“You don’t make peace by sitting in your living room. Show up and make a difference.”
Rabin’s negotiators clinched the Oslo II agreement with their Palestinian counterparts on September 24, 1995. Amir, gloomy and irritable, organized a student weekend in Hebron, where the extremists would be gathering.
The agreement called for Israel to withdraw from all seven cities in the West Bank, including Hebron—though hundreds of troops would remain behind to protect the Jewish enclaves there. Israel would also hand over hundreds of towns and villages in several stages. Oslo II would not end the occupation. Large swaths of the West Bank and Gaza, including the settlements and areas defined as “military zones,” would remain in Israeli hands until the two sides negotiated a final agreement. In the interim period, Israel would continue controlling the borders, religious sites like the Cave of the Patriarchs, the water aquifers, and other natural resources. But the deal would free most Palestinians from many of the day-to-day encumbrances of Israeli military rule. And it would signal to the settlers that their enterprise had been a historic misstep, one the government was now bent on reversing. The settlement movement had grown accustomed to getting its way. It had amassed far more influence and power than its size merited. Rabin was now declaring that the tail would no longer wag the dog.
Rabin traveled to Washington toward the end of the month for another White House signing ceremony with Arafat. Though the agreement had far more breadth and detail than the original Oslo deal—it ran to 460 pages—the ceremony itself lacked the drama of the signing two years earlier. It took place in the White House East Room in the presence of a few hundred congressmen and diplomats. Journalists from around the world covered the event, but not a single American network transmitted it live. The exhilaration of 1993 had given way to temperance and even caution. But the two leaders now seemed more at ease with each other. Martin Indyk, who had left the White House to serve as the US ambassador in Tel Aviv, watched Arafat press his arm to Rabin’s back at one point and marveled that Rabin let it linger there. “Today we are more sober,” the Israeli leader said in his speech. “We are gladdened by the potential for reconciliation, but we are also wary of the dangers that lurk on every side.”
At a reception hosted by Clinton at the Corcoran Gallery across from the White House that evening, Rabin spoke unambiguously about the Palestinian right to self-determination. His unscripted comment drew applause. When Arafat remarked warmly that Jews and Arabs had always been cousins but were now peace partners, Rabin responded with a tease. He explained that Jews were not famous for their athletic abilities but had a gift for speechmaking. Then he turned to Arafat and said playfully: “It seems to me, Mr. Chairman, that you might be a little Jewish.” Indyk would write later: “At that moment many thought the Arab-Israeli peace process had reached a tipping point. It seemed only a matter of time before a Palestinian state would be established in most of the West Bank and Gaza.”
In Israel, Rabin’s opponents sensed the tipping point as well. Rowdy street protesters now clashed with policemen almost every day somewhere around the country. In the settlements, rabbis and YESHA Council leaders talked openly about sabotaging the deal, whether by seizing military bases the army would evacuate or urging soldiers yet again to disobey withdrawal orders. By signing the Oslo II agreement, Rabin had defied biblical injunctions and undermined the redemption process that messianists believed had been under way since 1967. That alone made it an abomination for religious rightists—even as they framed their opposition to the handover of more land as largely a security issue.
Amir headed to Hebron the day after the Washington signing, taking more than 500 students with him from Bar-Ilan. The large turnout should have pleased him—the school year hadn’t even begun yet. The students, including Margalit Har-Shefi and Avishai Raviv, jammed the sidewalk at the entrance to the university, waiting to board the eight buses he and the other organizers had leased. But Amir bristled at the mingling and the banter. Where was the outrage? He’d been organizing protests since the first Oslo Accord, hoping they would help foment a rebellion. Instead, the events allowed these recreants to feel they were doing something significant while mainly shopping for spouses. He looked forward to interacting with the ideologues and the hotheads of Hebron.
They were all there. Though it would take months to implement Oslo II, activists had been heading to Hebron for days to try to block the agreement or at least vent their anger. By the time the buses from Bar-Ilan arrived, the scene outside the Cave of the Patriarchs resembled a Hasidic block party: music blaring from speakers, settler spokesmen leading tours of the area, men shouldering assault rifles, and women carrying babies. Along Shuhada Street, settlers had been waging a constant battle to displace Palestinian street merchants. Now Israelis who had only just set foot in Hebron scowled at the vendors. Amir instructed the students to set up their sleeping bags in the seminaries or prayer halls scattered around the enclaves—wherever they found room. He and Hagai, who came straight from a stint in reserve duty still clad in his military fatigues, climbed the roof of a building intending to sleep under the stars.
The weekend offered a little of everything. In a Saturday-morning sermon, Rabbi Eliezer Waldman excoriated Rabin for handing Jews over to the enemy. “We have total and absolute right to this place,” he intoned from a podium. “The government is against us, collaborating with the Arabs.” Later, Amir and other students joined settlers on a rampage through Arab areas of Hebron. The group smashed a windshield and broke the camera of a Palestinian photographer. At meals, Amir would stand up and announce upcoming events, sounding surly and impatient. At one point, he led a group to Baruch Goldstein’s grave in Kiryat Arba.
On the way back to Bar-Ilan, Amir and the other organizers handed out forms asking people to check off what they could do to help the settlers of Hebron. The options included moving to one of the enclaves and, at a lesser level of commitment, joining settler patrols. Many of the papers ended up on the floor. For the two-hour ride, Amir sat with his friends at the front of one of the buses and said little. For all the spiritedness these weekends inspired, the rightists had been dealt a stinging defeat with the signing of Oslo II, he thought. If this was Israel’s civil war, Rabin was winning.
Israelis marked Yom Kippur the following week, the holiest day of the year. Religious Jews fasted and prayed while secular Israelis, many of them anyway, spent the day on their bicycles. With a virtual ban on motorized travel, cyclists of all ages own the roads for twenty-four hours every year, swarming main arteries, riding even on highways. And yet, for all the reverence (and recreation), the political spasms continued. Rabin still had to win the endorsement of parliament for the Oslo II agreement, and the vote was sure to be close. As the debate got under way in Jerusalem on October 6, protests around the city grew steadily more sinister and frenzied, with the aggression directed mainly at Rabin.
In the afternoon, a group of extremists led by the former Kach activist Avigdor Eskin gathered outside Rabin’s official residence to pronounce a kind of Kabalistic death curse against the prime minister. Known by its Aramaic name Pulsa diNura (blaze of fire), the curse involved a complicated series of procedures and carried certain risks for its invokers: it would rebound against them if the target of the malediction turned out to be innocent. But if guilty, he would die within thirty days. One of the participants would say later that the ritual in Jerusalem had been preceded by a more official ceremony in Safed with some twenty rabbis and scholars, a sizeable gathering of extremists that Shabak somehow failed to detect. Eskin and the other participants recited the curse from photocopied pages: “Angels of destruction will hit him. He is damned where he goes. His soul will instantly leave his body . . . and he will not survive the month. Dark will be his path and God’s angel will chase him. A disaster he has never experienced will beget him and all curses known in the Torah will apply to him.”
Later in the evening, tens of thousands of people gathered at Zion Square for the largest anti-government protest in years. The square at one of Jerusalem’s main intersections had long been a venue for right-wing demonstrations—and also tourist gatherings and the occasional terrorist attack. For some two hours, Benjamin Netanyahu and a phalanx of other right-wing leaders stood on the balcony of the Ron Hotel above the square and watched as protesters came unhinged, burning pictures of the prime minister, chanting “Death to Rabin” in a pulsating frenzy, then “Rabin the Nazi,” and “In blood and fire, we’ll drive out Rabin.” One of the demonstrators had brought a stack of photocopied pages with distorted images of the prime minister, including one showing his head superimposed on the body of a dog and another of Rabin dressed in a Nazi uniform. Raviv, who drove from Kiryat Arba to attend the rally, spotted a youngster handing them out and saw an opportunity for more of the publicity he craved. He grabbed one of the Nazi images and delivered it to the hands of an Israeli television reporter, who promptly displayed it to viewers in a live broadcast.
On the balcony, Netanyahu seemed unfazed by the mayhem—even as protesters threw burning torches at the line of policemen. Any effort to call the crowd to order could well have turned the extremists against him, a risk Netanyahu evidently did not wish to take. Instead, he castigated Rabin for relying on the backing of Arab-Israeli parliament members to get his agreement through parliament. Lawmakers had yet to vote on Oslo II, but it was clear by now that Rabin would need the representatives of Israel’s Arab minority to support it in order for the deal to pass. Though Arab-Israelis were full-fledged citizens and made up one-sixth of the population, Netanyahu and many other rightists were now arguing, unblushingly, that an endorsement that rested on the support of non-Jews would lack legitimacy. “The Jewish majority of the state of Israel has not approved the agreement,” he said. “We will fight and we will bring down the government.”
The protest ended around ten p.m., but instead of dispersing, thousands of demonstrators marched on the Knesset, where legislators would debate the accord into the night. All 120 parliament members had signed up to address the plenum before the vote; each was entitled to five minutes at the microphone. As the crowd outside swelled, hundreds of policemen rushed from other parts of the city to the parliament building and formed a human cordon. For the first time in Israel’s history, it seemed the Knesset might be overrun.
Menachem Damti, who served as Rabin’s alternate driver, happened to be making his way to the Knesset in the Cadillac. A block from the building, protesters swarmed the car, rocking it back and forth, climbing the hood and pounding on the roof. Fearing a lynching, Damti locked the doors and inched his way forward until policemen arrived and pulled people off the car. But in the melee, one of the protesters managed to rip the hood ornament from the Cadillac. A nineteen-year-old Kach activist, Itamar Ben-Gvir, held up the ornament during a television interview later and made what could only be interpreted as a death threat. “This is the ornament. People managed to remove the ornament from the car. And just as we got to the ornament, we can get to Rabin,” he said.
One of Rabin’s cabinet ministers, Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, got caught up in the mob as well. A retired general who had served in an elite commando unit and suffered war wounds, Ben-Eliezer told friends later that he felt more threatened in the car than in his toughest moments on the battlefield. When he reached the Knesset building, Ben-Eliezer tracked down Netanyahu in one of the corridors and launched at him. “You better restrain your people, otherwise it will end in murder. They tried to kill me just now. . . . If someone is murdered, the blood will be on your hands.”
By the time lawmakers voted on the Oslo II Accord sometime after three in the morning, most of the protesters had gone home. Rabin managed to rally sixty-one votes to the opposition’s fifty-nine—a narrow margin but a majority nonetheless. Yoel Bin-Nun, the settler rabbi who had been corresponding with Rabin for more than three years, now crafted his harshest letter yet to the prime minister. “Your success at passing the agreement . . . is formal and legal but cannot be binding on the entire nation of Israel, either morally or historically. It certainly cannot obligate Jewish history,” he wrote. Still, he vowed to fight those members of the right-wing camp calling for an insurrection. “I will continue opposing any attempt to go against the law and against the democratic foundation, which remains the one thing that stands between us and a civil war.”
From both sides of the political divide, the civil-war scenario now seemed at least plausible. Israel had reached a crossroads on a matter that would define its very character, with implications for territory, rights, and religion, and with two roughly equal camps pulling in opposite directions. What would Israel be and what would it do? Would it surrender land some regarded as a Jewish birthright or maintain a system of rule in the West Bank and Gaza that privileged Jews and disenfranchised Palestinians?
Amir, who had attended the rally at Zion Square and then made his way to the Knesset, somehow missed the ransacking of Rabin’s car. When he spotted Har-Shefi on the street later, he told her he was mad at himself for having been elsewhere. But a certain line had been crossed in Jerusalem and Amir felt it. A few days later, he watched another right-wing outburst on television. At an annual gathering of American immigrants at the Wingate Institute north of Tel Aviv, a protester charged at Rabin, getting to within a few feet of him before being intercepted by a bodyguard. The assailant didn’t exactly fit the profile of the right-wing hothead. He was later identified as Natan Ofir, a middle-aged rabbi employed by the Hebrew University. But the mayhem at Zion Square had set a new standard for protesters; Ofir kicked and spat at policemen who tried to arrest him. To Amir, the details were less important than the lesson the event offered: Had Ofir been armed, he could have killed Rabin.
The spiraling protests posed a dilemma for Rabin, who hoped to get reelected in a year’s time. The demonstrations created the perception that Israelis overwhelmingly opposed his policies. But Rabin hated the idea of initiating a pro-government rally—it smacked of authoritarianism. Still, while his own polls gave him a small lead over Netanyahu, he worried that perceptions could shape political reality.
Haber shared his boss’s reluctance. When two figures from outside the Labor Party—the former Tel Aviv mayor Shlomo Lahat and the French businessman Jean Friedman—approached the prime minister’s office in early October with their own plans for a peace rally, his response was tepid. Haber felt that a small turnout, either due to bad weather or because people were more inclined to rally against policies than in favor—would create the impression that the public lacked confidence in Rabin. And if large numbers of people did show up, the government would be accused of using its influence with the labor unions to bolster attendance. It was a lose-lose.
Lahat, who had served alongside Rabin in the military decades earlier, came back with a new plan: a rally against violence—to address one of Haber’s points—and in favor of peace. The theme would reference the right’s rising hooliganism and its threat to Israeli democracy. It would also gesture at Hamas and its suicide attacks, recasting the regional conflict as a dispute between moderates and extremists, whether Palestinian or Israeli. As the idea circulated, Peres began pressing for the rally as well.
Sometime after the Wingate incident, Rabin relented. With the calendar out, Haber suggested November 4, a Saturday night following the prime minister’s return from the United Nations General Assembly meeting in New York. Rabin would deliver the main address. The plan quickly gained momentum, with peace groups offering their help and popular musicians agreeing to perform. Lahat chose the Kings of Israel Square as the venue, a huge plaza adjacent to Tel Aviv’s city hall building that could accommodate more than 100,000 people. The square had been the scene of the largest protest in Israel’s history—against the Lebanon War in 1982. Friedman, a contributor to Israeli political campaigns over the years, paid for several large newspaper advertisements to promote the rally, including one in Yedioth Ahronoth that read: “You don’t make peace by sitting in your living room. Show up and make a difference.
“Yes to peace, no to violence.”
With the event now two weeks away, Rabin cycled between the parts of his job he liked most and least—the closed-door security meetings and the big public events. In Tel Aviv, he deliberated for several days whether to allow a Mossad hit team to kill Fathi Shaqaqi, the Islamic Jihad leader who had boasted to a British newspaper about his role in the double suicide attack in Netanya back in January. The assassination in Malta days later would come off cleanly. At the UN General Assembly, where Israelis often received icy receptions, Rabin drew more attention than just about any other political figure. Haber struggled to make time on the prime minister’s schedule to accommodate all those world leaders who wanted their pictures taken with Rabin. Apparently, the memento had political value at home.
Amir spent the last days of October with the regulars from Bar-Ilan—though, as usual, not in class. He attended Skornik’s wedding in Tel Aviv, a glitzy affair held at the same banquet hall where Amir had first seen Rabin in person two years earlier. Skornik would notice in a video of the reception later that Amir seemed to be brooding and off to the side much of the time. Amir also organized a birthday party for Nili Kolman at a makeshift settlement that Bar-Ilan students had been visiting regularly since the summer. Among scattered trailers and an improvised synagogue, the students talked about starting their own settlement when the Likud Party eventually returned to power and ended the construction freeze. Kolman had distanced herself from Amir months earlier to avoid leading him on. Now the two were friendly again.
The day before the rally, Amir pondered whether to try to kill the prime minister at Kings of Israel Square. The start of the dreaded pullback in the West Bank was now only weeks away. Already, Israel was handing over government compounds to Palestinians in Jenin and elsewhere. But police had announced road closures around the plaza ahead of the event, which meant security would be tight. After three failed attempts to get close to Rabin, Amir had begun to think God did not intend for him to do the job. In the early afternoon, he returned home from Bar-Ilan and spotted Hagai in the front yard. Impulsively, he suggested they drive to Shavei Shomron to spend the weekend with their uncle. Had Hagai agreed, the two brothers would have remained at the settlement until the end of the Sabbath and returned to Herzliya late Saturday, too late to get to the rally.
But Hagai felt drained from the long week at school. The sky had been gray since morning and the idea of driving back into the West Bank in what might be rainy weather seemed unappealing. Instead, Hagai tinkered in the shed and then lounged around the house. Amir spent the afternoon talking to people by phone, organizing another settlement weekend. To Kolman, one of the people he reached, Amir seemed irritable. They discussed the counter-rally that rightists planned to stage at the plaza the next day, but Amir did not say whether he intended to go.
At Rabin’s apartment, the family gathered for Friday night dinner at 8 p.m. sharp, as usual. Dalia had been hosting a group from abroad and could not attend, but Yuval, who had been living in North Carolina, was now back in Israel. He arrived with a new girlfriend, Tali Henkin, who seemed surprised to find so few bodyguards posted around the building. With extremists now openly threatening the prime minister, charging him at public events, and ransacking his car, she expected a small army at the entrance. “The security is a joke,” she remarked in the narrow elevator. Yuval put a finger to his lips to indicate the issue should not be raised at the dinner table.
“We don’t talk about things like that at home.”
AT AROUND NOON the next day, Police Chief Superintendent Motti Naftali began directing preparations at the plaza. A twenty-year veteran of the force who smoked a pipe during most hours of the workday, Naftali had helped write the operational plan for the event—the document that outlined how police would maintain security at the rally. Lahat had told him to expect up to 100,000 people, a huge crowd in a square the size of several football fields. If a Hamas suicide bomber managed to blow himself up at the rally, the casualty toll would be enormous. Naftali had seen the effects of suicide attacks. A year earlier, he had surveyed the scene of the Tel Aviv bus bombing. Among the fragments and body parts, he spotted the severed head of the bomber. The security plan now included blocking roads to traffic around Kings of Israel Square and ringing the plaza with police barricades. Rally-goers would have to approach on foot and get searched by policemen on their way in.
Shabak took charge of security in the inner circle—the stage where the politicians and performers would gather and the open-air parking area just north of it. Though police bore overall responsibility for the event, officers from Shabak’s Dignitary Protection Unit exercised a certain authority over police, at least as far as the security of Rabin and the rest of the dignitaries was concerned. With Shabak chief Carmi Gillon in Paris on a work visit for the weekend, the head of the Protection Department would be the agency’s senior officer at the event.
The officers now walked the length of the plaza with Naftali and other police officials, pointing out rooftops where snipers should be posted and areas around the stage where they wanted walk-through metal detectors. The Shabak operational plan called for the stage and the parking lot to be “sterile zones,” meaning only authorized personnel would be allowed entry, a group that included VIPs, accredited journalists, performers, and their roadies.
The parking lot demanded particular attention. The stage itself was on a raised platform, accessible by two separate staircases. Keeping crowds away was simply a matter of restricting admission at two points. But the parking lot, adjoining one of the staircases, was at street level, exposed from above and open at either end. In the language of dignitary protection, the parking lot was a “seam zone,” a potentially dangerous corridor the dignitary would need to traverse in order to get from one relatively safe area to another—in this case, the car and the stage. Shabak cadets were taught that most assassination attempts occurred in seam zones, including the one against President Reagan in Washington in 1981. It was a lesson they learned on day one of their training. To secure the lot, Shabak had policemen stand at both ends—along a police barricade at one side and a rising and falling barrier gate at the other.
Around the plaza in what was now early afternoon, Tel Aviv came to life. A surge of Mediterranean sunshine had burned off the morning haze, drawing people to the sidewalk cafés that dotted the city. At one of the cafés across from Kings of Israel Square, Dror Mor, the Shabak officer who oversaw Rabin’s security detail, sat with a friend and sipped a cup of milky coffee, kafeh hafuch. Mor had no role in the security plan that day, but his subordinates would be working the event, including the two young bodyguards, Shai Glaser and Yoram Rubin. Though Glaser was just twenty-five and Rubin thirty, both had already protected Rabin at hundreds of events.
At one point the conversation turned to politics. Mor’s friend, a well-known sports analyst, probed whether the prime minister was taking seriously the threat posed to him by right-wing extremists. “Rabin is going to be assassinated,” the sports analyst said suddenly. “You guys need to be aware of it and if you want, I’ll explain it to him.” Mor had spent much of his time in the preceding months assessing the potential for right-wing violence, but his friend’s vehemence surprised him.
At Rav Ashi, some fifteen minutes north of the square, Rabin worked in the den of his apartment through the afternoon. Earlier in the day he had denied the army’s request to target a certain Lebanese militant whose location intelligence analysts had suddenly pinpointed. The potential retribution seemed to outweigh the benefits of the strike. Now he tried on the phone to defuse a crisis with Peres, who had been threatening to challenge Rabin in the upcoming Labor Party primaries if he didn’t get more say in future political appointments. The two men had come to accept their partnership in the preceding years as a kind of providence but the occasional argument still stirred up old resentments.
Throughout the day, Rabin worried whether people would show up at the rally. The night before, Lahat reassured him the square would be full. If not, he joked, the two of them would have the plaza to themselves. “You bring Leah, I’ll bring [my wife] Ziva. The performers will be there. . . . We can dance alone at the square.” Sure enough, by 7 p.m., the official start time, Israel Radio reported that thousands of people had arrived and thousands more were streaming toward the plaza. Lahat had asked Rabin to get there at 8:15 p.m. for his address. At 7:45 p.m., Yoram Rubin, who commanded the five-member close-protection team that night, knocked on Rabin’s door to say the Cadillac was waiting downstairs.
In the car, Rubin sat up front, alongside Rabin’s alternate driver, Menachem Damti. The prime minister and his wife sat in the back, where dark curtains covered the windows. Three other bodyguards rode in the Caprice, which trailed the Cadillac. In his earpiece, Rubin could hear the communications between various Shabak officers. At one point, he turned toward Rabin to report what was being said: Intelligence gatherers had picked up something about a Palestinian suicide bomber intending to strike at the rally. Perhaps this was Islamic Jihad trying to avenge the assassination of its leader in Malta the week before. Within minutes, Danny Yatom phoned the car to deliver the same news. Then he called Shabak to ask that security around the prime minister be enhanced. Leah felt a wave of dread wash over her, but Rabin seemed unfazed. Intelligence warnings were often false alarms.
By 8:15 p.m., the crowd had swelled to more than 100,000. Lahat met Rabin at the car and walked him to the edge of the platform to take in the view: A stunning mass of people, bobbing and swaying to the music blaring from the stage. Rabin’s supporters had filled every inch of the plaza and its surrounding streets. On a side road, police had cordoned off an area for the counter-rally. Only a few dozen rightists showed up, including Avishai Raviv.
Amir was on his way. In Herzliya, he’d kept to himself throughout most of the day. After telling Hagai in the morning that he’d decided to try to kill Rabin at the rally, he made no further mention of it. He ate lunch with the family, then sat in the living room and read from one of the religious texts stacked tightly on the shelf. At synagogue in the evening, Amir quietly asked God to let him accomplish the thing he’d been endeavoring to do for two years now and he repeated the vidui—the prayer Jews say before death. Though Hagai didn’t know it, Amir had paid a quick trip to the mikva the day before, the ritual bath where observant Jews purify themselves. It was one more way he prepared himself for death.
When the Sabbath ended after nightfall, Amir took his Beretta and several boxes of ammunition and closed himself off in the room next to the one he shared with Hagai. He had read about the Kahalani brothers a year earlier—how Shabak had secretly neutered their gun before they set out to kill a Palestinian. To make sure no one had replaced his rounds with blanks, Amir emptied his magazine and reloaded it with new ammunition. He started with three of his brother’s modified shells, then alternated between regular rounds and hollow points. Then he pressed the magazine back into the handle and fit the gun in his pants.
Amir slipped out of the house at 7:45 p.m. without saying goodbye, and made his way to the bus stop. If Shabak had somehow been on to him, he thought, better to avoid traveling by car, which agents could tail. He took the 247 line and got off two blocks from the plaza. To blend in, Amir took off his black skullcap and stuffed it into his pocket. In dark jeans and a T-shirt, he looked like every other demonstrator.
Amir had no real plan. But as he drew closer to the stage, he spotted the prime minister’s two cars parked in the lot, the Cadillac and the Caprice. The lot teemed with people, including policemen and security guards but also roadies and drivers, and just bystanders hoping to catch a glimpse of some famous person. The police barricade blocked the entrance only partially and the men who guarded it seemed to come and go. Amir was about to make his way in when he spotted a fellow law student from Bar-Ilan, the careful note-taker Amit Hampel, and quickly retreated. Hampel would wonder what he was doing at a peace rally and why he was not wearing his skullcap, Amir thought. He might become suspicious.
Instead, Amir pressed into the crowd. Onstage, the performers and politicians alternated at the microphone, grating on him equally. In the square, he bristled at these Hellenizers, the peaceniks. To Amir, this was the other Israel, the one with no regard for biblical warrant, no reverence for Jewish heritage. He walked the length of the plaza and then turned back toward the parking lot, approaching it this time from the west. At the electric gate, he had no trouble getting past policemen. Once inside, Amir walked to within fifteen feet of the Cadillac, leaned on one of the equipment vans, and waited. From there, he had a clear view to the staircase where Rabin would likely descend from the stage.
Now Amir gave himself over to God. If a policeman approached, he told himself, he would walk away. But if no one questioned his presence there, it would be a divine signal. If God wants a person to commit an act, He lets him commit the act.
For forty minutes, Amir lingered, either leaning against the van or sitting on a planter at the base of the stairs. The policemen around him seemed to mistake him for a roadie or a driver. To allay possible suspicions, he chatted casually with one of the cops about the musician Aviv Geffen, a rocker in white face makeup. “What a weirdo,” Amir remarked when Geffen came down from the stage. Twice, he noticed another policeman coming toward him but veering away at the last moment. The Shabak officer charged with maintaining a sterile environment in the parking lot stood less than two car lengths from Amir, leaning on the Caprice. He’d been privy to the intelligence about a “short Yemeni guy with curly hair” wanting to kill the prime minister. And yet he paid no attention to Amir. At a moment when the threat to Israel’s leader loomed larger than ever, Shabak’s seam zone—the very place where assassination attempts were known to occur—was unsecured.
Onstage, Rabin huddled with the other men in suits and waited for his turn to speak, trailed constantly by the bodyguards Rubin and Glaser. Leah looked out at the crowd and noticed a few dozen young people standing waist-deep in a fountain at the front of the plaza, shouting, “Rabin, King of Israel.” It was a pleasant alternative to the chants she’d been accustomed to hearing outside her window. While she scanned the square, the wife of an Israeli journalist approached and asked her if Rabin was wearing a bulletproof vest. Though Leah had certainly been aware of the growing threat to her husband, the question seemed somehow out of place to her.
Rabin’s turn came after Peres finished his speech and as the two men intersected at the podium, they lingered for a moment facing the plaza. In an unscripted and uncharacteristic display, Rabin threw an arm around Peres’s waist and Peres reciprocated, prompting cheers from the crowd. The speech had been written to include references to the growing danger posed by right-wing extremists. Though Rabin lacked the theatrical impulse required to be a rousing orator, he now found his rhythm. “Violence is undermining the foundation of Israeli democracy,” he said into the microphone, a staccato echo bouncing off the low-slung apartment buildings around the square. “I was a military man for twenty-seven years. I fought as long as there was no chance for peace. I believe there is a chance now, a great chance, and we must take advantage of it.”
The rally would soon draw to a close. For a finale, one of the performers lined up the politicians for a rendition of “A Song for Peace,” a late-1960s anthem that echoed the American antiwar folk songs of the era. “Sing a song for peace, don’t whisper a prayer. Better to sing a song for peace, shout it out loud.” A microphone passed down the line picked up Rabin’s discordant baritone; the prime minister, it was now evident to 100,000 rally-goers, could not carry a tune. When it was over, he folded the page with the lyrics printed on it and placed it into the breast pocket of his jacket. The national anthem followed and by 9:30 p.m., the crowd began to disperse. From a phone on the stage, Chief Superintendent Naftali called his wife to say he’d be home soon. “Everything went smoothly, Gott sei dank [thank God],” he said, using the German he’d learned during a posting in Europe.
Rubin led Rabin toward the staircase but the prime minister kept getting stopped for another handshake, another photo. Partway down, Rabin realized he’d forgotten to thank Lahat for organizing the rally. He walked back to the stage and gave him an embrace. Now the prime minister headed once again toward the exit, with Glaser on his left, Rubin on his right, and two other Shabak men trailing. On the staircase, Rubin saw the crowd in the parking lot and a horde of people to his right, pressing up against the police barricade. He had been trained to look at hands and faces—what people were holding and what their expressions indicated. If danger lurked, it would come from the right, he thought, where bystanders were reaching over the barricade to shake Rabin’s hand. The parking area to his left, where Amir still waited, was supposed to be secure. Toward the bottom of the staircase, Rabin turned his head and asked about his wife. “Where is Leah?” She had fallen behind but was there at the top of the stairs.
By this point, Rabin had entered Yigal Amir’s field of vision. From behind the planter, Amir watched Yoram Rubin place his left arm on the prime minister’s back to direct him toward the Cadillac. He waited one more moment until Rabin drew close to the car, then circled the bodyguards who trailed the prime minister and found a gap. Amir pulled the Beretta from his pants and lunged at Rabin in one fluid motion, firing three shots from a distance of about two feet. The first round sliced into Rabin’s upper back, causing him to fall forward. Amir had hit his target. The second shot struck Yoram Rubin’s left elbow, the one he’d draped over Rabin. It bore through the bodyguard’s arm and exited his shoulder. As Rabin tumbled to the ground, the third bullet entered his lower back, left of the spine.
The next few moments unspooled like a series of snapshots: The Beretta falling from Amir’s hands and bouncing off the pavement; policemen piling on top of him. The Dignitary Protection Unit had a rule that if someone managed to fire a shot at one of its VIPs, the second bullet must come from the gun of a bodyguard, directed at the assassin. Yet Amir had squeezed off three rounds and no one fired back. The head of the unit, who had followed Rabin down the stairs, watched the event with a sense of confusion that quickly gave way to horror. Behind him, or perhaps off to the side, someone else called out: “It’s not real, it’s not real.”
On the pavement, Rubin now crouched over Rabin and tried to lift him into the Cadillac. “Listen to me and no one else,” he said. But his arm ached badly and the prime minister’s body felt limp and heavy. Glaser, who had been a step ahead of Rabin when the shots rang out, spun around and dropped to the ground. Together the two bodyguards hoisted Rabin into the backseat of the car and Rubin dove in behind him. “Get going, now!” Rubin shouted to Damti. As the Cadillac sped away, the rear door still open, Glaser glimpsed an image that would stain his consciousness for years: Rabin, the man he was charged with protecting, lying on the backseat of the car, with Rubin sprawled out on top of him.
From the plaza, Ichilov Hospital was only minutes away. But the hysteria of the shooting and the crowds that still lined the streets disoriented Damti. At the first stoplight, he turned north instead of south and then lost his bearing. In the back, Rabin was bleeding heavily but still conscious. He managed to tell Rubin he thought he’d been hurt but not too badly. Then he fell into a coma. With his left arm barely functioning, Rubin leaned down and blew short quick breaths into Rabin’s mouth.
Damti punched the gas pedal, running red lights and swerving to avoid pedestrians. But he was unsure about his direction. In his rearview mirror, he saw Rubin crouching over Rabin. “What’s his condition? How’s Rabin?” he asked several times. After turning east on a main artery, Damti spotted a policeman and pressed the brakes hard. He reached across the front seat, opened the passenger door and yelled for the policeman to get in. “Guide me to Ichilov,” he said. The policeman, Pinchas Terem, took control of the megaphone, calling cars out of the way. Two minutes later, at 9:52 p.m., the Cadillac pulled into the driveway of the hospital. Some ten minutes had elapsed since the shooting.
In the emergency room, Rabin was not breathing and had no pulse. The doctor on call, Nir Cohen, noted the bullet wounds in Rabin’s back and then turned him over to examine his chest. Only then, when he bent down to listen to his lungs with a stethoscope, did Cohen realize this elderly man in his elegant suit was the prime minister. Other doctors gathered around his bed while a nurse phoned the surgery department: send people now, she said. Forty-one-year-old Mordechai Gutman, the most senior surgeon in the building, came running. The emergency-room doctors had pulled off Rabin’s jacket and shirt by now and inserted an IV. Gutman, sensing that air had seeped into Rabin’s right chest cavity, plunged a tube into his rib cage to drain it. A gust of air and blood burst from the cylinder. Suddenly, a pulse appeared; the prime minister was alive.
Gutman wanted Rabin in the surgery room immediately, where he could cut him open and treat the internal wounds. He and several other doctors wheeled the gurney into a long, fluorescent corridor and began running. Gutman expected the waiting area they passed through to be teeming with people—Rabin’s wife and children, his staff members and security team. It was strangely empty.
Leah at that moment was at Shabak headquarters across town, unsure of her husband’s condition. She’d witnessed the shooting from the staircase but by the time she reached the parking lot, Rabin was gone. Glaser, who had just watched the Cadillac speed off, took Leah by the arm and pushed her into the Caprice, to get her away from the danger zone. “What happened?” she kept asking. Glaser had felt Rabin’s limp body on the ground, but he had also heard the confusing words “It’s not real” spoken immediately after the shooting. Now his earpiece had gone quiet. Until he was told something definitive, he decided, it was better to reassure Leah. As the car raced north toward the imposing red building that served the agency, he echoed the words from the parking lot. “Don’t worry, it’s not real.”
Leah and Rabin had planned to attend a party in Zahala, north of Tel Aviv, after the rally in honor of the diplomat Avi Pazner, who’d been named Israel’s ambassador to France. For a moment, she thought Glaser might be taking her there. But the driver was tearing through the city, running red lights and cutting curbs. It made no sense. When they arrived at the Shabak office, the details began to emerge. Leah overheard one officer telling another that two people had been wounded in the parking lot, one lightly and the other seriously. Both were now at Ichilov. From a phone in one of the rooms, she called her daughter, Dalia. “Your father has been shot,” Leah said. Dalia heard the words but struggled to grasp their meaning. How could it have happened? And what was her mother doing at the Shabak building? “Why aren’t you at the hospital?”
Leah hung up and demanded to be taken to Ichilov.
By the time she got there, Israel Television had interrupted its scheduled program, the movie Crocodile Dundee II, to report that the prime minister had been shot and that his condition was unknown. The news brought hundreds of people to the street outside Ichilov, along with journalists and their broadcast vans. Inside, several of Rabin’s cabinet ministers and staff members had already arrived. The American ambassador, Martin Indyk, was on his way. Haber had been at the party in Zahala at the moment of the shooting, along with Ichilov director Gabriel Barbash. At 9:59 p.m., Barbash’s beeper went off with an urgent message to call the hospital. The two men rushed out together.
Barbash met Leah at the entrance and walked her to a private room near the surgery theater. For the first time, she learned that her husband had been struck by two bullets, that his situation was dire, and that the shooter was not a Palestinian but a Jew. It was too much to absorb. She felt herself disconnecting from the events around her. Leah thought about the protesters who had gathered outside the building on Rav Ashi every Friday afternoon, the vile things they chanted. Slowly, the room filled with people, including Dalia and her family, Sheves, Yatom, Haber, and Peres.
In operating room number 9, other senior doctors had joined Gutman by now, having rushed from their homes, among them Joseph Klausner, the head of Ichilov’s surgery complex. With the anesthesiologists and nurses, as many as forty hospital staff circled the patient. The rounds that struck the prime minister—the first and third to emerge from Amir’s gun—were hollow points. They’d caused massive internal bleeding and remained lodged in his body. It occurred to one of the doctors that a protective vest would likely have stopped these particular bullets, with their scooped-out tips. Gutman had removed Rabin’s spleen and cracked open his chest. More than twenty units of blood had been pumped into the prime minister intravenously. When a dose of adrenaline was injected into his heart, Rabin’s vital signs seemed to stabilize. Barbash left the room to report to Leah that the doctors now had some hope.
In the hallway, Haber immediately swung into action. He spotted a high-ranking Defense Ministry official and told him to begin setting up a makeshift office at the hospital, with phones and fax lines. The prime minister would need to run the affairs of the country from Ichilov while he recuperated.
But Rabin quickly lapsed again. To keep him alive, Gutman reached into his chest cavity and pumped his heart manually, repeating the motion again and again, until he lost track of time. Around the room, the grim realization was setting in that the prime minister could not be saved. Gutman sensed the futility as well but he couldn’t bring himself to pull away from Rabin’s heart. At 11:02 p.m., eighty minutes after the shooting, Klausner touched him on the back and said it was time to stop.
Rabin was dead.
THE OPERATING ROOM fell silent. Then some of the surgeons, trauma specialists who had seen terrible ordeals, began to weep. Gutman stepped away from the table and let other doctors stitch up the body. He found a corner outside the room to smoke a cigarette. Someone brought him coffee.
Barbash took several doctors with him to break the news to Leah and the rest of the family. The hallway outside the private room now swarmed with people—members of Rabin’s cabinet, military officers, and security officials. For a moment, the crowd huddled around Leah. Then Barbash led a small group including Leah; Sheves; Peres; Yuval; Dalia; her husband, Avi Pelossof; and her two children, Noa and Yonatan, to a reception room where Rabin’s body had been wheeled. A white sheet covered everything but his head. To Noa, who was now eighteen and a private in the army, her grandfather seemed to be smiling slightly. His face had retained its color but he was cold to the touch. After taking turns standing at Rabin’s bedside, the group filed out.
By this point, masses of people had gathered outside the hospital, including rally-goers who’d made their way to Ichilov straight from the plaza. From media reports, Israelis had learned that the shooter was a twenty-five-year-old Jewish extremist from Herzliya who studied law at Bar-Ilan. But they still knew little about Rabin’s precise condition. Haber was about to stun the nation. At 11:15 p.m., he walked out of the hospital alone, looking pale and deeply shaken. He stood in front of television cameras and asked for quiet. Beyond the ring of journalists, the crowd pressed forward to hear him. “The government of Israel announces with shock, with great sorrow and grief, the death of Prime Minister and Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who was murdered by an assassin this evening,” he said. At the word “death,” some people erupted in shouts of “No, no!” Others gasped loudly.
Haber continued: “The government will convene in an hour to mourn in Tel Aviv. May his memory be blessed.”
The announcement plunged Israel into a haze, a gloomy twilight zone where everything seemed surreal. At a movie house not far from Ichilov, an usher went from theater to theater to convey the news. Audiences filed out in a daze. On Channel One, television’s most distinguished anchor, Haim Yavin, could not bring himself to say the words “Rabin is dead.” Instead, he announced that the prime minister was “no longer among the living.” Yedioth Ahronoth, the country’s largest-selling newspaper, had already laid out its front section for the next day. Its editors now threw out the material and began working on a new edition for what would be a different country in the morning. The columnist Nahum Barnea, who had covered the peace rally earlier in the evening, sat down and wrote: “Ever since Israel was established people believed, rightly so, in the stability of the regime. Only in Arab countries are leaders assassinated. Only in Arab countries, people who strive for peace pay with their lives. . . . We were mistaken. We are not immune.”
In Washington, Clinton’s aides patched the president through to Leah in the hospital. Clinton’s national security adviser, Anthony Lake, had been the one to inform the president ninety minutes earlier that an attempt had been made on Rabin’s life. The long wait for word on his condition felt excruciating. To steady his nerves, Clinton walked out to the putting green on the South Lawn of the White House—the same grassy field where the Oslo Accord had been signed two years earlier—and swung at golf balls aimlessly. Eventually, he spotted Lake walking toward him from the Oval Office. “From the look on his face, I knew that my friend was gone,” Clinton would say later.
On the phone, he tried to comfort Leah. “This idiot took my Yitzhak away,” she told him. After hanging up, Clinton ordered the flag over the White House lowered to half staff, summoned reporters, and delivered an anguished tribute to Rabin, straying into Hebrew at one point and adding to the sense of delirium in Israel. “Yitzhak Rabin was my partner and my friend. I admired him and I loved him very much,” he said at the podium of the Rose Garden. “Because words cannot express my true feelings, let me just say, Shalom, haver. Goodbye, friend.”
Eitan Haber had been careful not to assign blame with his statement outside the hospital. But to many Israelis, the murder felt like an assault by one political camp against the other, another step toward civil war. Amir clearly stood on the margins of the right-wing camp. But its mainstream leaders had goaded the extremists with their ugly rhetoric and its rabbis had furnished the religious justification for violence. Even now, as the horror of the country’s first political assassination set in, some Israelis celebrated.
Within seconds of the shooting, policemen had cuffed Amir on the ground, then lifted him to his feet and ran with him to the outer wall of a small shopping mall that bordered the parking lot. At least fifteen men pressed up against him, clutching his arms and patting him down but Amir heard the voice of just one policeman asking questions in rapid succession: Were the bullets real? Was the prime minister the intended target? Amir had regarded his lunge at Rabin as an act of suicide, yet somehow he was alive. He responded loudly enough to be heard over the chaos: Yes, he intended to shoot Rabin and yes, the bullets were real. Inspector Yuval Gershon pushed him into a police had car, a late-model Subaru, and got in behind him.
Already on the ride to the station, Amir delivered a full confession. He was a law student at Bar-Ilan, he owned the Beretta that police had picked up in the parking lot, he had gone to the square intending to shoot the prime minister, and he was reasonably sure his bullets had struck Rabin. For the policemen in the car—Gershon and three others—the incident itself had been a bewildering experience. Amir’s swagger, his nonchalance, added another layer of astonishment. One of the men asked Amir if he’d been aware that his actions could cause Rabin’s death, information that in court would help establish intent. Amir, who had completed two full years of law school, including at least two courses in criminal law, understood the question. Not only was I aware, he said. That was my objective.
The bluster continued pouring out at the precinct, along with a giddiness that made Amir seem weirdly detached from the enormity of his crime. Before he was even booked, he asked First Sergeant Yohanan Ronen to reach into the pocket of his jeans, pull out his skullcap, and put it on his head. The policeman obliged. While pressing his fingers to an inkpad, Amir noticed that his wrist was bare. “My watch fell off in the parking lot,” he remarked to the lab technician. “Can you check if someone found it?” To the technician, it must have seemed like the suspect had mistaken him for a summer-camp counselor. “We’ll let you know,” he said.
Throughout the booking, Amir kept replaying the shooting in his mind. Though it remained unclear to him whether Rabin had survived, Amir was now certain that God had wanted him to act, that he’d managed to fathom God’s will, in the words of that settler rabbi. The proof was in the outcome. Only divine intervention could account for the fact that he eluded police for forty minutes, outmaneuvered Rabin’s vaunted protection force, and fired at the prime minister without getting shot himself. In one of the waiting rooms, he told a policeman his act would cause people to rise up. “I don’t want people to think I’m crazy. Otherwise, I won’t achieve my goal.” To Ronen, he explained that din rodef amounted to a death sentence for Rabin—an explication that only people familiar with the internal discourse in the Orthodox community over the preceding year would have understood. When the policeman pointed out that even the most hardline political parties would condemn the assassination attempt, Amir seemed untroubled. “I didn’t do it in order to go down in history,” he said. Then he added: “But you guys will be famous.”
In the interrogation room, Amir faced Motti Naftali, the chief superintendent who had helped draft the security plan for the rally. Word had reached the precinct by now that Rabin had died on the operating table. With his pipe wedged in the corner of his mouth, Naftali told Amir he would be charged with the murder of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Amir’s response nearly unhinged the police officer. Amir threw up his cuffed hands and declared, “I did it.” Then he asked Naftali if he could bring a drink—a “schnapps,” he said—to toast the news.
While the interrogation continued, several policemen and Shabak investigators made their way to Borochov 56 in Herzliya, to search the house and pick up Hagai. Forensic technicians had already discovered the modified bullets at the bottom of Amir’s magazine. When Naftali asked about them, Amir said they were the handiwork of his brother and bragged about Hagai’s technical skills. Now he was a suspect as well.
In Herzliya, Hagai waited for a knock on the door. He’d been watching a television movie earlier in the evening when a newscaster interrupted the program to report that shots were fired in Rabin’s vicinity at Kings of Israel Square. Though the initial details were scant, Hagai knew immediately that it was his brother. He turned to his father and told him to brace himself—Amir had tried to kill Rabin at the peace rally. Shlomo erupted: What did you and your brother do? How could you do this to me? Then Hagai set about hiding his ammunition and explosives.
Elsewhere in the neighborhood, Geulah watched the same news bulletin at the home of a friend and had a similar stirring about Amir. She dialed the home number and asked one of her younger sons to check if he was there. Geulah had noticed the Beetle in the driveway when she left, but her son reported back that Amir was not in the house. At that moment, with the phone still pressed to her ear, she heard the news anchor read out a description of the suspect—a short, dark-skinned resident of Herzliya. Geulah felt a crushing pressure in her chest. A few minutes later, Israel’s two networks broadcast the first footage of Amir—surrounded by policemen against the wall of the shopping mall.
By the time she got home, friends from the neighborhood were making their way in and the phone was ringing constantly. One of the callers was Margalit Har-Shefi, who had seen the bulletin at her parents’ home in the settlement Beit El. When Hagai came to the phone, Har-Shefi probed for information. “You don’t think . . .” she started. But Hagai worried that Shabak might already be tapping the line or even surrounding the house. He cut her short and said, “We’ll cry later.” Har-Shefi asked him to give Amir her regards.
An hour passed and somehow the police had still failed to show up. Hagai considered dismantling some of his homemade armaments, including the grenades and the timers. The parts alone would be less incriminating. But he worried that investigators would walk in as soon as he got to work. Instead, he grabbed what he could from the bedroom and the shed and stashed it in a small chicken coop he’d built over the summer in the backyard—on the left side, near the incubator. The deadlier munitions, the TNT sticks and C-4 explosives, remained hidden in the attic and inside one of the walls.
Back in the house, he spotted a relative who lived in the neighborhood and had come over to console the family. Hagai still had a few things left to hide, a supermarket bag with fuses, explosives, and the handcrafted silencer. He pulled the relative, Uriel Ben-Yaakov, to the back patio and asked if he’d be willing to stash the munitions in his home. In the dimly lit yard, Hagai opened the bag and showed him the contents. When Ben-Yaakov refused, Hagai pointed to the hiding place in the coop and asked him to remove the materials after he was arrested.
The policemen and Shabak agents, delayed apparently by the chaos, finally pulled up around midnight. On the street, journalists were knocking on doors to interview people about their neighbor, the assassin. Inside, the friends still lingered; Shlomo sat alone in a bedroom reading Lamentations. The officers took Hagai to a bathroom, told him to undress, and searched him. Then they combed the shed and the bedroom he shared with Amir, confiscating whatever items seemed relevant. In several boxes, they carted off the ammunition Hagai left lying around and tools from his shed but also a phone book, four photo albums, a camera with film in it, and a worn copy of The Day of the Jackal. Near Amir’s bed, they found a book titled Baruch the Man, a paean to Baruch Goldstein with tributes written mostly by settlers and rabbis. Amir had not only devoured the 533-page book, he’d recommended it to Har-Shefi and others.
The officers walked Hagai out and cuffed him in the car. Borochov, the sleepy suburban street, swarmed with people. At one in the morning, the day was not over yet.
In Tel Aviv, Peres had gathered Rabin’s cabinet ministers to formalize the transition of power. Alongside his responsibilities as foreign minister, Peres held the title of deputy prime minister, which meant he would be leading the government through the transition period. Dressed in the same suit and tie he’d worn onstage a few hours earlier, his face pale and heavy, Peres looked wretched. He struggled to deliver a brief eulogy for Rabin and kept his gaze down through much of the meeting. Peres had preceded Rabin in the parking lot by a few minutes. In updates he received from the interrogation room, he learned that Amir had considered shooting at him but decided to wait for the prime minister. Had the two men come down together, Amir told Naftali, he would have killed them both. The trifecta—losing Rabin, having the country’s leadership thrust suddenly upon him, and realizing he’d barely escaped death himself—had induced in Peres a kind of post-traumatic stress.
Rabin had now been dead for three hours. His body remained in a room at Ichilov Hospital, waiting for the autopsy. Doctors had left the clothes he’d been wearing in a neat pile, a pack of Parliaments still stuffed in his jacket pocket. At two in the morning, the government’s chief pathologist, Yehuda Hiss, walked in with an assistant and began to probe what precisely killed Rabin. Speaking into a tape recorder, Hiss described what he saw: “The body of a man who looks to be about seventy, nutritional condition looks normal, measuring 172 centimeters from his left heel to the top of his head, naked and covered in sheets.” He noted the obvious and the obscure: The long lines of stitches crisscrossing Rabin’s chest and abdomen where surgeons had cut him open and the yellow stains between his index and middle fingers from a lifelong smoking habit. In back, Hiss traced the pathway of the bullets into Rabin’s body. One hollow point entered his lower back, ruptured his spleen, then traveled up and to the right, where it punctured his left lung. The other pierced his back below the clavicle, smashed through the rib cage, and entered the right lung.
The massive bleeding alone and the collapse of his lungs had made Rabin’s chances of surviving the shooting extremely low, Hiss concluded. But it wasn’t until doctors wheeled the body to a lab room for a brain scan that the full picture came into view. In the computerized image, they noticed an embolism in one of Rabin’s cerebral arteries, a large pocket of air that entered his bloodstream in the lungs and made its way to his brain, restricting the flow of blood and oxygen. The blockage, it was now clear, had hindered the resuscitation effort and, with every passing moment, eroded the prime minister’s mental capacity.
In effect, Rabin’s brain died well before his body did.