Ali, his sisters and cousins are living a sequestered life in Tikrit, Saddam Hussein’s birthplace. Ali may still be drawing pictures for his grandfather in vain. He and the other children are being raised to know that their parents were traitors.
Middle East
The Hawk who downed a dove: assassination of Yitzhak Rabin
12 November 1995
Marie Colvin and Jon Swain
Her name was Nava, and she was everything that Yigal Amir, a rather serious student at the religious university of Bar Ilan, wanted. Amir, his friends say, was an arrogant man, lonely and aloof, who had never had a girlfriend before because no girl had been good enough.
He began pursuing her as soon as they met in the spring of 1994. ‘She was rich, pretty, clever, pure and religious. She had it all,’ said a fellow student. They dated for five months. ‘They never broke the limits of what is permissible between a religious pair, but there was a huge commitment.’ So intense was the relationship, they planned to marry.
Then, in January this year, she abruptly left him for his best friend, Shmuel Rosenblum. Amir was stunned. ‘The talk on campus was that her parents had disapproved of her marrying him because he was poor and of Yemeni extraction,’ the friend said. A month later Nava married her new boyfriend.
Amir changed. He had always been fiercely nationalist, with a deep religious belief that God’s holy land had to be zealously guarded by the Jews. He was utterly opposed to Yitzhak Rabin, the prime minister, and his policy of trading land for peace with the Palestinians.
Now he became outrageous, outspoken and dangerous. The extremist, angered and rejected, had tipped over into a potential assassin. ‘I think that not only political views caused the murder, but also his feeling of disappointment in his personal life,’ the friend said. ‘Suddenly we heard him talking about the duty to kill Rabin.’
A fellow student, Shmulik, recalled: ‘His arguments were always based on the Torah [the body of Jewish sacred writings and traditions].’ Amir would tell his friends that, since Rabin had given up parts of the land of Israel, it was a mitzvah (positive obligation) to kill him.
Eight days ago, on a Saturday night in Tel Aviv, he walked up to Rabin, pumped two exploding bullets into him, and discharged that obligation.
In the weeks before, Amir was on such a public rampage that it now seems astonishing that he was able to get near the prime minister with a gun in his hand and a clear line of fire. All last week, stunned Israelis asked why nobody had been watching him.
Amir had made no secret of his deadly intentions. He was a member of an extremist Jewish group that denounced Rabin for treason; he was dragged away by security guards for heckling Rabin at meetings; before he succeeded last Saturday, he had already made two unsuccessful assassination runs. Weren’t the groups of fundamentalist Jews who vowed to stop the peace process at all costs under any kind of surveillance?
The murder raised other, more profound questions. Nobody had believed a Jew would ever kill a Jew; despite the venomous rhetoric that had followed Rabin’s peace treaty with Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader, nobody believed that taboo would be broken. So what was this nation of Jews if the land had become more important than an individual’s life?
The shock and incomprehension deepened as Israelis learned more details about the killer in their midst. Amir grew up in the heart of Israel, the Tel Aviv suburbs, and served in an elite brigade of the army. His background might have given him something of a chip on his shoulder; he was a Sephardi, an Israeli descended from Jews who came from Arab lands, rather than an Ashkenazi, the elite of Israel who came from Europe and founded the state. But he had done well.
Born in 1970, the second of eight children, he was raised in a two-room house by his father, Shlomo, a scribe who supplemented his income with the ritual slaughter of chickens, and his mother, Geula, a large, warm woman who supported the family with a creche in the back garden. They had come to Israel in the 1950s from the Yemen.
Religion played a strong role in Amir’s life from the beginning, first at Wolfson, a school run by the ultra-orthodox Aguda movement and dominated by Ashkenazis. He was out of place as a dark-skinned Sephardi, but he surpassed everyone in his work.
When most of his fellow religious students opted out of armed service, allowed for those pursuing religious studies, he joined the elite Golani brigade while continuing to study the Torah at the fiercely nationalist Yeshiva Kerem De’Yavne institute.
In October 1993, a month after Rabin signed the agreement with Arafat in Washington to hand over land occupied by Israel in the 1967 war in return for peace, Amir entered Bar Ilan University. There, too, he was unable to forget his Sephardic background. Although he was a top student in the most difficult of Israeli studies – a triple course of law, computer and Torah studies – he always felt a misfit. When Nava left him, he felt it even more keenly: she was Ashkenazi.
As his politics became more virulent, he spent most of his time in the Institute of Advanced Torah Studies and in fierce religious and political debates. He began organising student demonstrations, obtained a gun licence and bought a short-barrelled Beretta 9mm, the gun he shot Rabin with. He wore it ostentatiously, tucked in his left trouser hip pocket, the handle protruding over his belt.
Somehow, though, he escaped the attention of Shin Bet, the Israeli version of MI5, even when he joined Eyal, a violently anti-Arab group operating in the West Bank and a venomous agitator against the Rabin government. He became a friend of its founder, Avishai Raviv, who was under surveillance and had been arrested. Still Amir went unnoticed.
In the final weeks he was a publicly angry young man who was hiding nothing. The incidents mounted. On 30 September, he went with other Bar Ilan students to Hebron, where about 20 Jewish families live at the heart of a city of 100,000 Arabs. There they went on a tour with a settler, Maisha Meishcan, a man who defiantly walks the streets with a cowboy hat on his head and an Uzi on his shoulder, and visited the site of a 1929 pogrom against Jews.
There, Meishcan revealed last week, Amir ‘beat up’ two Christian women pacifists, dragging them 20 yards, before police arrived. Two of the group were arrested but Amir slipped away.
A week later he was stopped and his identity details taken by police at a demonstration outside the home of a right-wing Israeli minister who had revealed his support for Rabin over the second phase of the peace agreement. There were other demonstrations. He was twice arrested and released.
On 23 October, Bar Ilan reopened. The last time fellow students remember seeing him was on 2 November, the Thursday before the assassination, at a computer class. He arranged with a friend for a lift to the university that Sunday. He never went.
On the evening of 4 November, at 5:45, Amir locked himself in his family’s garden shed and loaded his Beretta. This time his plan would work.
He had made his first attempt to murder the prime minister months earlier, in June, but at the last minute Rabin had failed to show up at a ceremony at Yad Vashem, the holocaust memorial in Jerusalem. Thwarted, he tried again in early September, when Rabin was opening a new road in Herzliya, near Amir’s home. He joined right-wing demonstrators against the premier, gun in pocket, and got close before security ‘closed like a clam’ around the prime minister.
Now Amir loaded his gun with special hollow-point bullets prepared by his brother, Haggai, 27. In the previous weeks, while Amir was demonstrating, Haggai had painstakingly drilled holes in the heads of about 20 bullets, filling the tiny space with mercury. Ordinary bullets pass cleanly through a target, but hollow-points flatten like a mushroom on impact, bounding around in the body and ripping apart flesh and bone. Amir was now ready.
He walked out of the shed, past the family car and took a bus to the Kings of Israel Square in Tel Aviv, where more