Killing a King: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel by Dan Ephron

cultural winds that blew in with them. Books that made their way to the house included the novels of the German author Karl May, whose stories about life in America’s Old West appealed to Amir. At some point, Geulah allowed television in the house—an appliance frowned upon in ultra-Orthodox communities—including a set in Amir’s room. He and Hagai, the eldest among the siblings, liked to watch thrillers and westerns borrowed from a video rental shop in the neighborhood.
    The secular influence could, in theory, have moderated Amir’s worldview. Certainly it influenced his outward appearance. Amir dressed in jeans and T-shirts, with the ritual fringes that observant Jews wear under the shirt, known as tzitziot, tucked into his pants instead of protruding ostentatiously. But far from tempering Amir’s political outlook, it produced an internal discord that seemed to radicalize him, in the view of a clinical psychologist who would evaluate him some years later. “There’s a strong conflict inside him betweenthe longing for sensual and emotional satisfaction and his commitment to a religious and ideological way of life—an ideology that demands sacrificing all material pleasures,” the psychologist Gabriel Weil would write after spending several hours with Amir over two days. “He feels a sense of guilt about the longing.”
    The dissonance would increase in Amir’s teen years. At age eleven, he pressed his parents to send him to a secondary school in Tel Aviv, Israel’s secular heartland. The school belonged to the Haredi education system but offered a broader curriculum than just Torah and Talmud. Crucially, it prepared students for university instead of a life in the yeshiva. Shlomo and Geulah balked at the idea. Getting to school would require their seventh-grader to travel on a public bus for almost an hour each way. But Amir was nothing if not willful. He locked himself in his room and announced he would not emerge until his parents relented. The standoff lasted a day and a night, an eternity for Geulah, who spent the time talking first herself and then Shlomo into giving the school a try. By morning, Amir had prevailed.
    The high school Amir went on to attend in Tel Aviv, HaYishuv HaHadash, had a snooty prestige to it and brought Amir into contact with the children of Orthodox nobility. A student several grades ahead of Amir would become the chief rabbi of Israel, the country’s highest religious authority. Geulah recalled years later that the principal of the boarding school initially snubbed her son, perhaps because of his skin tone, but came to respect his solid command of scripture. When Amir graduated four years later, he declined the service exemption available to most Haredis and signed up for the army.
    It was now 1988, the first full year of the Palestinian uprising. In the Gaza Strip, where Amir spent long stretches, Palestinian youths would gather in huge numbers to taunt soldiers and throw stones. Though the level of violence would remain relatively low in this first “intifada” (a second insurrection years later would include dozens of suicide bombings), it affirmed for Amir the notions he’d held for years: that Arabs would kill Jews at every opportunity and that only ruthless reprisals would deter Palestinians.
    Amir had volunteered for the Golani Brigade, a unit with a reputation for dealing harshly with Palestinians. In dispersing large protests, it was not uncommon for soldiers to separate individuals from the crowd and dispense harsh beatings. Private Amir, Company C, 13th Battalion, seemed to take special pleasure in it, as a member of his unit, Boaz Nagar, would later recall. “Yigal was the enforcer with a capital E . Hit them hard, hit here, push there. Destroy stuff. He enjoyed badgering them just for fun.” The behavior drew mostly praise from Amir’s officers.
    There were other forms of harassment as well. Amir told friends later that on patrols in Gaza, he and his buddies