Torah, they’ll side with the Torah and turn against democracy,” he would say.
To cope with the rising Jewish vigilantism, Kalo ordered his officers to recruit more informants in the settlements, a particularly complicated endeavor in close-knit communities. Their information had become critical. In the fall of ’94, one of them informed Shabak that two brothers in Kiryat Arba, Eitan and Yehoyada Kahalani, were planning to murder a Palestinian randomly. In a clever bit of undercover work, the agency managed to neuter the guns the Kahalani brothers intended to use by removing the firing pins. On the appointed day, Shabak men followed them to an isolated road in the West Bank and watched them point their weapons at a Palestinian on a bicycle and then pull the trigger. When the guns misfired, they swooped in and arrested the brothers.
Weeks later, Shabak picked up on what it thought was an emerging plot to murder Peres. The details came from another informant but they were vague and circumstantial, not nearly enough to substantiate an indictment. Instead, authorities jailed the suspect without trial for several months under a procedure known in Israel as administrative detention.
The information Shabak had on Amir had also come from an informant—the blue-eyed Bar-Ilan student Avishai Raviv. The agency had recruited him eight years earlier from the ranks of the Kach movement and kept him on the payroll while he rose to prominence as a far-right agitator. His handlers found him difficult to control—he’d accumulated arrests for incitement, rioting, and assault. But Raviv was a prolific source. Though only in his late twenties, he’d already delivered thousands of tips about the radical milieu in which he’d ensconced himself. The agency had given him the code name Champagne for his bubbly energy: Somehow, Raviv managed to show up at just about every right-wing event—at the university and around the country.
Now, on the bus to Yad Vashem, in the frigid February of 1995, the firebrands from Bar-Ilan bantered across the aisle.
Jerusalem winds along the slopes of several hills, a tattered mesh of Jewish and Arab, spiritual and secular. Thanks in part to a long-standing ordinance requiring all buildings to be faced with chiseled limestone, the new neighborhoods of the city have the look of something consciously old and solemn—the architectural equivalent of distressed furniture. Amir sat near Har-Shefi and Skornik but said little. He envisioned himself standing outside the memorial, waiting for Rabin to approach, then lunging at him and firing his Beretta. Throughout the ride, he reminded himself that he had tried other approaches and was now spiritually ready. After a long stretch of highway, the bus heaved toward Mount Herzl, where Yad Vashem shares the crest with Israel’s national cemetery.
But before it reached the top, a news bulletin announced a double suicide bombing at the Beit Lid junction north of Tel Aviv. A Palestinian bomber blew himself up at a bus stop teeming with soldiers near the town of Netanya. Moments later, a second bomber set off his explosives, killing people who rushed in to help the wounded. The attacks would be claimed by Islamic Jihad—Hamas’s smaller and more radical stepsister. But Israeli investigators would discover that the bombs used at Beit Lid were built by the same Hamas operator involved in earlier attacks, Yahya Ayyash.
Amir listened to the descriptions of the carnage on the radio and began making calculations. Rabin would surely cancel his appearance at Yad Vashem. He might well decide to tour the bombing site, something officials often did in the aftermath of a major attack. If Amir could embed himself in the crowd pressing in on the Israeli leader, he might be able to take a shot at Rabin. He contemplated getting off the bus and finding his way to Beit Lid. But then he reconsidered. The assassination needed to be perpetrated in cold blood. “It occurred to me that I didn’t want it to be an emotional response to something,” he would say later. “If I’m going to act, it’s only from a cerebral place. I won’t do it in the aftermath of an attack.” Amir remained with the group.
On the way back to campus, the radio delivered constant updates from the bomb scene. Rabin had indeed rushed to Beit Lid and was met by crowds chanting, “Death to Arabs.” Now, Amir let loose. Once again, he announced openly that din rodef applied to Rabin and that the prime minister must die. An argument ensued, with students shouting across the aisle, debating whether the Halakhic decree had any relevance at all and, if it did, whether it allowed for the killing of the prime minister. Rosenbloom, who organized the protest, would say later that he was seated too far from Amir to hear his remarks. By now he and Holtzman had been dating for several months and were planning to marry in May.
Raviv filed reports to Shabak about many of the events he attended with Amir. But he never mentioned his threats against Rabin. Like many of the people who surrounded Amir, he simply did not give them credence. Raviv was a complicated character. He took seriously his work with Shabak and felt devoted to his handlers. The secrecy and intrigue of his life as an informant appealed to him deeply, so much so that he dreaded the prospect of being cut loose one day. But the world of far-right politics, the ideological certainty, the ethnic chauvinism and the bullying, tapped into something central in his character. Compulsively, Raviv needed to be the most provocative figure in any setting, the biggest attention hound. In Amir, he saw something similar—a young man who liked to talk big, liked the attention, and liked women. Not a guy who would murder the prime minister. Raviv himself blustered about the need to kill Rabin. Why should he have taken Amir’s bombast seriously?
Shabak had two kinds of informants. There were those who joined the agency on a career track, received training in undercover work, and then got planted in target groups. As homegrown agents, there was rarely a question of their motives or loyalty to the agency. But their training and infiltration could take years. And as newcomers to the target group, they were often looked on with suspicion. As a rule, the more radical the group, the harder it was to infiltrate a homegrown agent. Then there were the “purchased” informants, people recruited from within particular communities or political groups whose credibility as activists was already established. These insiders would often deliver much better information but they could be difficult to control.
Raviv was a purchased informant. He had been active in Kach already as a teenager, hanging posters for the group in the Tel Aviv suburb where he grew up and showing up at rowdy protests and rallies. In high school, Raviv met Meir Kahane, the rabble-rousing leader of Kach, whose racist tropes included vulgar references to Arabs defiling Jewish women. To friends at the time, Raviv seemed spellbound. Among the messages he picked up from Kahane, Raviv liked to talk about the traitorous smolanim—leftists who cared more about the Arabs than their fellow Jews. Already then, he craved media attention.
Sometime after the army released Raviv on a disability, Shabak made the approach. By then he’d racked up several arrests and perhaps the agency enticed him with an offer to expunge his record. Once on the Shabak payroll, Raviv began branching out, operating with several groups at once. Dani Dayan, who encountered him while working for the right-wing Tehiya Party in the late 1980s, recalled something pleasant about Raviv, not exactly charisma but a kind of boyish enthusiasm and a stutter that made him seem vulnerable. But he could also be thuggish and breathtakingly reckless. Raviv dated a teenage girl the Dayans had informally adopted, often visiting her at their home in the settlement Ma’ale Shomron. One day he took her to the Palestinian town of Qalqilya in the West Bank to throw stones at passing cars. “We got very angry at him,” he said.
Dayan, who would eventually become the chairman of the YESHA Council, heard rumors that Raviv worked for Shabak but dismissed them. Other friends had their suspicions. Raviv was constantly initiating hate crimes—running amok in Palestinian produce markets, organizing a militia summer camp, assaulting a leftist parliament member. But while his accomplices ended up in court, he seemed to have a knack for dodging indictments.
That knack was actually the deft maneuvering of his handlers, who repeatedly extracted their agent from trouble. If a policeman arrested Raviv, he might get a call from a Shabak officer asking him cryptically to release the suspect without raising too many questions. If somehow an investigation ensued, the state attorney herself—the one official in the Justice Department who knew Raviv worked for Shabak—would quietly quash the indictment.
By late ’94, Shabak had grown tired of its informant’s excesses. Raviv had formed his own group, Eyal, that was drawing media attention. With the help of a deputy, Benzion Gopstein, Eyal would circulate regular beeper messages to journalists announcing its latest provocation. In undercover work, agencies prefer for their informants to be observers, not initiators. Otherwise, it can look like authorities have planted a provocateur to deliberately smear the group. As the hooliganism mounted, Raviv’s handlers summoned him repeatedly for rebukes and suspended him at least once.
But Raviv was delivering so much information that the agency, coping with spiraling radicalism in the settlements, felt it could not afford to sever the relationship. He was also making personal sacrifices to improve his intelligence gathering. Raviv had married a religious woman and started wearing a skullcap—though in reality he remained secular. For nearly a year now, he was living in Kiryat Arba, on the same block where Baruch Goldstein had lived, and reporting on the settlers of Hebron—extremists who fit the agency’s profile of the Jewish terrorist or assassin.
Amir, who had begun actively stalking Rabin, did not fit this profile. He lived in Herzliya instead of a settlement and had no record of violence against Palestinians. The agency had an informant watching him but wasn’t getting the picture.
IN THE WEEKS that followed the protest at Yad Vashem, Amir couldn’t help himself: He bragged separately to Har-Shefi and Skornik about having gone there to kill Rabin. Later, he confided it to Adani. Though nothing had actually happened at Yad Vashem, the event marked a psychological leap for Amir and a shift in his own self-perception. Until then, his discussions with Hagai focused on ways to kill Rabin and flee. The escape plan held as much importance as the killing itself. Now, Amir had begun thinking of himself as a living dead man, a martyr like the Palestinian bombers. From a tactical point of view, the shift offered tremendous advantages. If there was no need to hatch a getaway, the options for killing Rabin multiplied.
The awareness colored Amir’s winter. He continued organizing protests and student weekends—mostly at far-flung settlements. But his parents noticed their son had become more pensive and withdrawn. Geulah thought Amir was still brooding over the breakup with Holtzman months earlier, or struggling with some other relationship.
At the settlement retreats, Amir would sometimes deliver the sermon after prayers Friday night or Saturday morning. One weekend, he told the biblical story of Pinchas, a Jew who witnesses another Jew transgress by lying with a Midianite. In a fit of rage, Pinchas kills them both—Zimri, the Jew, and his non-Jewish mistress. But instead of punishing him for his zealotry, God rewards the killer by declaring that the lineage of the High Priest will come from his descendants. Amir offered the story as evidence that murder can sometimes be justified. “If God wants a person to commit an act, He lets him commit the act.” Then, he made a connection between Zimri and Rabin. Both men had turned their backs on their own nation for personal pleasure or gain, he asserted. To at least some of the students, it sounded as if Amir was saying God would reward the person who killed Rabin.
At home, Amir was now scouring the papers for information on Rabin’s upcoming appearances. Rabin’s government had been pressing ahead with negotiations over a wider pullback in the West Bank, one that would allow Palestinians control over six of the seven cities and many of the towns and villages. In a summit meeting, the two sides set a target date of July 1 for the start of the redeployment. Oslo II, as it had come to be called, would still leave the Jewish settlements untouched. But for Rabin’s critics, the fact that he intended to cede more West Bank land to Arafat even as Hamas persisted with its bombing campaign amounted to folly or, worse, treason. Now Amir had a deadline. He told himself he must track Rabin before July 1 and kill him.
At school, Amir continued coasting on the hard work of others, skipping classes and borrowing notes from friends before the exam period. During the semester break, he threw himself into a new book about Rabin, a contemptuous assault on the Israeli leader that bracketed Amir’s religious critique of Rabin with a quasi-scholarly one. Written by the philosopher Uri Milstein, the book focused on Rabin’s early career in the military, highlighting certain episodes and depicting him as a serial bumbler on the battlefield. “It turns out . . . that Rabin amassed a string of failures and oversights that could well have prevented the establishment of the state of Israel,” he wrote hyperbolically on the back cover. Israeli academics ordinarily pay publishing houses to print their books—the market is too small for profits. In Milstein’s case, some two hundred of Rabin’s opponents donated the money.
But the book sold reasonably well and it added a veneer of academic legitimacy to what was now a street campaign of blistering agitation against Rabin. The settler journal Nekuda excerpted the book and allowed Milstein space to launch a broader attack on the Israeli left. “Rabin’s character exemplifies the left in its entirety, which exerted its hegemony . . . through brainwashing and fraud. This approach eroded the social fabric of Israel and destroyed the Israeli spirit,” he wrote.
As the street protests grew more aggressive, Shabak became increasingly concerned for Rabin’s safety. It was now standard to hear protesters chant, “Rabin is a murderer,” over and over, in pulsating fury; to compare Rabin to Hitler or his government to the Judenrat, the Jewish administrative bodies that enforced Nazi rule during World War II. The ugly invective came not just from the political margins but from the top echelons of the Likud Party. Ariel Sharon, who had founded Likud and now served as one of its senior deputies in parliament, favored the World War II comparisons. “What’s the difference between the Jewish leadership in the ghetto and this government?” he said in a typical remark, months after the Oslo signing. “There, they were forced to collaborate. Here they do it willingly.” Netanyahu generally stuck to calling Rabin a liar and accusing him of enabling violence against the settlers. “They [Hamas] receive signals from both the government and the PLO to kill Jews in Judea and Samaria.”
Others said much worse. Politicians regularly likened Rabin’s administration to the collaborating Vichy government in France during the Second World War, to the Quisling government in Norway, and to the Nazi regime itself. Settler leaders portrayed Rabin’s peace deals as acts of treason for which the prime minister and his cabinet would one day stand trial.
Certainly, this wasn’t the first time Israeli politicians reached for inflammatory rhetoric or made heinous Nazi-era comparisons. Left-wing activists depicted Sharon as a murderer for his role in Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon and the Phalangist massacre of Palestinians at Sabra and Shatila. But the invective on the right was being matched by a rising tendency toward violence on the right. In Shabak’s Jewish Affairs Department, Kalo was now wondering how long it would take before some hothead interpreted the verbal assaults on Rabin as a green light for a physical assault.
In early March 1995, Rabin named Carmi Gillon to head Shabak, an appointment that symbolized more than anything the new priorities in the agency. Gillon had never served in the Arab Affairs Department. He started his career with the Dignitary Protection Unit—the equivalent of the American Secret Service—and made his reputation in the Jewish Affairs Department, having broken up the Jewish Underground in the 1980s. No one in Shabak knew more about right-wing extremism than Gillon. On his sabbatical in 1990, he wrote a master’s thesis about the radicalization process under way on the right, which he said “pushes the extremists even further towards the margins, both ideologically and in terms of their willingness to take dangerous action.”
Almost immediately, Gillon took steps to protect Rabin. But he met resistance from an unexpected source—Rabin himself. In March, Gillon decided to order an armored car. Astonishingly, Israeli prime ministers to date had been chauffeured in regular American-made vehicles, usually a Chevrolet Caprice. The agency appointed a team to pick the right model. The most secure cars in the world were made by Mercedes, but because of the sensitivities involved—still, fifty years after the Holocaust—ordering a German car for Rabin was out of the question. Instead, Shabak purchased an armored Cadillac, similar to the model the Secret Service used to ferry President Clinton around at the time.
Rabin hated it. Luxury cars were uncommon in Israel and Cadillacs, especially, with their wreath-and-crest hood ornaments, had the air of American excess. When it arrived at the port in Haifa, an Israeli television crew filmed it being wheeled into the parking lot. The report aired on Channel One highlighted the car’s lavishness, prompting opposition figures to criticize Rabin for wasting government money. From that point on, the car became a source of friction between the prime minister and his security chief. Rabin complained that the silver Cadillac, with its thick, cloudy windows and its excessive weight, made him claustrophobic. Often he instructed his driver to bring the Caprice instead—over the objections of the agency. Yechezkel Sharabi, who served as Rabin’s driver for three decades, said later that his boss felt uncomfortable traveling in an armored car when ordinary Israelis risked being blown up on buses.
Rabin and Gillon also clashed over the issue of a bulletproof vest, which the agency had been trying for more than a year to get Rabin to wear. Gillon made the case that the threats against the prime minister were now specific enough to warrant wearing one at all public appearances. He argued that modern vests were light and flexible, not the bulky things Rabin knew from his military days. And he explained why they were so effective. Most assassins shot from the hip—raising the gun to eye level made them too conspicuous. From that low-down position, even a skilled shooter would have a hard time hitting a person in the head. The back, in contrast, formed a broad target. A good bulletproof vest would cover it entirely.
Rabin responded with a typical wave of the hand. “Are you out of your mind? I’ll never wear a bulletproof vest in my own country, no matter what it’s made of.” In early spring, Rabin and Gillon both attended Israel’s annual memorial service for fallen soldiers at Mount Herzl in Jerusalem. Right-wing protesters waited for the prime minister, chanting, “Rabin is a traitor.” Gillon gestured at the crowd and raised the issue once again, only to be rebuffed. “I could understand his position,” Gillon would write in his memoir later. “He was this Palmach soldier who fought in Israel’s wars for thirty years, who commanded the army in the victorious Six-Day War . . . and he’s supposed to suffer this humiliation?”
Though the relationship between the two men would eventually improve, at this early stage it remained awkward. Rabin had deliberated for months between Gillon and Gideon Ezra for the position of Shabak chief. Ezra had come from the Arab Affairs Department—it had been his idea to check car rental companies that led Shabak to Wachsman’s captors. In a way, the choice between them mirrored the broader questions facing Israel: Was it genuinely ending its rule over the Palestinians or merely repositioning its occupation? Did domestic threats now require as much attention as external ones? Ezra had been considered extremely effective at antiterrorism but the agency’s new roles included coordinating with former enemies in the West Bank and Gaza. Rabin wasn’t sure Ezra could make the transition. Still, terrorism had not subsided. On the contrary, it had mutated into something deadlier and more fanatical. So torn was Rabin that he offered the job to a third candidate, navy chief Ami Ayalon. When Ayalon turned it down, Gillon finally got the call. But he entered the job with the dispiriting knowledge that he wasn’t Rabin’s only candidate—or even his preferred one.
The entire debate, of course, was concealed from the public. Shabak’s culture was so secretive, it kept the very identity of the man who ran the agency hidden. The Israeli press referred to Gillon only by the first initial of his first name—Kaf, in Hebrew. Still, somehow the settlers knew his résumé and complained about his appointment.
The matter of body armor was on Amir’s mind as well: he wondered whether Rabin would be wearing a vest when he finally caught up to the prime minister. Though Amir now regarded his plan as a suicide mission, he still feared failing—and dying for nothing. Over the spring semester, he and his brother went to a shooting range at an isolated beach several times to test bullets Hagai had modified to make them armor-piercing. He’d learned the technique from a book about guns and ammunition. In his shed behind the house in Herzliya, Hagai had drilled into the top of a bullet and pressed a small steel pellet into the groove he’d created. The extra weight would give the projectile more force. Over the course of several weeks, he made some forty of these bullets and gave half to his brother.
As part of the experiment, the brothers shot both hollow points and modified rounds at a thick aluminum plate Hagai had attached to a large telephone book—the equivalent of the American Yellow Pages. The plate stopped the hollow points. But with Hagai’s rounds, the steel pellet pierced the aluminum and tunneled well into the phone book. After additional modifications, Hagai was satisfied that his homemade ammunition would penetrate a vest. From that point on, Amir kept several stacked in his magazine, alongside the regular casings and the hollow points. With the July deadline drawing near, he felt an almost constant restlessness, a compulsion to put himself close to the prime minister.
In April, Amir spotted an opportunity. At the end of the weeklong Passover holiday, leaders of the Moroccan Jewish community would hold a banquet in Jerusalem to mark the end of the ban on eating chametz, or bread products—a Maghreb tradition known as Mimouna. Rabin would be there. In Israel’s ethnically charged political climate, the Moroccans were a rising force, a group politicians regularly courted.
The event at the Nof Yerushalayim banquet hall fell on a Saturday night, April 22. Amir waited until after sunset, then drove to Jerusalem in Hagai’s Volkswagen. He planned to talk his way in and sit as close to Rabin as possible. This would be his opportunity to reprise the wedding-hall encounter eighteen months earlier, when Amir could have killed Rabin but hesitated. But after a long wait at the entrance, organizers turned him away. The hall, perched on a hill overlooking the neighborhood of Bayit VeGan, could accommodate no more than twelve hundred people. Only ticket holders would get past the door.
Outside, Amir sized up his options. The banquet hall had two stories, its façade made almost entirely of glass. Rabin’s Cadillac stood on the street abutting the entrance. Amir contemplated waiting near the car, hoping he could spot Rabin through the glass and charge at him when the prime minister emerged. But bodyguards congregated around the Cadillac and more security men sat with Rabin inside the hall. The protection procedures had clearly changed since the wedding. Amir recalled thinking at that early point, months after the Oslo signing, that he would regret not seizing the opportunity. And here he was, awash in regret. He spent one more minute considering whether he could force his way into the hall. But the lack of opportunity felt like a divine signal. “If God wants a person to commit an act, He lets him commit the act.”
Amir slipped into the Volkswagen and drove back to Herzliya.
By the following month, Kalo at the Jewish Affairs Department had decided to sound another alarm over the possibility of a political murder. The prospect of a broader pullback in the West Bank had created more agitation in the settlements. YESHA Council rabbis were now drafting a new ruling calling on soldiers to refuse to evacuate army bases, an even more galling challenge to the sovereignty of the elected government than their effort to impede the dismantling of Tel Rumeida a year earlier. In early June, Kalo issued a “strategic warning” to agency officers and law-enforcement officials effectively saying that a Jewish assassin was out there, searching for an opportunity. To Kalo, the document reflected the increasingly dire picture his informants had been painting of radical settlers desperate to halt what they saw as a sacrilege against God. Intelligence analysts measured extremists in terms of their propensity for violence. Few were more dangerous than the religiously aggrieved.
But to others in the agency, it was one more intelligence assessment among many, one more document to read and file away. Analysts were paid to provide worst-case scenarios. Sometimes their reports pointed to real dangers and sometimes to what Israelis called kisui tachat, the ass-covering common to bureaucrats everywhere.
Kalo was certainly doing effective intelligence work—the kind he’d been trained to do against Palestinians. He had figured out that someone might try to kill Rabin and he had an informant, Avishai Raviv, watching the guy who was actually plotting murder. But the two ends weren’t meeting. In part, it was Raviv’s faulty estimation of Amir as nothing but a blowhard. But the agency itself had a too-narrow mental picture of the assassin based on its experience with Jewish terrorism. He would come from one of the hardcore settlements, as did Goldstein and members of the Jewish Underground. And his pedigree would be national religious, not ultra-Orthodox. The law student from Herzliya did not register as a threat.
In June 1995, a piece of information came in that should have helped the agency connect the dots.
Amir had continued bragging to people about his thwarted plot to kill Rabin at Yad Vashem, even five months after the event. One of them was Hila Frank, a twenty-three-year-old master’s student in Bar-Ilan’s history department. Frank had met Amir at one of the protests on campus and helped him organize the settlement weekends. She thought of him as a committed activist, smart and friendly, more radical than she was but certainly not a potential killer. Now, in the hallway of a building on campus, she stopped to talk to him about Rabin. Alongside the things she’d heard him say before—that din rodef applied to the prime minister and he needed to be killed—he added the fact that he’d said vidui on the morning of the protest at Yad Vashem. The detail caught her attention. Religious Jews don’t say the confessional prayer unless they really believe they’re going to die.
Frank considered going to the police. If Amir was serious, the authorities needed to know. But if he said it just to impress her—he clearly liked flirting with women—she would land him in trouble over nothing. She shared the story with her boyfriend, Shlomi Halevy. A philosophy student at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Halevy had served in an army intelligence unit and still did stints there as a reservist. He had also studied at Bar-Ilan before transferring to Jerusalem and knew Amir from the kolel. As she recounted the details, Halevy shot her a skeptical look. Lots of people on the religious right were wishing aloud that Rabin would die. “He didn’t think it was a real threat,” Frank would recall later.
Still, the two of them kept coming back to the vidui, a detail that seemed to give the story more credibility. Amir had a gun; everyone knew that. And there was an intensity to his anger at the government that set him apart. Could he be the kind of braggart who also followed through on his threats? Halevy proposed a compromise. He would convey some of the information to his commanding officer in the intelligence unit without naming Amir. On his own later, Halevy prepared his story. He would say that he overheard two young men talking in a public bathroom at the Tel Aviv central bus station, among the most teeming spots in the city. In their conversation, he would recount to his officer, one of the young men claimed to know a person who planned to kill Rabin and had already said the vidui. Halevy would claim no names were mentioned but that the young man described the would-be assassin as a short Yemeni guy with curly hair.
If Halevy had intended to test the efficiency of the separate intelligence agencies in Israel at sharing information, the bureaucracy scored well. After hearing the story, his officer wrote a report and sent it to Shabak, where it made its way to the Jewish Affairs Department. But officers in the department—the people more keenly attuned than anyone in the country to the possibility of a political assassination—found it unremarkable. The details were vague and there was no reason to believe the source had more to tell. “It didn’t raise any red flags because this was a guy from inside the intelligence community. If he was a guy from Kiryat Arba, we would have interrogated him right away,” Kalo would say later. “There was a lot of intelligence noise. This was one more item.” Instead of summoning Halevy to Shabak for questioning, the agency asked the police to handle it.
At Jerusalem’s police headquarters, Halevy stuck to his story, claiming he sat in one of the stalls while the two young men spoke to each other over the urinal. To the two investigators in the room, it should have seemed improbable. Witnesses who claimed to have overheard bits of information in random circumstances were often hiding something, so often that Israeli security officials had a name for their stories. They called them yediot halon, roughly translated as “under-the-window tales,” as in: I was standing under a window when I heard someone above me say something incriminating. In real life, assassination plans are not overheard in public bathrooms. But instead of pressing further, the investigators made the mistake of assuming an intelligence officer would not withhold information. They took down Halevy’s story and released him after a friendly exchange. Halevy told Frank later that he would have named Amir had police pressured him even slightly.
Shabak interrogators would surely have pressed harder—they were known to be thorough. But Kalo’s department had waived the opportunity to have its own men sit with Halevy. Still, even with that misstep, it now had a pertinent bit of information. A short Yemeni guy with curly hair planned to kill the prime minister and had already said the vidui. Finding him might have been just a matter of circulating the tip among agency informants along with a question—does this description match anyone you know? The profile lacked the specificity required for tracing a suspect from a population of 5.5 million. But right-wing extremists numbered no more than a few thousand, and many of them operated under the gaze of Shabak informants. Avishai Raviv knew a short Yemeni guy with curly hair. By now, that guy had endeavored twice to kill the prime minister.
SOMEHOW, THE JEWISH Affairs Department saw no way to make use of the information. It did, however, relay the report to Dignitary Protection, the unit within Shabak responsible for guarding the prime minister and other VIPs. If Arab Affairs occupied the top rung on the agency ladder, the protection unit lingered at the bottom. Its senior officers had no role in intelligence gathering—the agency’s core function—and met with the head of Shabak on average only once every two years. Guarding dignitaries at their offices and in their homes, as they made their way from one public event to another, involved complicated planning. But to outsiders it could seem like mere muscle work. It helped little that recruits often resembled nightclub bouncers, with gorged biceps and wraparound glasses. In Shabak’s early years, the department had been known as the Escort Unit, a name some in the agency’s other branches still invoked with a sneer.
Several people in the unit read the report, including Dror Mor, the officer in charge of Rabin’s security detail. Though his job entailed more planning than actual guarding, Mor had served as a regular on Rabin’s detail in the 1980s, picking him up from his home on Rav Ashi at five in the morning on many days and staying with him until midnight. With all those hours together—more than Rabin spent with his closest advisers or even family members on a given day—Mor came to know him intimately. How this man who had been a public figure for most of his life remained so painfully shy baffled him. Rabin seemed to relish the interaction with soldiers at dusty military bases while dreading the small talk at dinners and cocktail parties—and the attire as well. When Mor came to pick him up one evening in a jacket and tie for a formal event, Rabin groused softly. “If you’re wearing one, I’m going to have to wear one,” he said, and retreated to the bedroom to change.
Mor found the detail about the short Yemeni guy determined to kill Rabin noteworthy. For decades, the protection unit was certain of only one thing when it came to assassination scenarios: the shooter would be an Arab. But Mor and others knew that assumption no longer applied. After Oslo, the unit had introduced a new drill for coping with right-wing protests at events attended by Rabin. Known as keren zavit (translated roughly as “secluded corner”), the drill specifically factored the possibility of Jews perpetrating violence at or around Rabin. “We took it into consideration; we understood it could happen,” Mor recalled later. Halevy’s statement to police seemed to substantiate the threat. Mor conveyed the vague profile to the rest of the detail. At a meeting sometime later, he asked members of the Jewish Affairs Department whether they followed up on the report and what came of it.
But even as the perception of the threat against Rabin shifted, the unit did what bureaucracies tend to do: it remained fixed in its old approach. Dignitary Protection had a near perfect record, at least within the borders of Israel. It had never lost a VIP. Though much of the credit belonged to Shabak’s intelligence gatherers, the bodyguards regarded themselves as the best in the world. All were graduates of military combat units and some had served in special operations forces. Shabak trained them to put a bullet in an assailant no longer than 1.8 seconds after the start of a potentially lethal event. Recruits who couldn’t draw and fire fast enough did not graduate from the training course. “Dignitary Protection was a cocky unit. Good but cocky,” recalled Shlomo Harnoy, one of its veterans.
The hubris bred a kind of institutional certainty that nothing bad could happen as long as the bodyguards showed up. It also fostered a culture of condescension toward outsiders, especially those who dared to offer suggestions or criticism. That, anyway, was the experience of a certain Shabak officer who served in one of the agency’s other departments and happened to live in Rabin’s neighborhood. The officer noticed that Rabin walked from his home to a country club in the area to play tennis every Saturday morning, often with Leah. Though it was a short walk and the prime minister had guards with him, he left the house at the same hour every week and took the same route to the club—basic mistakes in bodyguard tradecraft. “There were a lot of tall buildings around [where a shooter could set up] and the smell of assassination was in the air,” he recalled. The officer took up the issue with the head of the Dignitary Protection Unit. The response he got amounted to a bureaucratic brush-back: Relax, everything’s under control.
That arrogance extended to other parts of Shabak as well. When Mor raised the Halevy issue with the Jewish Affairs Department, he was similarly rebuffed.
Gillon, who had spent his entire career in Shabak, knew the agency’s shortcomings. But he was still new to the job, serving a man who had shown only tenuous confidence in him and coping with the bloodiest waves of Palestinian violence on record—on top of the right’s surging radicalism. In late June, Israeli and Palestinian negotiators engaging in marathon talks in the Egyptian resort town of Taba announced they would not meet their deadline for the Oslo II agreement. Gillon would have more time to prepare for the redeployment. But as the summer heat blistered across the country, members of the settler group Zo Artzeinu launched a new round of protests, blocking key intersections and creating huge traffic jams. Their rhetoric grew so nasty that Gillon decided to appeal directly to opposition leaders and members of the YESHA Council to help lower the temperature.
Most right-wing leaders welcomed the dialogue but the meetings produced nothing tangible. Gillon argued that hotheads on the right might misinterpret the references to Rabin as a traitor and a murderer as an explicit call for violence. He asked the leaders to exert their influence over the rank and file—or to simply refuse to speak at demonstrations where protesters engaged in incitement. The settlers, who suspected Gillon identified with Rabin politically, felt he was dwelling on the actions of a few insignificant rabble-rousers in order to tarnish the entire nationalist camp. They accused him of trying to stifle legitimate protests.
Gillon also made his pitch to a group of senior columnists, asking them to refrain from writing anything overtly inflammatory. The Shabak chief had rarely engaged with members of the media—most knew him only by the initial Kaf. Though meeting this man of secrets was clearly a dream for journalists, at least some resented his message as an attempt to mobilize the press on Shabak’s behalf. Yoel Marcus of the left-leaning Ha’aretz newspaper wrote later that the interaction made him feel like he lived in a banana republic. “Israel is not a country of political assassinations, thank God,” he wrote.
Gillon’s initiatives were all meeting resistance: the Cadillac, the bulletproof vest, the appeals to settler leaders and journalists. Now he faced yet another challenge: Avishai Raviv’s handlers felt they’d lost control of their agent. Raviv kept running amok, assaulting Palestinians and pushing the limits of what the agency thought it could justify. In the messy business of undercover work, informants sometimes broke laws. A reputation for delinquency helped an agent maintain his cover and attract the real criminals or extremists. But Shabak had been forced to intercede with the police or the Justice Department eleven times in the years it had been running Raviv in order to head off indictments. The agency had warned him repeatedly that he would lose his immunity. Yet he continued to demonstrate an almost obsessive hooliganism—and Shabak continued to protect him.
In late July, the agency summoned Raviv for what it termed a “peeling off” meeting: a daylong session in which the informant would come clean about his offenses and submit to a lie-detector test and a psychiatric evaluation. Raviv’s handlers wanted a catalogue of every crime he’d committed, whether police knew about it or not. Over several hours, the informant spared no detail. He confessed to attacking Palestinians dozens of times, often in the Hebron area and often at random, using brass knuckles, slingshots, a crossbow, a flare gun, knives, and even a real gun he borrowed from a friend. He also admitted to teaching two minors how to make petrol bombs. It was a deeply troubling list. Innocent Palestinians were being victimized regularly by a man who drew his salary from Shabak. And by seeking publicity for his thuggery, Raviv contributed to the image of the settlers as violent extremists—a reputation already well established through the acts of Baruch Goldstein and others.
Still, Raviv had shown his value again and again and this was no time to forfeit intelligence assets. His handlers decided to deliver yet another rebuke. They ordered him to get prior permission for even the tiniest infraction. Raviv promised to comply, as he had on previous occasions. But he persisted with the provocations. Several weeks after the meeting, he staged a nighttime swearing-in ceremony for new members of his Eyal militia at the national cemetery in Jerusalem, complete with guns and balaclavas. With an Israeli television crew filming the event—it would air on Channel One’s nightly newscast—each member pledged to fight the Rabin government to his dying breath. “Much blood will be spilled,” Raviv promised from behind a ski mask. To the few people who knew that Raviv worked for Shabak, the paradox could not have been more stark. Gillon had been making the case to settlers and journalists—to anyone willing to listen—that inflammatory rhetoric would lead to violence. Yet here was his own informant engaging in precisely such rhetoric. Raviv’s undercover work had created a complicated arithmetic: Even his handlers could no longer tell if the benefits canceled out the damage.
With so much going on, Gillon was now meeting Rabin almost every day. Over the summer, the two men reached an understanding about the Cadillac. Rabin would ride in the armored car whenever he attended events that appeared on his calendar—the kind a potential assassin might learn about from the media. For unscheduled events, he would have his driver bring the Caprice. Though Rabin occasionally strayed from the agreement, it seemed to set the relationship on a better footing. Rabin felt comfortable with security people, and Gillon warmed to his boss’s forthrightness. He also identified with Rabin’s social unease. At a gathering in the Caesarea home of President Ezer Weizman around midsummer, Gillon wandered through the house to get away from the crowd. He found Rabin alone in a back room, watching a soccer match on television. The two men remained there together until the game ended.
The delay in the negotiations gave the Amir brothers a respite as well. Three months had passed since Yigal’s aborted mission at the banquet hall in Jerusalem. When he told his brother about it, Hagai became more determined than ever to forge a better plan, something other than a suicide operation. Killing Rabin with a handgun meant his brother would need to get within a few feet of the prime minister—and within easy range of his bodyguards. With an assault rifle, he could shoot him from a safe distance. Hagai had enough money to afford a rifle but by law, Israelis could only buy handguns; assault weapons were issued by the military.
Hagai called the liaison officer in his infantry unit and asked to sign out an M16 rifle. His official address remained at the settlement Shavei Shomron, where his uncle lived. Hagai argued that the hour-long drive between the settlement and his college at Ariel, also in the West Bank, took him through areas where Palestinians frequently stoned Israeli cars. He needed more than a handgun to feel safe.
His company commander turned down the request. The army had issued thousands of guns to settlers over the years and incorporated these armed civilians in community patrol units. By the 1990s, some military officials worried about blowback—the possibility that settlers might turn their guns against the army if it tried to evacuate them under a peace agreement. The Hebron massacre prompted a reassessment of the gun policy; Goldstein had used an army-issued weapon in the shooting. In a phone call, the liaison officer explained that only reservists with a rank of lieutenant or higher were now eligible to sign out rifles. Hagai was a sergeant.
With that idea nixed, the brothers talked almost obsessively about other ways to kill Rabin. Sometimes, Dror Adani joined the conversation. Amir had decided Adani would make a good match for his younger sister Vardit. He brought him to the house several times to get to know her. But Vardit showed little interest and, when they ran out of things to talk about, Adani would head upstairs to sit with Amir and Hagai. As the summer wore on, the brothers confided more in Adani than in anyone else. Ohad Skornik had proposed to a woman at the end of the school year—a fellow student he’d met on one of the settlement weekends—and lost interest in the militia plan.
The ideas they discussed together ranged from the impractical to the bizarre (just outside the room, two washing machines ran almost constantly, muffling their voices). Adani favored bombing Rabin’s car but had no idea how to plant the explosives without getting caught. Amir talked about trying to get an interview with Rabin for a student journal and smuggling in a gun disguised as a microphone—or hiding a bomb in the tape recorder. Hagai’s idea of injecting nitroglycerin into the pipes of the building on Rav Ashi prompted cackles. But even when the conversations strayed to the absurd, Adani, perhaps alone among Amir’s friends, actually believed Amir intended to kill the prime minister. “He really wanted to kill Rabin,” he would say later. And his outlook in those conversations seemed remarkably similar to Amir’s. Adani believed fully that din rodef applied to Rabin. He agreed that a death sentence hung over the prime minister. Occasionally, he raised the concern that murdering Rabin would harm Jewish cohesion, itself a religious precept. But Amir insisted that preventing a withdrawal from the West Bank was more important. Without Rabin, the peace process would collapse in a heap.
At the close of summer, as Oslo’s second anniversary approached, Amir tried one more time to come face-to-face with Rabin. The prime minister would be inaugurating an underpass designed to ease the rush-hour traffic at a junction north of Tel Aviv. In Taba, Israeli and Palestinian negotiators were close to finalizing the Oslo II agreement. Amir thought this might be his last chance to stop the handover of West Bank territory to the Palestinians. The Kfar Shmaryahu junction lay just ten minutes from his home; he knew the area well. An outdoor event would be easier to infiltrate, he thought. For the third time in nine months, he packed his gun and headed out to kill Rabin. But once again God seemed to offer no guidance, no help. Amir arrived at ten in the morning, noticed just a few people milling about, and decided to drive around for an hour. When he returned, Rabin had come and gone.
Amir had been pursuing Rabin for two years now while the prime minister moved closer to his objective: ending the corrosive military occupation in the West Bank and Gaza and forging peace agreements with all of Israel’s neighbors. Rabin had taken huge strides while his stalker mostly blustered and schemed. But a fanaticism defined Amir’s pursuit of Rabin—so much so that any honest interpretation of the Talmudic principle he fixated on would have pointed back at him.
Amir was the real rodef.