Lone Wolf Terrorism (23 page)

It is not surprising to hear about terrorist attacks related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The modern era of international terrorism is usually traced back to 1968, when Palestinian extremists began hijacking and blowing up planes, among other incidents, while the Israelis struck back in retaliatory and sometimes preemptive attacks. Assassinations committed by both sides were a common feature of this ongoing battle. Yet it was a single assassination in the mid-1990s by an Israeli citizen against his nation's leader that had major repercussions that are still being felt today.

On November 4, 1995, Yigal Amir, a twenty-five-year-old religious Jewish extremist, fired three shots at Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin at a peace rally in Tel Aviv, fatally wounding him and also injuring a security guard. Although the assassination shocked the country, it was not surprising. Rabin, along with foreign minister Shimon Perez, had long been the target of a vitriolic campaign by segments of the Israeli population. There were also some in the orthodox Jewish communities both in Israel and the United States who did not shy away from calling for his death. The reason for the hatred was Rabin's support of the 1993 Oslo Accords that, among other things, called for Israel to give up land in exchange for peace with the Palestinians. If ever there was an assassination that was just waiting to happen, the killing of Rabin would fit that bill. Despite all the rhetoric against Rabin, nobody took action except for Amir. How he came to be the one to carry out the assassination reveals some of the dynamics of the making of a lone wolf assassin.

Amir was born in the Israeli city of Herzilya in 1970 to a lower-middle-class family of Yemenites. His mother, Geula, the dominant figure in the family of eight children, was known for her extremist views. She even once made a pilgrimage to the grave of Baruch Goldstein, the Jewish extremist who killed twenty-nine Palestinians in February 1994 when he opened fire at worshippers at a mosque in the West Bank city of Hebron. Amir's father, who was an Orthodox Jew working as a calligrapher transcribing Jewish holy books, did not make much money, and it was left to Geula to become the family's breadwinner. She ran a private nursery in the family's backyard. Yigal, meanwhile, was sent to ultra-Orthodox schools. He also served in the army in the occupied territories during the first intifada (Palestinian uprising) that began in late 1987.
⁸⁹

It was when he enrolled at Tel Aviv's Bar-Ilan University to study law and computer science after leaving the army in September 1993 that Amir became radicalized. This was the same time as the signing of the Oslo Accords, which infuriated Amir and other Israelis. The accords called for Israel to recognize the Palestinian Authority as the governing body of the Palestinian people and grant the Palestinians self-government in parts of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The Palestine Liberation Organization in turn recognized Israel's right to exist and renounced its intent to attack and destroy Israel.
⁹⁰
The Amir family, like most Israelis, was divided over the Oslo Accords. Amir argued with his father, Shlomo, who supported the peace process. When Shlomo would say at the dinner table that Rabin should be given a chance, Yigal would angrily reply that Rabin was giving away the sacred land of Israel. When the discussion would come to an end, his mother, Geula, would sum it up and declare, “Yigal is right.”
⁹¹

Amir became involved in right-wing political activity while at Bar-Ilan University. He was the driving force behind student protests and led discussion groups on the future of Israel. He also organized solidarity weekends in Hebron to show support for the Jewish settlements there. Despite his activities, Amir “was a loner who felt uncomfortable as a registered member of any ideological movement
or cell.” Nevertheless, he would tell people that he felt an obligation to kill both Rabin and Perez. Nobody took him seriously.
⁹²

However, the notion of the right to kill Rabin, who as prime minister was the person most responsible for implementing the Oslo Accords, was a salient one in ultra-Orthodox communities both in Israel and in the United States. It was based on an obsolete Halakhic [Jewish law and tradition] precept of
din rodef
, which stated that it is the duty of Jews to kill a Jew who imperils the life or property of another Jew. Through a broad interpretation of
din rodef
, a number of Orthodox rabbis “reached the conclusion that relinquishing territory in the West Bank and Gaza Strip to non-Jewish rule endangered Jewish lives, making
din rodef
applicable to anyone who did so.”
⁹³
It was the Jewish equivalent of a
fatwa
, an Islamic religious ruling on any matter, only in this case it dealt with the justification for the death of a leader. Yigal Amir believed that he had received one, as can be seen in his explanation to investigators for why he assassinated Rabin:

Without believing in God—a belief in the afterlife—I would never have had the strength to do it. In the last three years I came to realize that Rabin is not the leader who can lead the people…. He didn't care about Jews, he lied, he had a lust for power. He brainwashed the people and the media. He came up with ideas like a Palestinian state. Together with [Palestine Liberation Organization chairman] Yasser Arafat, the murderer, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, but he failed to address his people's problems. He divided the people. He marginalized the settlers and didn't care about them. I had to save the people because they failed to understand the true situation, and that is why I acted…. If not for a Halakhic ruling of
din rodef
made against Rabin by a few rabbis I knew about, it would have been very difficult for me to murder.
⁹⁴

Amir stalked Rabin on several occasions before the assassination. He attended a ceremony in Jerusalem for victims of the Holocaust in January 1995, expecting Rabin to be there, but the prime minister canceled his visit. Then, he went in April to a folk festival that Rabin
was to attend, also in Jerusalem, but Amir got nervous and left the site with his loaded gun. In September, he went to another ceremony near the city of Herzliya that Rabin was scheduled to attend, but Amir again lost his nerve and left before Rabin arrived.
⁹⁵
He finally carried through with his plan when he shot Rabin in the back as the prime minister was walking to his car after a peace rally in Tel Aviv.

Amir was convicted and sentenced to life in prison for assassinating Rabin. He was also convicted, along with his brother Hagai and a friend, Dror Adani, on separate charges of conspiring to kill Rabin and to attack Palestinian Arabs. Amir, his brother, and their friend had often talked about killing Rabin, with only Yigal being totally serious about the assassination.
⁹⁶
Hagai, who was an amateur gun enthusiast, had amassed a vast arsenal of guns and explosives in the Amir home in Tel Aviv. He also prepared the hollow-point bullets that Yigal used to kill Rabin. However, it was not determined whether Hagai had given Yigal these bullets with knowledge that his brother was actually going to follow through with the assassination. Investigators concluded that Yigal acted alone in killing Rabin on the night of November 4.
⁹⁷
From all his statements and actions prior to the assassination, Yigal did not seem like the type of person who needed the help of others in killing Rabin. He was determined to do so no matter what, and it was just a matter of time before he found the best opportunity. His family, however, believed that it was a breakup with a girlfriend in January 1995 and her subsequent marrying of one of Amir's friends that set him on the path of throwing his own life away by assassinating Rabin. He became depressed after the breakup and, according to his brother, began talking about sacrificing himself.
⁹⁸

The assassination naturally shocked and saddened the country. One left-wing member of the Knesset described the assassination as “the most shocking political disaster in Israeli history.”
⁹⁹
Despite the anti-Rabin rhetoric that had been heard from those opposed to the Oslo Accords, “the vast majority of organizations and individuals who spoke the language of delegitimation and engaged in character assassination had not really wished to see Rabin dead.”
¹⁰⁰

The assassination did, however, achieve one of the goals of the anti-Rabin sector; it slowed down the peace process.
¹⁰¹
Shimon Perez, who became the new prime minister upon Rabin's death, was only able to stay in office for a few months. He was defeated by Benjamin Netanyahu, leader of the conservative, right-wing Likud Party, in the May 1996 elections. Netanyahu would himself only stay in power for a few years, losing to Labor's Ehud Barak in the 1999 elections. (Netanyahu returned to office as prime minister after winning the elections in 2009.) The topsy-turvy of Israeli politics, therefore, continued as usual despite the assassination of Rabin. However, one can speculate as to whether Rabin would have been able to defeat Netanyahu in the 1996 elections and eventually successfully implement the Oslo Accords. Former US president Bill Clinton believes so, writing on the fifteenth anniversary of the assassination, in 2010, that had Rabin lived, “within three years we would have had a comprehensive agreement between the Israelis and Palestinians.”
¹⁰²

Regardless of how things might have turned out, Yigal Amir nevertheless demonstrated the impact of a lone wolf assassin. His act of violence, at the very least, created uncertainty at the time in Israel and beyond about the Mideast peace process and caused concern in Israel about the ramifications of one Jew killing another. Some even worried that the assassination might eventually be seen as “the first shot in the Israeli civil war.”
¹⁰³

A court-ordered psychiatric evaluation of Amir found him to be neither mentally ill nor emotionally disturbed. He did, however, have “narcissistic and schizoid tendencies and sees the world in terms of black and white.”
¹⁰⁴
He was also found to have the complex personality of a highly intelligent individual “who sought love and admiration at any price. He had a desire to prove to himself, his mother, his friends, and others that he could go further than anybody else.”
¹⁰⁵
He was afraid that somebody else might kill Rabin before he did and thereby stand in the way of his chance for fame. Perhaps most indicative of his self-aggrandizement was the following statement Amir made as he reflected upon the assassination:
“My deed will be understood in the future. I saved the people of Israel from destruction.”
¹⁰⁶

OBSERVATIONS FROM THE CASES EXAMINED

This brief look at four different cases of lone wolf assassins is certainly not enough to generalize about the characteristics and impact of all lone wolf assassins. It does, however, provide us with some interesting observations that may also apply to other lone wolf assassins.

First, in terms of their psychological makeup, only one of the assassins, Charles Guiteau, would qualify as being mentally ill. Guiteau was so delusional that he believed he deserved the top US envoy position to France, even though he had no government or diplomatic experience. A speech he had once made on behalf of President Garfield when the latter was a candidate was enough, in Guiteau's mind, to earn him the prestigious post. He was also convinced that God told him to kill Garfield in order to save the country from another civil war, a thought not based on reality. He believed that a grateful nation would eventually see the justification for the assassination and set him free. Yigal Amir also believed that God approved of his actions (“I have no regrets,” he told the court. “Everything I did was for the sake of God.”
¹⁰⁷
) and that his country, too, would ultimately understand and honor him. He was not mentally ill. His belief—that if Yitzhak Rabin was removed from power, then the Oslo Accords might not be implemented—was not an irrational thought and was shared by many others. Leon Czolgosz and Lee Harvey Oswald were also not mentally ill, but both were similar to Guiteau and, to some extent Amir, in that they, too, were basically unhappy, depressed individuals with few friends.

Other studies of lone wolf assassins have found differences in the psychological makeup of the assassins. For example, terrorism scholar R. Hrair Dekmejian divided lone wolf assassins into two basic categories—pathological and political. Pathological assassins
“target leaders or other symbols of authority as an expression of their individual pathologies such as paranoia, identity crisis, cognitive disorders, and feelings of inferiority, helplessness, rejection, or marginality.” Dekmejian placed Guiteau (along with Arthur Bremer, who shot Governor George Wallace, and John Hinckley Jr., who shot President Ronald Reagan) into this category. Political assassins, on the other hand, who may have psychological problems, are nevertheless motivated primarily by political causes “based on ideology, ethnicity, or religion.” Czolgosz, Oswald, and Amir are placed into this category by Dekmejian.
¹⁰⁸

In another study, political scientist James Clarke divided sixteen American assassins and would-be assassins (including both lone wolves and those who worked with coconspirators) into four basic categories that he simply named Type I, II, III and IV. The Type I assassins “view their acts as a probable sacrifice of self for a political ideal…. Their extremism is rational, selfless, principled, and without perversity.” Czolgosz (along with John Wilkes Booth, among others) was put into that category. Type II assassins, on the other hand, are “persons with overwhelming and aggressive egocentric needs for acceptance, recognition, and status.” Clarke put Oswald (along with female would-be assassins Lynette Fromme and Sara Jane Moore, both of whom attempted to assassinate President Gerald Ford) into this category. Type III assassins are “psychopaths (or sociopaths) who believe that the condition of their lives is so intolerably meaningless and without purpose that destruction of society and themselves is desirable for its own sake.” Clarke placed Giuseppe Zangara (who attempted to assassinate President Franklin Roosevelt) and Arthur Bremer (who attempted to assassinate Governor George Wallace) into this category. Finally, Type IV assassins “are characterized by severe emotional and cognitive distortion that is expressed in hallucinations and delusions of persecution and/or grandeur.” Clarke placed Guiteau, among others, into this category.
¹⁰⁹