The eleven-hour flight from Tel Aviv to New York, over Europe and across the Atlantic, can pass like an easy night’s sleep or it can feel interminable. In the countless trips I made back and forth over the years, I had forged a strategy: book the red-eye and swallow an Ambien while the plane is still on the ground. The jostling of bags, the swapping of boarding passes between Hasidic men horrified to find they’d been seated next to women—the general chaos of the Israeli condition starts to dim even before the cabin doors close. But in the late summer of 2013, I was too agitated to sleep. I had been nervous about the security check at Ben-Gurion Airport, where vigilant young screeners specialize in detecting anxiety. If one of them decided to search my luggage, how would I explain the bloody clothes wrapped carefully in large sheets of white butcher paper and stuffed in my carry-on?
I had been living in Israel since 2010, filing dispatches to Newsweek, the steadily withering publication that had been my professional home for more than a decade. Sometime during the posting, I decided I would write a book about the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. The murder of the Israeli leader by a fellow Jew in 1995 had profoundly shifted the course of events in Israel. It had also left a deep impression on me. I had covered Israel during the Rabin years, reported from the peace rally where he was assassinated, and then attended every session of the murder trial. Now almost two decades later, I wanted to reconstruct the twin narratives of Rabin’s endeavor to forge peace with Israel’s neighbors and Yigal Amir’s fanatical effort to stop him. But in one of my first interviews with Dalia Rabin, the sixty-three-year-old daughter of the slain leader, I got sidetracked. “Do you know about the hole in the front of the shirt?” she asked me at her Tel Aviv office.
I did not.
At our next meeting, Dalia produced a cardboard box and in it the clothing Rabin was wearing the night of the assassination: a white Marks & Spencer dress shirt, encrusted entirely in blood; a sleeveless undershirt, similarly stained; a dark, tailored suit jacket and pants made of heavy wool; a pair of white cotton underwear; black socks; and leather shoes. She laid out the dress shirt on the table, holding the edges with the tips of her fingers. It had been torn in several places, presumably on the operating table. First she showed me the back side, where two bullets had struck Rabin. Amir had approached the Israeli leader from behind and fired three rounds from a 9mm Beretta. The first and third bullets entered his back—one high and to the right of his spine, the other low and to the left—and lodged in his body. The second bullet missed its target and passed through the arm of Rabin’s bodyguard Yoram Rubin.
Dalia then turned the shirt over to show me a third hole in the front, on what would have been Rabin’s lower left side. It was perfectly round and a little smaller than a dime, about the size of the perforations in the back. She showed me a similar hole in the front of the undershirt. Then she laid the undershirt inside the shirt, the way the garments would have hung on her father’s five-foot-six-and-a-half-inch frame. The holes seemed to line up. In hospital records and other documents I’d reviewed relating to the assassination, there was no mention of Rabin being shot from the front, no evidence of an exit wound or other anterior injuries. Yet something had punctured the face of the garments, quite possibly while Rabin was wearing them (otherwise how to explain that the defects lined up?). The holes, Dalia said, had come to her attention ten years after the murder and had never been properly investigated. They were a mystery.
Murder cases, no matter how thoroughly investigated, almost always leave in their wake a trail of unanswered questions or just bits of evidence that don’t add up. With political assassinations—and no one knows this better than us Americans—those loose ends tend to become the source material for theories about cover-ups and conspiracies. The main questions surrounding Rabin’s murder were broad and sweeping: how did Amir elude Israel’s esteemed intelligence and security agencies and how could the Israeli leader have been so exposed? But there were little ones as well, including discrepancies over the precise distance between the shooter and his target, and the time it took Rabin’s driver to get him to the hospital. Most vexing was the testimony of nearly a dozen witnesses who heard someone at the scene shouting that the shots fired were “not real” or “blanks.”
That odd detail in particular fueled conspiracy theories almost from the outset, mainly from the right side of the map—the political camp to which Amir belonged. In opinion polls over the years, at least one-quarter of Israelis have said they doubt the official version of the assassination. Among religious and right-wing Israelis, the number rises above 50 percent.
Dalia, of course, was no conspiracist. A lawyer by training and a former parliament member and deputy defense minister, she had spent much of her time since the killing nurturing the legacy of her late father. But she had her own questions about the night of the murder. In one of our conversations, she said she felt the whole truth about the assassination had yet to emerge. Seeing her father’s clothing for the first time deepened her suspicions. Dalia learned about the holes from members of an Israeli documentary team who had come across the garments in the national archive in Jerusalem. After conducting their own probe (and producing an inconclusive film about it), one of them told Dalia cryptically that the mystery surrounding the clothing should keep her up at night.
In fact, it did. One scenario she kept replaying in her mind involved a bodyguard whirling around to shoot Amir but hitting her father instead. She wondered whether the security service that protected him would have covered up such a blunder to avoid yet more embarrassment—going so far as to have the pathologist leave the evidence out of his report. But Dalia also worried that raising any questions publicly or trying to have them investigated would give ammunition to the conspiracists. In a way, they had paralyzed her. Their accounts of the murder were so outlandish, she thought, and so clearly designed to exonerate Amir and the hardliners who had incited against her father that she vowed to avoid saying or doing anything that might give them momentum. In 2005, Dalia took possession of the clothes from the national archive and tucked them in a storage room at the memorial institute she ran in Tel Aviv, the Yitzhak Rabin Center, alongside her father’s other belongings. They were still there when she mentioned them to me eight years later.
In early August 2013, a few weeks after those first meetings with Dalia, I sat down at the computer in my Tel Aviv rental to write her an email. I had met with Dalia several times in the preceding months while making progress on the research for this book. By then, my own view about the bits of odd evidence had been shaped in interviews with scores of people, including members of Rabin’s security detail. “I want to be candid with you about this,” I wrote. “With all the reporting I’ve done, I feel reasonably confident that the question marks surrounding the night of the murder . . . do not point to some cover-up.
“And yet, the hole in the shirt is a mystery. Having seen it with my own eyes, I find it hard to dismiss.”
I asked in the email if I could take the clothes to the United States and have them inspected by an expert. I had spoken by then to several forensic examiners to find out whether it was possible nearly two decades after the event to determine what caused the holes in the garments, whether gunfire or something else. Crime-scene examiners who work privately often make their money by testifying on behalf of their clients. An investigative reporter I’d worked with and trusted in Washington, DC, had warned me to choose carefully—that the flaw in the profession is the vested interest examiners have in telling their clients what they want to hear.
Eventually, I got referred to Lucien Haag, a firearms specialist in Arizona whose credentials seemed unassailable. A former Phoenix police criminalist, he had been examining evidence from crime scenes for almost fifty years, including the Kennedy assassination and the FBI assault on Ruby Ridge. An article in the Arizona Republic described him as the Michael Jordan of his profession. On the phone, he sounded intrigued. If something other than a bullet caused the hole, it would be difficult so many years later to determine precisely what it was. But the important thing was to test the gunshot theory—to substantiate it or rule it out. That much, he was confident he could do.
Within a few days the cardboard box with the clothing sat in the foyer of my apartment. For Dalia, my proposition held appeal. She stood to get the answer to a question that had been gnawing at her for years—without having to initiate the procedure herself. Dalia seemed unsentimental about the garments. They were musty and soiled and held memories of a terrible ordeal. When I picked up the box from her office I had the feeling she was happy to be rid of it, even for just a few weeks.
My own calculations were mostly pragmatic. If Haag could exclude gunfire as the cause of the holes, it would help discharge the conspiracy theories altogether. If, on the other hand, a bullet had caused the defects in the front of the shirt and undershirt, the entire narrative of the Rabin assassination stood to be upended. That’s the kind of information a writer wants to verify before embarking on a book—not after.
I opened the box and phoned Haag again. I wanted to know which garments he wished to inspect in addition to the shirt and undershirt and how best to pack them. The items had been strewn carelessly in the box for years, some in plastic bags, a messy heap of bloody remnants from one of the most significant events in Israel’s history. I stretched out each piece on my dining-room table, which I had covered with long sheets of white paper. A washed out yellow tag attached to the suit jacket bore the Hebrew acronym for the police department’s Criminal Identification Bureau, Mazap. The first thing Haag wanted to know was the composition of the dress shirt. A label on the inside seam listed it as 55 percent cotton, 45 percent polyester. Good news, he said. Burn traces were easier to detect on fabric that included man-made material. Then he instructed me to discard the plastic bags and wrap each garment in butcher paper. Mold tends to grow in plastic and can alter the chemistry of the evidence.
By now my flight was just two days away and I had visions of being arrested at either Ben-Gurion Airport or at John F. Kennedy in New York—or at least having to do some serious explaining. Haag said sniffer dogs in the baggage hall at Kennedy could potentially smell the blood in my carry-on, prompting a search. Customs agents might decide that the garments were a biohazard and seize them.
Working quickly, I drafted a letter for Dalia to sign, saying the Rabin Center had allowed me to take the clothing to the United States for a forensic exam. Then I called the Department of Homeland Security’s customs bureau in New York. In an awkward exchange, I tried to explain why I needed to import the bloody clothes of a dead foreign leader. The spokesman on the other end of the line had not heard of Rabin and didn’t seem particularly interested. I began thinking it was a mistake to raise the issue at all, that I should have just taken my chances. But by the next morning, I got an email from public affairs specialist Anthony Bucci: “Customs & Border Protection at JFK is aware of your arrival and you will be expedited. There will be no issues with the clothing.”
The next day, I was on the plane with the clothes in the carry-on. The trace evidence from an Israeli tragedy would now make its way to a town in Arizona with a name that seemed to mock the entire endeavor: Carefree. Population 3,418.
ON THE NIGHT of the assassination, eighteen years earlier, I left my Tel Aviv apartment around seven p.m. and walked a few blocks to Kings of Israel Square. At the foot of the stage where Rabin and the other politicians and entertainers had started to gather, I showed my press badge, passed through a metal detector, and conducted a few interviews. Then I walked the length of the plaza, the size of several football fields, talking to people in the crowd.
By news standards, it was not a particularly significant event: a rally of Israeli peaceniks expressing support for their government’s contentious agreements with the Palestinians. But the huge turnout—more than 100,000 people showed up—seemed to challenge the notion that Rabin’s support was ebbing. In the arithmetic of the newswire—I was working for Reuters at the time—the event warranted a story of a few hundred words. At around nine thirty p.m., I phoned my editor to say I was leaving the area and would file from my apartment.
A few blocks away, the small black pager on my belt bleeped and vibrated with a message from the newsroom: Shots fired near Rabin, head back now. In the time it took me to race to the parking lot behind the square, I had just one thought: Did I leave the area prematurely, and would it cost me my first real job in journalism? At the scene of the shooting, several stunned witnesses told me they thought the prime minister had been hit. Using a bulky, work-issued Motorola cell phone we’d aptly named “the brick,” I called the details into the newsroom. Then I sprinted to Ichilov Hospital, a half mile from the square, getting there in time for the announcement of Rabin’s death.
For days after that, every interaction with Israelis, every outing, felt surreal. My newsroom rented a scooter from a local shop so that I could get through the traffic and cover the funeral and later the murder trial. Policemen had begun closing off main roads whenever Rabin’s successor, Shimon Peres, moved around. They also put up roadblocks from the airport to Jerusalem to allow the stream of foreign leaders who arrived for the funeral to get around quickly and safely. The resulting gridlock added to the sense that all of Israel had been brought to a gloomy, eerie standstill, that nothing in the country was normal.
The murder had easily been the biggest story I’d covered. It was also the most depressing. Rabin’s peace deals with the Palestinians had plenty of flaws and had triggered bursts of violence. Israeli fatalities from Palestinian attacks nearly doubled in the two years that followed the Oslo Accord compared to the two years that preceded it. But the agreements seemed to shift some big, important things to the inevitable column: a territorial bargain, a Palestinian homeland (even if Rabin never embraced it explicitly), and a veering away from the messianic drift that the 1967 war had set off in Israel. By deciding Israelis would no longer rule over Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, Rabin had struck a blow for the pragmatists over the ideologues. Through the barrel of Amir’s Beretta, the ideologues had struck back.
And yet, the murder did not feel like the end. In the time that I had covered Israel and, later, followed events there from afar, I remained convinced that Israelis and Palestinians would eventually reach a workable agreement. No conflict could sustain itself forever, I told myself with characteristic optimism (and how better to define an optimist than someone who thinks the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can be resolved?). Even in the bloodiest phase of the past two decades, during the years of the second intifada, I believed that the broad trend lines pointed toward conciliation.
In early 2010, after I’d been away from Israel for years, Newsweek sent me back to the region to serve as the Jerusalem bureau chief. It didn’t take long for my assessment to shift. The country I returned to was in many ways a more livable place. It felt safer, more prosperous, and less troubled than it had in years. But the terrible violence and hostility of the second intifada had left even the moderates among Israelis and Palestinians feeling alienated from each other and simply fed up. The fact that life in Israel was good despite the absence of peace meant there was little incentive to revive the process.
In the first story I published during the new posting, I wrote that the diplomatic arithmetic had changed. Many Israelis felt they had nothing to gain from a resumption of negotiations. And since a peace process would almost surely revive the suicide bombings and political instability, they had plenty to lose. “A combination of factors in recent years—an improved security situation, a feeling that acceptance by Arabs no longer matters much, and a growing disaffection from politics generally—have for many Israelis called into question the basic calculus that has driven the peace process. Instead of pining for peace, they’re now asking: who needs it?”
This analysis helped explain why Israelis had elected Netanyahu, the hardliner, months earlier. There were other factors as well. The Israeli settlement movement, which had viewed Rabin’s Oslo Accord as an act of treachery, had more than doubled in size since his assassination and greatly expanded its political power. Its representatives in parliament would come to include Moshe Feiglin, who had been convicted of sedition for organizing rowdy protests during the Rabin era. The parliament I was now covering in Israel also included a record number of Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Jews—who form the country’s two fastest-growing communities and whose views on the issues of war and peace are consistently hawkish. When Israelis reelected Netanyahu in 2013—for a third time in eighteen years—I wrote in Newsweek that the religious and right-wing parties opposed to ceding substantial portions of the West Bank might have something akin to a permanent majority. Even if they lost a vote, history seemed to be foreclosing on the possibility of a negotiated peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians.
It was around this time that I made up my mind to write a book about the Rabin era. If the prospects of a peace agreement had shrunk to almost nothing in the intervening years, the assassination felt even more significant in retrospect. Had he lived, Rabin might plausibly have reshaped Israel broadly and permanently. In killing the Israeli leader, Amir had done better than the assassins of Lincoln, Kennedy, and King, whose policies had gained momentum as a result of their murders. During the years of his imprisonment, he had the satisfaction of watching Rabin’s legacy steadily evaporate.
That was what I told Dalia Rabin at our first meeting. And how I’d come to possess her dead father’s clothes.
CAREFREE LIES ABOUT forty minutes north of the Phoenix airport, a desert town with adobe houses, huge boulder formations, and cactus plants almost everywhere you look. In the 1970s and ’80s, it housed a film studio where some Hollywood hits were made, including one with Bob Hope. Now lined with golf courses and gated neighborhoods, the town has the feel of a Florida retirement community transplanted to the gold-tinted landscape of the Old West. Apparently it’s marketed that way. A real-estate website I happened on listed Carefree’s motto as “the Home of Cowboys and Caviar.” On one of the nights I was there, I watched an hour of live bull riding at the Buffalo Chip Saloon, then dined at a fancy French restaurant.
In the desert heat people start their day early, so by six thirty I was already pulling into the Good Egg, a diner I spotted on the way to Haag’s home. I had kept the carry-on close to me during two days of travel, imagining the awful prospect of having to tell Dalia I'd lost the clothes or let them get stolen. Now I wheeled it across the parking lot, lifted it into the booth, and ordered coffee and the morning special: peach cobbler pancakes. The dish seemed somehow in step with the broader juxtapositional weirdness. If Rabin’s bloody clothes had any business in Carefree, the person who brought them there should obviously be eating peach cobbler pancakes. When they arrived, I tucked the suitcase under the table and out of sight.
Haag lives on the eastern ridge of Carefree, just in front of a huge nature reserve with high cliffs and dry riverbeds. When he’s working on a case, he’ll sometimes drive his SUV to a spot in the reserve and re-create the conditions of a certain shooting incident to deduce precisely what happened. He also has an indoor shooting range in his home with its own ventilation system. He moved to the area in 1965, after graduating from UC Berkeley, to take up a job at the crime lab of the Phoenix Police Department. Until his arrival, the lab had just one employee. Now it occupies a five-story building and employs 150 people, including one of Haag’s two sons. Both young men followed their father into the profession.
We started the morning going over documents in Haag’s backyard, where he warned me to watch for javalinas, a kind of wild pig that can show up unannounced. The folder I’d amassed included photos from just before and just after the shooting, police lab reports, and hospital documents detailing Rabin’s wounds. After scrolling through several files, the sun was so bright that I could no longer see the screen of my laptop. We moved inside, reviewed the remaining documents, and then moved again, this time to his laboratory.
The room, sandwiched between the den and the living room, resembled a high school science class, with microscopes and beakers laid out on several large countertops and books stacked on shelves. It also contained objects not ordinarily found in a classroom—namely guns. Haag is a collector and he displays some of his firearms on a high shelf in the lab, including a Russian bolt-action rifle used in both world wars. He bought it in the Soviet Union during a visit in the ’80s and has fired it about fifty times but says it bruises the shoulder in a way that, now in his early seventies, he no longer wishes to endure. Two other rifles on the shelf looked like AK-47s but he corrected me and said they were AK clones—the kind that shoot only in semiautomatic mode, not in rapid fire.
Haag unzipped the suitcase, pulled out the box with the clothes, and placed it on one of the counters. He inspected the jacket first, noticed that the lower bullet hole had caused some tearing of the fabric, and said Amir was probably closer in when he fired that shot, almost at contact point. Then he unwrapped the shirt and, after inspecting the two punctures on the back, he turned it over and found the mystery hole. “Whoa, I’m really surprised,” he let out, more expressively than anything else he’d said so far. But he quickly recovered his scientist timbre and issued a qualification. “Whoa doesn’t mean ‘Oh my God it’s a bullet hole.’ Whoa just means that’s a very clean, sharply defined hole. . . . You certainly brought something different and very interesting.”
Gunshot analysis involves mostly geometry and chemistry—figuring out pathways the bullets travel and testing for residue they leave behind. At one point during the morning Haag took a call from a lawyer and, when he returned, explained how geometry was going to sink his case. The lawyer represented a policeman who shot a young man dead and was being sued for damages. He hired Haag to help prove the policeman’s version of events—that the man had been lunging at him when the officer discharged his gun. But the facts Haag gathered suggested the opposite: the man was actually backing away. Two findings led him to this conclusion. The bullet carved a straight tunnel through the midsection of the victim’s body, a line that ran perpendicular to his spine. After exiting his back, it hit the wall behind him just a few inches up from the floor. “It’s a straight path through the body and everyone agrees they were standing, facing each other,” Haag explains. “So think about it. If a bullet goes through me as a standing victim and hits the wall low, I had to be leaning away to accommodate that.”
With Rabin’s shirt, determining whether a bullet had caused the hole was mainly a matter of chemistry. Most modern bullets have a lead core and a copper coating. They tend to leave traces of one or both elements on the clothes they penetrate, especially on man-made fibers. There’s also lead in the propellant—the powder that sits in the case of the cartridge and ignites in the process of gunfire. When a bullet is discharged, lead vapors burst out of the barrel and can cling to fabric at close range, creating a ring of soot around the bullet hole. So Haag would be looking for three things—copper, lead, and soot. The traces of each tend to stick around for decades.
If any of the test results were positive, Haag said he would run other tests to determine the bullet type. Amir fired hollow points made by Winchester, bullets with rounded, carved-out tips instead of sharp, pointy ones. The Winchester hollow point—Silvertip is the brand name—has a nickel patina that makes it shiny and leaves a distinctive residue. But if a bullet had indeed hit Rabin from the front, it was unlikely to have come from Amir’s gun. So the next step, should we get that far, would involve contemplating some unsettling scenarios—including the possibility that a second gunman may have shot the Israeli leader.
While Haag prepared the shirt for the first test, I described to him the conspiracy theories that had surrounded the murder and the way they had gained traction among significant numbers of Israelis, especially on the right side of the political map. One theory posited that rogue elements within the security establishment killed Rabin, using Amir as their patsy. Another laid the blame at the feet of Shimon Peres, Rabin’s deputy and longtime rival within the Labor Party. The account that proved to be the most resilient put Rabin himself at the center of the plot, alleging that he helped stage his own shooting in order to raise his sagging approval rating—and died in some unintended twist.
Haag has honed a kind of doubt-but-verify approach to conspiracy theories, a paraphrase of Reagan’s attitude toward the Soviet Union’s disarmament in the 1980s. For an episode of the television series NOVA, Haag spent long hours reviewing the evidence of the Kennedy assassination and carrying out his own test fires. He said investigators tend to make more mistakes in high-profile cases than in just regular ones because “everyone is rushing around trying to do something.” The Kennedy case was no exception. But none of the forensic or ballistic evidence he examined made him doubt the conventional narrative: that a lone gunman, not exceedingly smart, hatched a relatively crude plan to assassinate the most guarded man in the country and succeeded. “There’s a natural inclination to want it to be more than that,” he said. “It’s got to take more than just one lone loser with a thirteen-dollar rifle to kill the president.”
The Rabin assassination inspired similar incredulity. It had to take more than just one religious extremist, waiting in a parking lot for forty minutes with nothing but a handgun, to kill the prime minister. But the conspiracy theories that followed also served a political purpose. For members of the right wing, who took part in depicting Rabin as a traitor and a murderer for his peace deals with the Palestinians, the alternative narratives helped deflect a collective responsibility that many in the country felt they bore. If a right-wing zealot had indeed killed the Israeli leader, the right’s incitement against Rabin might well have influenced him and contributed to the murder. But if a darker and more sinister plot lay behind the assassination—perhaps one orchestrated by Rabin himself or by the security agency sworn to protect him—their complicity would be washed away.
The conspiracy theories in the Rabin assassination have never stood up to any serious scrutiny. They endure in part thanks to those loose ends, including the testimony of witnesses at the murder scene who heard someone yell out, “It’s not real” (or something similar) moments after the shooting. To the conspiracists, the odd detail suggested that the assassination was staged. But in one of the interviews I conducted, the former police officer who helped lead the murder investigation offered a somewhat more sober explanation—a complicated one, but the only one I’ve heard that actually tallies with the rest of the facts in the case. Dramatic events make people say or do odd things. Sometimes those things point to hidden information and help investigators uncover the real circumstances of a crime. But—and this is the part that’s hard to accept in high-profile crimes—often they point nowhere, and mean nothing.
And still, there was the shirt. Haag folded it into the butcher paper, carried it across the house, and took it onto his back patio. He stretched it out on a table under the glaring midday sun and took pictures of the area of the hole using an infrared camera. With ultra-violet light streaming from the sun’s rays, anything black would show up as white through the lens of the camera. If there were soot around the hole, embedded in the bloodstained fabric, he would see it in the viewfinder.
Haag stepped up onto a footstool and aimed the camera down at the shirt. “I don’t think there’s soot here,” he said straightaway. He snapped several photos, scooped up the shirt, and walked back to his office adjoining the lab. Haag connected the camera to his computer and with a few mouse clicks brought up a close-up of the mystery hole. At maximum magnification, the shirt threads looked like coarse strands of rope woven together tightly. The hole itself appeared slightly oblong and the fibers around the margins looked almost perfectly clipped. “I can’t remember the last time I saw something like this,” Haag said. There was no sign of soot on the computer screen. His first test had come up negative.
Back in his lab, Haag sprayed a diluted ammonia solution around the hole in the shirt and then pressed a square of transfer paper onto the fabric. If there were copper particles around the hole, the solution would loosen them just enough for some to adhere to the paper. But the copper wouldn’t be visible against the transfer paper. So Haag poured a few CCs of DTO—dithio-oxamine—into a pressurized bottle and sprayed the reagent onto the page. When DTO reacts with copper, the particles turn orange. Together we stared at the wet transfer paper for several moments, like a couple waiting on a home pregnancy test. Nothing happened. We were zero for two.
By now, Haag was speculating aloud what, other than a bullet, could have caused the defect. Insects can chew away bits of fabric in evidence storage rooms over time. But the hole was too clean and round to be the work of an insect, and how to explain the fact that the hole in the undershirt lined up? A cigarette could have burned a ring through both layers. Rabin was a heavy smoker. But under a microscope in polarized light, the threads along the margins lacked the clumped thermal effects associated with a burn (or a bullet hole, for that matter). Haag seemed to settle on the idea that the hole was caused on the operating table. In the emergency room, a doctor had thrust a tube into Rabin’s chest cavity to drain the air and fluid that had accumulated. The procedure usually involves stripping the patient first. But in the chaos, in the rush to stabilize Rabin, maybe the instrument plunged through his shirt and undershirt. That would explain the clean shape and the lining up of the holes, he said.
When the third test—the one for lead—came up negative, Haag imagined himself on the witness stand, being cross-examined by an attorney. Could someone have lifted off all traces of copper and lead in a previous test or through some other procedure? Unlikely, he responded to his own question, but not impossible. To exclude even that remote possibility, he suggested a final test. He would cut out a small square of the fabric from somewhere else on the shirt and shoot a hole through it at close range. Then we could compare the hole he made with the mystery hole to see if they were similar.
By now, we were well into the afternoon in Arizona—nighttime in Israel. It was too late to call Dalia and ask for permission to cut out a section of the shirt. The question was left to me and it posed a dilemma. Dalia had entrusted me with her dead father’s clothes and I was determined to bring them back safely. But she also badly wanted an answer to the question of the hole in the shirt. In that meeting at her office, it seemed more important to her than the garment itself, which had languished in a box for years. I told Haag to go ahead.
Working with a plain pair of scissors, Haag cut out a patch about five inches long and four inches wide. He used scotch tape to fix it to what looked like a block of yellowish gelatin. Haag described it as a tissue stimulant, a loaf of translucent silicone that behaves much the way the body’s insides behave when struck with slicing metal. He suggested using the same gun and bullets Amir used, a 9mm Beretta with Winchester hollow points.
Together we walked over to his indoor range, a long, narrow room with thick walls and a soundproof door. He loaded a single hollow-point bullet into a magazine and clicked it into the Beretta. Then he handed me earmuffs and slipped a set on his own head. From six inches away, he pointed the gun at the gelatin block and pulled the trigger. Hollow points expand on impact, the metal in front peeling back and forming razor-sharp edges. They tend to cause more internal damage than regular rounds and stay lodged in the body—reducing the chance of a bullet passing through one person and injuring someone else. Most US police departments issue them to their officers.
Haag peeled off the fabric square and took it back to the lab. He placed it on the counter near the shirt so that we could examine both holes. They looked nothing alike. Haag’s bullet had created an almost star-shaped perforation, with some vertical and horizontal tearing in the fabric. The threads along the margins of the hole were loose and uneven. After scrutinizing the panel and the shirt from different angles, Haag gestured that we were done. The chemistry alone had satisfied him that the mystery hole was not caused by the passing of a bullet. But the shooting test produced something more tangible—a physical piece of evidence that members of a jury could hold and pass around.
“I’ve been looking at bullet holes for forty-seven years or so. I shoot things for a living,” he said, wrapping the shirt back in the butcher paper. “Everything I see says it’s something other than a bullet.”
BY THE TIME I returned to Israel in September, the holiday season was under way—that three-week period between the Jewish New Year and Simcha Torah when children are out of school, government offices are closed, and any work at all feels strictly optional. I had sent Dalia a short email summarizing Haag’s findings and we agreed to meet at her office so that I could give her a copy of his report. She walked from her desk to the door to greet me.
Dalia had worked as a lawyer in both the private and public sectors before her father was assassinated. She had no political ambitions and, except for her occasional involvement in high-profile legal cases, was not in the public eye. But the murder made her a national figure and the victory of Netanyahu over Peres in 1996 gave her a reason to enter politics—to help unseat him and get the country back on the peace track. She started campaigning for parliament in early 1999.
To the dismay of her mother and others, Dalia chose not to join the Labor Party. It was now led by Ehud Barak, a former army chief who had been Rabin’s protégé but whose overture a few months before the election had put Dalia off. “He said, ‘I need a Rabin on my list.’ I didn’t like his approach towards me.” She aligned herself instead with the Center Party, won the sixth spot on the list, and just managed to enter parliament.
Her tenure lasted four years and included a stint as the deputy defense minister—a position that put Dalia in the core of her father’s old milieu. But she never quite found her footing in politics. She left parliament in 2003 to establish an educational center in her father’s name that includes a museum and an archive from his years in public life. The Cadillac in which Rabin was spirited to the hospital after the shooting is parked at the entrance to the center, on permanent display.
I gave Dalia a thumb drive with a copy of the report and the photos Haag had taken. She plugged it into her computer, brought up the first document, and scrolled to the key line: “The source of the sharply-defined hole in the front of the dress shirt and the likely associated hole in the front of the undershirt . . . were effectively excluded as being bullet-caused.” Dalia said the conclusion came as a relief, though I had a sense that it wasn’t exactly closure. She said she would go over the report slowly on her own.
Then we got to talking about the anniversary of the assassination, which was a few weeks off (Israel marks it officially according to the Hebrew calendar, which in 2013 put it around mid-October). Dalia said she dreaded the annual ritual. Her obligations start with the state ceremony in parliament attended by the Israeli prime minister—in this case, Benjamin Netanyahu, the man Dalia held responsible for much of the incitement against her father. Then she rushes from one public event to another in what feels like a failing endeavor to keep the memory of her father alive. She told me that the one engagement she looks forward to every year is the ceremony at the headquarters of the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency. The employees gather along a spiral staircase and look down over the banister at a staging area on the ground floor, where a short observance is held. The security establishment’s enduring solidarity with her father is palpable, she says.
Other events have left scars. For a while, Dalia would visit schools around the anniversary to talk about her father’s legacy and about the Rabin Center’s effort to promote democracy. At a religious girls’ school in the settlement of Alon Shvut in the West Bank a few years earlier, she told the students about a program at the center that brings smart, underprivileged high school kids from outlying areas—including Arab-Israelis—to Tel Aviv and Haifa for a series of lectures on law and government. One girl raised her hand and asked why Arabs are included. Dalia explained that as citizens of Israel, they are equal members of society. “But they’re not Jewish,” the girl countered.
When she talked about her father’s assassination and how it had highlighted the deep divisions in Israel, another girl raised her hand. She said it was actually Dalia’s father who had created the divisions by agreeing to hand over parts of biblical Israel to the Palestinians.
The interactions, those and others, would not have been traumatic if Dalia thought the voices represented a small minority in Israel. But she has come to view the last twenty years as the story of a power shift from the likes of her father—secular, pragmatic, and moderate—to the advocates of Alon Shvut (and the settlement movement generally): ethnically chauvinist, uncompromising, often messianic. That the assassination would mark the birth of this new Israel is nothing short of horrifying to her. When a foreign correspondent asked Dalia at a small gathering of journalists a few years ago whether she and the Israeli mainstream had diverged at some point, she nodded without hesitation. “I don’t feel I’m part of what most people in this country are willing to do.”
And what of the Amirs? How have they fared since the assassination? Yigal Amir remains in prison, without the possibility of parole. He spent the first seventeen years of his sentence in total isolation. Since 2012, prison authorities have allowed him to study with other religious inmates for an hour a day, several days a week. Amir married while in prison and has a son he sees on visitation days two or three times a month. He can make at least one phone call each day but cannot talk to journalists.
His brother, Hagai, completed a sixteen-and-a-half-year sentence in 2012. He returned to his parents’ home in Herzliya at age forty-four and found a job within weeks as a welder. The first time I met him, a year later, he was about to start a degree program in construction engineering. He showed me the second-floor bedroom he had shared with Amir growing up and the small shed behind the house where he tinkered with bullets to make them more effective at penetrating a car or an armored vest.
I wondered how people respond to seeing Hagai and the rest of the Amirs in public. Israelis recognize him and his parents from the media coverage over the years. His siblings are not familiar faces, but it’s enough for them to mention the last name and the town Herzliya for some people to draw the connection. Yet the image I’d conjured of a family that remained stigmatized and isolated did not hold up. The brothers and sisters had all married. Four of them were university students at the time I conducted my interviews; one was doing a master’s degree in psychology. The Amirs seemed to lead something close to normal lives. On one of the evenings I interviewed Hagai, he and the family had just returned from an outing with friends at the beach in Herzliya. On another night, they came from a wedding in Jerusalem. They were invited by the bride’s father, a prominent right-wing activist. “We have a lot of support,” Hagai told me. “People come up to us on the street and say it clearly.”
If I had any reason to doubt it, Hagai’s Facebook page seemed to bear it out. He created it soon after his release to post his own political observations and advocate on his brother’s behalf. In a typical comment on his wall, one supporter wrote soon after Hagai came online: “We’re all with you, Hagai Amir. We hope your brother will be freed soon.” Another wrote: “The drinks will be on me.” Within a few months, he had more than six hundred friends.
Hagai did not come to regret the murder during his years in prison. But his sharp hostility toward Arabs seemed to have softened and been redirected, chiefly toward the Israeli establishment—the government, the courts, the prison authority, the security agencies, and even the military. It made for some surprising conversations. In one of them, Hagai said Israel had a habit of launching unnecessary wars against the Arabs—a critique more commonly heard on the left than the right—and that generals and security officials needed them in order to justify their positions and budgets. He praised the work of civil-rights groups and said it was a mistake to give broad powers to the security agencies in order to suppress Palestinians because Israeli authorities would sooner or later use those powers against Jews as well. In the parlance of American politics, Hagai had become a libertarian.
In part, at least, the changes flowed from conversations he had in prison with Palestinians, including members of the Islamic Hamas group. That they found common ground should not be surprising. Outside prison, both Hamas and the Amirs played decisive roles in killing the Israeli-Palestinian peace agreements. Inside, Hagai came to view Palestinians as allies in the battle against the (mostly Jewish) guards, whom he regarded as dumb and vindictive. He told me that Arab inmates could not demand the rights they had coming to them in prison because their Hebrew wasn’t good enough and they couldn’t afford lawyers. And so, in what must have been a bizarre scene even by prison standards, Hagai sat in his cell and penned petitions to the High Court of Justice on behalf of Arabs, including a member of the Islamic Hezbollah group captured during fighting in southern Lebanon. Hagai showed me a handwritten note the Hezbollah man (he remembered him as Barzawi) slipped him requesting help in petitioning for a mirror, a bookshelf, and a hearing with the parole board.
Hagai told me his ambition now was to free his brother. In a diary he kept in prison that ran to five hundred pages, he hinted at ways he might try to spring Amir by force once he himself gets out of jail. But in my interviews with him, he said those ideas were unrealistic—that only political and legal pressure could force his brother’s release.
Though the possibility seems unlikely, the fact that fully a quarter of Israelis now support a commuting of Yigal Amir’s sentence makes it not quite unimaginable. Amir has already won several legal battles since his imprisonment, including the right to marry Larissa Trimbobler. An immigrant from the former Soviet Union, she began writing Amir in prison soon after the murder and later got permission to visit him. Larissa was married at the time, with four children. She divorced in 2003 and soon realized she was in love with Amir, she told me. When prison authorities rejected their request to marry, Larissa staged a wedding-by-proxy ceremony, with Amir’s father standing in for the groom. After rabbis ruled that the procedure had the imprimatur of Jewish Law, the High Court of Justice ordered Israeli authorities to register the couple as married.
They also won a fight for conjugal visits, though not before Amir tried to pass semen in a bag to Larissa during one of her visitations. A son was born to them in the fall of 2007 and named Yinon, one of the biblical terms for the messiah. Larissa told me that Amir chose the name as a prayer for the coming of the messiah—not some megalomaniacal intimation that the boy was one. Still, it seemed to reflect the murderer’s own sense of himself as a figure of historical and religious consequence. Jews circumcise their sons on the eighth day after the birth. In what Amir surely saw as yet another affirmation of God’s support for the assassination, Yinon’s circumcision ceremony fell on November 4—twelve years, to the day, after the murder.
Amir and Hagai have mostly rejected conspiracy theories about the murder over the years. In part, it was a matter of pride. The two men believe killing Rabin was a singular achievement, given all the obstacles, while the conspiracists pass the credit to others. But the family is divided on this issue. Geulah, the mother, told me she never believed her son fired the bullets that killed Rabin. And Larissa said Amir had come around to the idea that a retrial that focused on the loose ends in the murder investigation might somehow exonerate him.
If that’s the case, the assassin now wants to have it both ways: to boast that he saved Israel from Rabin’s betrayal—and hint that it might not have been him at all.