Killing a King: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel by Dan Ephron Page A
Authors: Dan Ephron
Tags: History, Biography & Autobiography, Political Science, middle east, World, Israel & Palestine, Presidents & Heads of State, Middle Eastern
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liked to drive their jeeps straight at oncoming Palestinian vehicles in order to provoke a response. If a driver didn’t swerve to get out of their way, the soldiers would interpret the behavior as hostile and shoot at his windshield. Most of the time, the Palestinians would pull well off the road to let the soldiers pass.
The growing brutality of soldiers serving in the West Bank and Gaza raised enough concern for the government to commission an internal study in 1989 on how the intifada was affecting troops. It concluded, perhaps not surprisingly, that soldiers often became violent at home as well and cultivated a deep hatred for Palestinians.
For Amir, the power felt invigorating. A photo from this period shows him standing on a dirt road, in front of a row of tanks. He has one arm propped on his hip and the other draped over the shoulder of a somewhat taller soldier. Both men are smiling, but Amir’s expression is tighter and more controlled. His Galil assault rifle hangs across his torso and the signature brown beret of the Golani Brigade is folded into his epaulette. A clump of dark chest hair projects from his open shirt.
Amir’s regular evaluations were so positive that one of Israel’s intelligence agencies approached him about a mission overseas. The agency, Nativ, had been sending Israelis to the Soviet Union for short periods going back decades—to smuggle books to Zionist activists who faced government harassment, teach them Hebrew, and lift their spirits. With the Communist era now over and Jews free to leave, the mission evolved. Amir was tasked with persuading these potential emigrants to choose Israel over other destinations, including Germanyand the United States. He spent several months in Riga with a second emissary, Avinoam Ezer, who came to regard him as exceptionally smart and capable. By the time they left, Amir had learned enough Russian to communicate basic ideas.
Sometime during his service Amir gravitated toward a more provocative form of fundamentalism. Whereas his Haredi upbringing taught him that God alone determined the destiny of the Jews, he now bristled at the passiveness of this approach. Instead, he embraced the idea that Jews “must learn to fathom God’s Will” and act accordingly. Amir had read the line in an introduction to a book of essays by Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, the spiritual leader of the settlers in the West Bank and Gaza. While Kook seemed not quite fiery enough for Amir, the author of the introduction, the far-right politician Binyamin Elon, had captured something profoundly meaningful to the young extremist. “Contrary to the secular, activist approach, which holds that history is determined by man’s actions alone, and contrary to the passive [religious] approach, which holds that Divine Will is the sole instrumentality, we must learn to fathom God’s Will and ‘come to the help of the Lord’ [Judges 5:23] and ‘act with God,’ ” he wrote in his own essay. Elon meant the passage as an exhortation: Jews must settle the West Bank and Gaza rather than wait for God to secure their sovereignty over the territory.
But Amir read it as a broader theological doctrine, one that empowered him to judge for himself—to “fathom God’s Will”—whether political leaders were honoring the Bible or violating it. Amir felt uniquely qualified to execute the doctrine. In his own view, he knew God’s writ better than most Jews, even most rabbis. And he was a doer—the characteristic that defined Amir more than any other, that distinguished him from his peers in school and in the military. If a leader of Israel strayed from the core tenets of the Bible, Amir had his own notions about how to “come to the help of the Lord.”
At home, these notions helped draw a line between his father’s Judaism and his own. Amir had already told his brother Hagai cryptically that it might be necessary to do something about Rabin. When he repeated the words one day at the dinner
The growing brutality of soldiers serving in the West Bank and Gaza raised enough concern for the government to commission an internal study in 1989 on how the intifada was affecting troops. It concluded, perhaps not surprisingly, that soldiers often became violent at home as well and cultivated a deep hatred for Palestinians.
For Amir, the power felt invigorating. A photo from this period shows him standing on a dirt road, in front of a row of tanks. He has one arm propped on his hip and the other draped over the shoulder of a somewhat taller soldier. Both men are smiling, but Amir’s expression is tighter and more controlled. His Galil assault rifle hangs across his torso and the signature brown beret of the Golani Brigade is folded into his epaulette. A clump of dark chest hair projects from his open shirt.
Amir’s regular evaluations were so positive that one of Israel’s intelligence agencies approached him about a mission overseas. The agency, Nativ, had been sending Israelis to the Soviet Union for short periods going back decades—to smuggle books to Zionist activists who faced government harassment, teach them Hebrew, and lift their spirits. With the Communist era now over and Jews free to leave, the mission evolved. Amir was tasked with persuading these potential emigrants to choose Israel over other destinations, including Germanyand the United States. He spent several months in Riga with a second emissary, Avinoam Ezer, who came to regard him as exceptionally smart and capable. By the time they left, Amir had learned enough Russian to communicate basic ideas.
Sometime during his service Amir gravitated toward a more provocative form of fundamentalism. Whereas his Haredi upbringing taught him that God alone determined the destiny of the Jews, he now bristled at the passiveness of this approach. Instead, he embraced the idea that Jews “must learn to fathom God’s Will” and act accordingly. Amir had read the line in an introduction to a book of essays by Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, the spiritual leader of the settlers in the West Bank and Gaza. While Kook seemed not quite fiery enough for Amir, the author of the introduction, the far-right politician Binyamin Elon, had captured something profoundly meaningful to the young extremist. “Contrary to the secular, activist approach, which holds that history is determined by man’s actions alone, and contrary to the passive [religious] approach, which holds that Divine Will is the sole instrumentality, we must learn to fathom God’s Will and ‘come to the help of the Lord’ [Judges 5:23] and ‘act with God,’ ” he wrote in his own essay. Elon meant the passage as an exhortation: Jews must settle the West Bank and Gaza rather than wait for God to secure their sovereignty over the territory.
But Amir read it as a broader theological doctrine, one that empowered him to judge for himself—to “fathom God’s Will”—whether political leaders were honoring the Bible or violating it. Amir felt uniquely qualified to execute the doctrine. In his own view, he knew God’s writ better than most Jews, even most rabbis. And he was a doer—the characteristic that defined Amir more than any other, that distinguished him from his peers in school and in the military. If a leader of Israel strayed from the core tenets of the Bible, Amir had his own notions about how to “come to the help of the Lord.”
At home, these notions helped draw a line between his father’s Judaism and his own. Amir had already told his brother Hagai cryptically that it might be necessary to do something about Rabin. When he repeated the words one day at the dinner
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