Killing a King: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel (7 page)

At home, Hagai figured out how to wire explosives to a timer and a battery. He also learned to make amateur hand grenades, with iron pipes and a propellant. By the time he left the army, his munitions stash included timers, fuses, TNT sticks, ammonal powder, and several blocks of the explosive C-4, one of which he’d received recently from a friend on active duty, Arik Schwartz. He hid the items in a few places around the house, including the attic and the shed in the backyard, where he kept his tools and did his tinkering. He also punched a hole in the wall of his room and stored the more dangerous materials in the cavity of a cinderblock. He then plastered it shut and repainted the wall to hide any trace of the opening.

Hagai meant for the materials to serve his hobby; he began collecting them long before Rabin’s peace deal with Arafat. But already in the coming weeks they would figure in the plans he and his brother would draw up to undermine the deal.

Shavei Shomron lay about an hour east of Herzliya and some fifteen miles into the West Bank—a territory that Israelis had increasingly taken to calling by its biblical name, Judea and Samaria. Perched on a hill overlooking the sprawling Palestinian city of Nablus, the settlement consisted of mostly single-family homes with red-tiled roofs, an eye-catcher in the otherwise rocky monochrome of the West Bank. Its 600 or so residents included Israel Shirion, a man in his late thirties who oversaw security and maintenance at the settlement and also transported schoolchildren to and from the surrounding communities
. Shirion was the younger brother of Geulah Amir and the uncle of Yigal and Hagai.

The two brothers visited him regularly at the settlement, which had a swimming pool, several synagogues, and a large contingent of young people. With its population of mostly Orthodox Jews and its rural isolation, the town exuded an almost mystical serenity on holidays and weekends.

It also radiated a pioneering militancy, its residents having lived for the first years in trailers or prefabricated structures, the men all armed with automatic rifles. Shirion had been among a group of founders who left their homes inside Israel in 1977 to spearhead the colonizing of Samaria, the biblical term corresponding to the northern half of the West Bank. Until then, Israelis had confined their settlement-building mostly to the area known as Judea south of Jerusalem—around Hebron and what Israelis called the Gush Etzion Bloc. International law expressly bars countries from colonizing territories they capture in war. But since Jewish communities had existed in both Hebron and Gush Etzion prior to Israel’s independence in 1948, left-leaning Labor governments argued that construction there amounted to a “reclamation” project.

The right-wing Likud Party that replaced Labor in 1977 enacted a much more aggressive settlement policy, authorizing new communities deep in the West Bank. Israelis who would populate these new outposts were motivated not by the prospect of improving their standard of living—the incentive that would draw tens of thousands to the settlements in subsequent years. These early settlers felt Jews had a singular right to the territory and that Palestinians—1 million of them in 1967, growing to 2 million by 1993—were essentially squatters. A steady expansion had brought the settler population to 140,000 in 1993, scattered across the territory in configurations strategically designed to block Palestinian contiguity.

Nothing divided Israelis more sharply than the settlement enterprise. To supporters, the settlers were rekindling that old Zionist spirit, bolstering Israeli security by putting themselves on the front lines, and bearing the brunt of Palestinian violence. To detractors, their very presence in the West Bank and Gaza amounted to a provocation.
It violated international law and gradually foreclosed on the possibility of peace between Israel and the Palestinians. The religious among the settlers, including Shirion, added a messianic element to the enterprise. For them, the incredible conquest of 1967 could only have been the work of God and a sign that the messiah—the great Jewish leader who would redeem the world from war and suffering and rebuild the ancient Jewish Temple—would soon appear. Settling Judea and Samaria, the heart of biblical Israel, was a way to hasten the coming of the messiah.

Shirion was fifteen years older than Hagai and seventeen years older than Amir. More of an older brother than an uncle, he liked to mentor the two, not always to their father’s liking. When the boys were teens, he would take them to a firing zone near his home to squeeze off rounds from his handgun, an Italian-made .22 caliber and later a Glock 19. When their father counseled them to continue studying the Torah in the yeshiva instead of joining the military, Shirion told them that service in the army, preferably in a combat unit, was the real way to fulfill the Zionist ethic. After their service, he helped both young men obtain gun licenses by having them change their official residency from Herzliya to his home in Shavei Shomron. Israel had strict gun laws. Only people who could show they genuinely needed one to defend themselves received licenses. Living on a settlement surrounded by Palestinians meant almost automatic approval.

On trips to Shavei Shomron, the two kept their guns wedged in their pants. Both had purchased 9mm Berettas, the standard sidearm of the US Army at the time, from a gun shop in Herzliya. The permits they held limited the number of shells they could buy each year. But the shop owner, a former policeman, sold them as many as they wanted—in Hagai’s case, a good lot. On recurring visits to the store, he bought boxes of regular rounds and hollow points in equal numbers, sharing the supply with his brother.

Hagai liked to stack the shells alternately in his fifteen-round magazine, starting and ending with a hollow point, a technique he also taught his brother. Palestinians regularly stoned Israeli cars on the road to Shavei Shomron and elsewhere in the West Bank and Gaza, but drive-by shootings were also a threat. The hollow points, which
expanded on impact and tended to lodge in the body, would blast a stone thrower clear off the road. But their scooped-out tip made them less effective than regular rounds at penetrating the steel frame of a car. Hagai figured that having both shell types in the magazine prepared him for any threat.

Sometime during the visit, or perhaps a bit later, Amir outlined to Hagai what he had in mind. Rabin would be putting settlers in jeopardy by ceding parts of the West Bank to the Palestinians. To counter the plan, the two would recruit young men for a militia that would carry out harsh reprisals in response to any attack on Israelis—shootings and bombings but also broader action like the downing of power lines in Palestinian areas. The spiraling violence would surely rupture the peace process. Amir would focus on students at Bar-Ilan University, where his semester would begin in a few weeks. Hagai’s role was to target students at the college in Ariel, one of the West Bank’s largest settlements. He had already registered for prep courses there, intending to major in physics.

The two discussed the criteria for membership in their militia. The recruits would have to be graduates of combat units in the army, comfortable with both guns and explosives. They would need to show a zealous commitment to the settlement project in Judea and Samaria and to ousting the Rabin government with its leftist agenda. Hagai’s stash of munitions would serve as a start. More would have to be collected.

If the idea seemed outlandish, it certainly did not faze Hagai. There were precedents for what Amir was suggesting. A decade earlier, a band of settlers had carried out a string of terrorist attacks against Palestinians, including a shooting spree on a college campus and bombings targeting the mayors of Nablus and Ramallah. Israel’s internal security agency, Shabak (a Hebrew acronym that stands for General Security Service), thwarted the group’s most ambitious plan: to blow up the venerated Muslim shrine known as the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem so that Judaism’s ancient temple could be rebuilt on its ruins. Though the plot could well have ignited a regional war, most of the militia members received presidential pardons after serving short prison terms.

Amir regarded the Jewish Underground, as the media dubbed the group, a model for his militia. But he also had the grandiosity to think of himself in historical terms—as a link in a chain of Jewish rebellion and zealotry, from the Maccabees, who revolted against the Seleucid Empire in the second century BC, to the Jewish armed groups that operated in Palestine before Israel’s independence. He and Hagai had both read
The Revolt
, a kind of manual for guerrilla warfare written by Menachem Begin, who headed the pro-independence Irgun Zvai Leumi (or Irgun, for short) in the 1940s and later became Israel’s prime minister. The group distinguished itself by carrying out devastating attacks against both Palestinian civilians and British administrators of Palestine, including the 1946 bombing of Jerusalem’s King David Hotel that killed ninety-one people. Amir viewed the Rabin government much the way Begin regarded the British Mandate and the Maccabees saw the Seleucids: as intruders, purveyors of a foreign culture and a threat to Jewish existence. It mattered not that Rabin himself was Jewish, the hero of 1967, and the elected prime minister of Israel.

With the conciliation process between Israelis and Palestinians only just getting under way, the Amir brothers made a commitment to each other: they would risk spending years in jail in order to prevent Rabin from surrendering parts of Eretz Israel—the Jewish homeland—to Arafat. Hagai drew the line there, telling his brother he would not die for the cause.

IN THE FOLLOWING
weeks, every day seemed to bring some nugget of news that suggested Israel had altered its troubled trajectory with the signing in Washington. Jordan’s King Hussein agreed to a common agenda for peace talks with Israel after decades of quiet contacts. Two African nations, Gabon and Mauritius, established ties with Israel—not exactly a diplomatic triumph but noteworthy enough to be heralded on the front page of Israeli newspapers.

Rabin brought his deal with Arafat to lawmakers on September 23
and won their endorsement by a comfortable margin, 61 to 50. In an embarrassment to Benjamin Netanyahu, three members of his Likud Party abstained instead of opposing the agreement. Netanyahu had taken control of Likud just six months earlier and struggled to impose discipline. But Rabin had problems of his own. One of his coalition partners, the ultra-Orthodox Shas Party, failed to support the deal, forcing him to rely on the votes of Arab-Israeli parliament members to clinch an absolute majority in the 120-member legislature known as the Knesset. Opponents of the agreement would seize on this to discredit the approval process, advancing the unsavory argument that Jewish votes alone should count when broad national issues are at stake. Netanyahu told reporters after the parliamentary session that Rabin’s coalition “stood on chicken legs.”

More distressing for Rabin was the surge in attacks on Israelis by Hamas and Islamic Jihad—a smaller Palestinian group that had also vowed to resist the peace deal. The violence included a fatal stabbing on September 24 and an attempted car bombing a week later that went awry. But it was the brutal killing of two Israeli hikers in a scenic gorge in the West Bank on October 9 that prompted many Israelis to begin questioning whether the core transaction of the deal—security for territory—was even realistic. A squad of Palestinians shot the two young men, slit their throats, and then bludgeoned them with rocks as other hikers looked on from ridges high above the canyon. The killers had no ties to Arafat’s PLO, and Arafat himself was still in Tunis. It would take him another nine months to relocate to Gaza and deploy his forces. But Israelis had watched the dramatic handshake in Washington and expected immediate results. That internal Palestinian divisions might hamper the deal seemed to be an afterthought.

Amir started classes at Bar-Ilan days after the double murder; the mood on campus was palpably glum. The university he had chosen was the academic bastion of the Israeli right, including the Orthodox establishment and the settler movement. Most senior faculty members regarded the Oslo deal as a terrible turn for Israel and a potential disaster for the settlements—where some of them lived. The few professors who supported the agreement did so quietly, to avoid trouble with their tenure boards.

The religious stream of the Zionist movement had founded Bar-Ilan in the 1950s as an alternative to the prestigious—and very much secular—Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Its board of governors usually included the country’s top rabbis and Orthodox politicians. Though the campus was open to all applicants, the criteria for acceptance favored graduates of religious schools, a policy that guaranteed a largely religious student body. Bar-Ilan was the only university in Israel to include Jewish studies in its required curriculum.

The Six-Day War marked a turning point for the university. The religious stream of Zionism had long associated the return to biblical Israel with the coming of the messiah. Now that Israel had restored its rule in Judea and Samaria, the messianic age had clearly arrived, a premise that stirred both excitement and extremism on campus. In 1980, a campus rabbi published an article in one of the university’s student journals predicting an inevitable holy war for the “annihilation of Amalek,” a clan described in the Old Testament as an enemy to the Jews. The remark was widely understood as a call for ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians or, worse, genocide. The university eventually fired the rabbi but the air of extremism remained strong on campus. In a book years later, an Israeli legal scholar referred to the rabbi as the “evil in the heart of Bar-Ilan.”

Already in the first weeks of the school year, activists formed a group to oppose the Oslo deal—Students for Security. Amir spotted their booth at the entrance to campus one day and stopped to give it a look. The students had hung posters on the booth and around campus depicting Rabin shaking hands with Arafat while handing him a gun or Rabin clad in a kaffiyeh, Arafat-style. But the people Amir encountered seemed tepid, not quite the stalwarts he hoped to enlist for his militia. Still, he put his name to a petition on the table calling for Rabin to step down and volunteered to join the rotation of activists manning the booth.