Killing a King: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel by Dan Ephron Page B
Authors: Dan Ephron
Tags: History, Biography & Autobiography, Political Science, middle east, World, Israel & Palestine, Presidents & Heads of State, Middle Eastern
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table, his father respondedwith a line he would deliver again and again in the coming years. “Only through prayer and Torah study will the government collapse. And if it doesn’t, it’s not God’s will,” he said.
To Amir it was a meek and submissive Judaism his father was preaching, one he had already left behind.
SOMETIME AFTER THE holiday, Amir and his brother set out for Shavei Shomron, a Jewish settlement surrounded by Palestinian villages in the West Bank. Hagai had finished his own army service several years earlier and had been working in trade jobs, first as an electrician and now as a metalsmith. With the money he’d saved, he bought an off-white Volkswagen Beetle, a 1976 model. He also put several thousand dollars in a savings account and bought shares in a company that quickly lost most of its value. He hadn’t bothered cashing out.
The two brothers looked alike, held the same extremist positions, and confided in each other about almost everything, having shared a room since birth. But they were different in significant ways. Amir engaged easily with people, including girls, while Hagai mostly kept to himself. Hagai had watched his little brother stand up to older and bigger boys if they tried to bully him on the playground but lacked the fiery temperament to do it himself. He also lacked his brother’s aptitude in school. Geulah thought of her two sons as the thinker and the tinkerer, Hagai being the one who could fix appliances in the house, who liked taking apart old radios to see how they worked.
Hagai was also less crafty. Geulah kept the boys mostly indoors or in the backyard. “You wouldn’t see them just walking the streets,” she would recall years later. She also kept them from participating in sports, which involved dressing immodestly and mingling with girls, whether on the team or on the sidelines. Instead, the two burned their schoolboy energy around the house. Hagai liked to sneak up on his brother and knock the book he was reading from his hand, a provocation that invariably ended in a chase and a broken window. (The neighborhood glazier, a survivor of Nazi concentration camps,made a regular portion of his living from the Amirs). But Amir almost never got punished. “Hagai would get yelled, at but Yigal was clever. He would get away with things,” Geulah said. Like his brother, Hagai had also served in an infantry unit and spent time in the Gaza Strip. During a grueling five-month boot camp, he trained as a sniper, learning how to stalk a target, where to position himself, and how to breathe while shooting. He also developed an interest in explosives, reading about them in army manuals and pilfering munitions whenever he could. On isolated operating bases, it was not difficult to do. The ammunition was often stored in a tent and guarded by the soldiers themselves. If Hagai did three hours of guard duty at the tent, he might leave with a pocketful of fuses or detonators.
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
To Amir it was a meek and submissive Judaism his father was preaching, one he had already left behind.
SOMETIME AFTER THE holiday, Amir and his brother set out for Shavei Shomron, a Jewish settlement surrounded by Palestinian villages in the West Bank. Hagai had finished his own army service several years earlier and had been working in trade jobs, first as an electrician and now as a metalsmith. With the money he’d saved, he bought an off-white Volkswagen Beetle, a 1976 model. He also put several thousand dollars in a savings account and bought shares in a company that quickly lost most of its value. He hadn’t bothered cashing out.
The two brothers looked alike, held the same extremist positions, and confided in each other about almost everything, having shared a room since birth. But they were different in significant ways. Amir engaged easily with people, including girls, while Hagai mostly kept to himself. Hagai had watched his little brother stand up to older and bigger boys if they tried to bully him on the playground but lacked the fiery temperament to do it himself. He also lacked his brother’s aptitude in school. Geulah thought of her two sons as the thinker and the tinkerer, Hagai being the one who could fix appliances in the house, who liked taking apart old radios to see how they worked.
Hagai was also less crafty. Geulah kept the boys mostly indoors or in the backyard. “You wouldn’t see them just walking the streets,” she would recall years later. She also kept them from participating in sports, which involved dressing immodestly and mingling with girls, whether on the team or on the sidelines. Instead, the two burned their schoolboy energy around the house. Hagai liked to sneak up on his brother and knock the book he was reading from his hand, a provocation that invariably ended in a chase and a broken window. (The neighborhood glazier, a survivor of Nazi concentration camps,made a regular portion of his living from the Amirs). But Amir almost never got punished. “Hagai would get yelled, at but Yigal was clever. He would get away with things,” Geulah said. Like his brother, Hagai had also served in an infantry unit and spent time in the Gaza Strip. During a grueling five-month boot camp, he trained as a sniper, learning how to stalk a target, where to position himself, and how to breathe while shooting. He also developed an interest in explosives, reading about them in army manuals and pilfering munitions whenever he could. On isolated operating bases, it was not difficult to do. The ammunition was often stored in a tent and guarded by the soldiers themselves. If Hagai did three hours of guard duty at the tent, he might leave with a pocketful of fuses or detonators.
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
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