On the Front Line: The Collected Journalism of Marie Colvin

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 than 100,000 Israelis had gathered for a demonstration in support of the peace process. It was the largest rally in Israel since 1982, when Israelis protested against their country’s invasion of Lebanon. Rabin was on stage and in a more ebullient mood than anyone could remember.

Out of the public eye, the security operation was under way to protect the prime minister. Its code name: Operation Sunrise. The special techniques for protecting VIPs in Israel are so straightforward that they can be written on one side of a sheet of paper.

But on the night of Rabin’s murder, the much-vaunted organisation was preoccupied. Evidence is emerging of recent infighting that may have weakened Shin Bet’s morale, upset its discipline and damaged its capabilities in the crucial weeks leading up to the assassination.

The trouble began six months ago when a new head of Shin Bet was appointed amid vociferous praise in the Israeli intelligence community. The fact that this man, who cannot be identified under Israeli censorship laws, spoke only broken Arabic was considered of minor importance; he had other vital qualifications, principally his expert knowledge of Jewish extremist organisations.

While at university in the 1970s he had written a thesis on Jewish fringe groups and how to deal with them from a legal point of view. Here was the man to carry Shin Bet into the new era of the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians.

But when Yaakov Perry, the outgoing head of Shin Bet, who was a close friend of Rabin’s, chose him as his heir, the result was devastating. Six section heads resigned when they realised their way to the top was blocked by the appointment, creating a serious vacuum within the organisation.

Even during Perry’s last years as director-general, signs of unease within Shin Bet had become discernible. Part of these were about Perry himself, who was nicknamed the ‘trumpeter’ for his taste for boisterous parties and wild music. There were two commissions of inquiry into Shin Bet’s activities during Perry’s tenure. But Rabin, in keeping with his customary loyalty to his friends, overlooked the reports against him.

In the words of a leading Israeli security specialist, Shin Bet had grown ‘complacent, sloppy and corrupt’. In common with many other bodies in Israel, a malaise had set in, derived from the deep divisions in Israeli society, the lack of a common goal and the pursuit of peace amid continuing terror.

None the less, it knew that an assassination was in the wind. Three weeks earlier, the heads of Shin Bet summoned leaders of the Jewish settler movement to meetings in Tel Aviv where they were urged to help build a profile of a potential assassin. They refused, saying that as leaders of their communities their involvement with the security services was inappropriate.

They assured Shin Bet that it was highly unlikely that a settler would assassinate a Jewish leader anyway. It would be better, they warned, for the security service to concentrate its energies on the Israeli heartland – the suburbs of Tel Aviv, for example.

They were right, and the view is that the new head of Shin Bet, as an expert on Jewish extremists, should have evaluated their advice better, and followed it. Like Britain’s naval guns guarding the fortress of Singapore in 1941, Shin Bet was pointing the wrong way last Saturday night.

The plain fact is that everyone knew the prime minister was in danger that night. In the days leading up to the peace demonstration, the intelligence services had publicised their fears of an attack, perhaps by sniper fire or a car bomb. The assumption was that it would come from Palestinian extremists.

There was extra surveillance around the square, with more than 1,000 policemen on duty, snipers crouched on rooftops and checks on hundreds of apartments.

Even so, Rabin failed to take the most elementary precaution of wearing a bullet-proof vest. One Israeli security expert last week laid some of the blame for this on the chummy relationship between the prime minister and the man in charge of VIP security, Colonel Benny Lahav (since resigned) of Shin Bet. It meant that Lahav could not exercise his authority. ‘Had I been in charge,’ the expert said, ‘I would have told the prime minister that either he wore a bullet-proof vest or I would, that I could not protect him without it. Such a firm stand would have got through to Rabin.’

Error was compounded by error. Shin Bet’s rules require the prime minister to be in a ‘sterile zone’ at all times, surrounded by a minimum of three Shin Bet bodyguards, preferably six. Last Saturday there were only two near him as he took his place on the stage with Shimon Peres.

By that time a vital breach in security had already taken place. The original plan had been for Rabin to arrive at a nearby municipal building and go to the rally via a basement door through a secure area not open to the public.

Instead, the premier’s car was parked next to the stage and he climbed to it up an open flight of stairs. ‘I don’t know why the change was made, but it cost Rabin his life. Under the original plan, he would not have been exposed to the public at all,’ said a security official.

Just after 8pm, Rabin took the microphone to address the cheering crowd. ‘Allow me to say that I am excited. I was a military man for 27 years. I fought as long as there was no chance for peace. I believe there is now a chance for peace that must be taken.’

Surprisingly, since he was awkward in public and usually fled after speaking, he stayed with Peres and other Israeli personalities to sing the Song of Peace, an anthem that was banned in Israel when it was released in 1969. Nobody had ever seen Rabin sing in public. It was a sign of his joy that after all the criticism of his policies he felt that the unprecedented numbers at the rally validated his decisions.

Then, 15 minutes before Rabin took his fatal walk down the stairs from the podium, two more security lapses gave Amir his chance. Shin Bet should have been guarding the car parking area beneath the stage. They were not. When an officer noticed that this area had not been secured, he ordered police to do so. By then, Amir was already inside, explaining to the police that he was a VIP driver called up for extra duties. Nobody challenged his story. As he waited behind a barrier for the right moment to strike, the Beretta lay hidden in his clothes.

By now, the Shin Bet officer in charge had reason to be distracted. Over his radio he received a tip-off that a shooting was imminent. ‘The tension was immense, and he wanted to get Rabin off the stage as fast as possible. But he was convinced that the main threat was from Palestinians,’ said a security official.

At the end of the demonstration, Rabin came down the stairs to his car, failing to make sure the bodyguards were around him. Another blunder. The police unit in the parking area had not received a message that Rabin was arriving, so no safe channel was formed. ‘We let down our guard,’ said the security official. ‘We felt that the rally had passed peaceably and that we had done our job.’

At 9.44, as Rabin was getting into his armoured Cadillac, Amir stepped forward. From 5 feet away he drew his pistol and fired. Ingeniously, he shouted to the police that it was ‘only an exercise’ and he was firing blanks. They believed him.

Rabin’s bodyguard, hit in the shoulder, knew otherwise. He bundled the prime minister, a bullet in his stomach, another in his back, into the car and they sped off. At the hospital, there was the final blunder: nobody was ready to receive them. In the confusion nobody had radioed ahead. The chief surgeon, summoned to an emergency on a badly wounded man, found he was treating the dying prime minister.

One top Jewish counter-terrorist expert said of the colossal foul-up: ‘It is beyond negligence of the most simple basic procedures. Rabin was abandoned.’

Amir told security officials who surrounded him immediately after the killing, the gun still in his hand: ‘God told me to do it. I have no regrets.’ The fact that he believed he had a religious mandate shocked Israelis.

So did the crass statements by supporters. One student at Bar Ilan sent a message on the Internet: ‘Happy holiday everyone. The witch is dead; the wicked witch is dead.’ The West Bank settlement of Maale Amos hung out a sign: ‘We are all Yigal Amir.’

‘I am very happy that the dictator Rabin is dead,’ said Aryeh Bar Yosef, a resident of Kiryat Arba, a radical settlement outside Hebron, which has made a shrine of the grave of Baruch Goldstein, who gunned down 29 Palestinians at the Hebron mosque last year.

‘I hope that the Nazi Arafat and his friend Peres will die like Rabin. Rabin, the head of the traitors, got what he deserved. Praise be to God. Yigal Amir redeemed us from the terrible situation we were in.’

Such statements have forced Israelis to face the dark netherworld of Jewish extremist groups. Eyal follows the teachings of Meir Kahane, a Brooklyn-based rabbi who moved to Israel and founded the extremist Kach movement.

Kahane was assassinated five years ago – eerily, on exactly the same day as Rabin – while making a speech in New York and his movement was outlawed last year by the Israeli government after Goldstein’s massacre. With Kach banned, groups such as Eyal, with the same ideology and many of the same members, have become increasingly active.

Even more disturbing for Israelis is the realisation that these groups flourish among young people from comfortable, ordinary homes. When police searched the Amir family house and the kindergarten run by his mother they found a cache of ammunition and explosives. Car tyres that were used as swings for children were packed with explosives. One of those arrested as part of the alleged conspiracy to kill Rabin, Ohad Skornik, is the son of Yehuda Skornik, an eminent surgeon at Ichilov hospital, where Rabin died. It has made parents all over Israel wonder what their children are up to.

Last week, the issue confronting Israel was the allegation of a conspiracy to kill Rabin. There is no doubt Amir was a member of an extreme right-wing group that considered Rabin a traitor.

Eyal, founded in 1991 by Raviv, good-looking, arrogant and, like Amir, a student at Bar Ilan, is fanatical, albeit in an immature way. Members are given a Hebrew code word, and go through a dramatic swearing-in ceremony at the graveside of Avraham Stern, the leader of the Stern Gang terror group that fought the British mandate.

It is believed to take orders from Baruch Marzel, a Boston-born settler based in Hebron who is a former member of Kach but resigned when it became illegal. Last week, he would not support the killing, but blamed Rabin for his own death. ‘When you force people underground, when you shut their mouths, their hands work and you have violence. There will be more, I am sure. Israel is heading to civil war.’

Before last Saturday, though, Eyal was ‘known for words rather than actions’, said one security official. That is indeed what Raviv said when he denied all knowledge of Amir’s plans to kill Rabin. ‘Yes, he was very close to us, but we knew nothing of his intentions,’ Raviv said after his arrest. ‘I am in complete shock. The guy ruined his life. We knew he said that Rabin must be killed but he didn’t speak more than anyone else here. We all shouted all kinds of things at demonstrations.’

In fact, Raviv was shouting those very things the night of Rabin’s assassination, with a few dozen right-wingers who staged a counter-demonstration in a side street at the peace rally in Kings of Israel Square. Amir was seen to join them briefly, then leave after talking to Raviv.

Was there a conspiracy? A total of six people are now in police custody, charged with complicity in the killing. All are religious men in their twenties.

Along with Amir, his brother Haggai, Skornik and Raviv, police also have in custody two other students, Dror Hadani and Michael Epstein. All deny any connection.*

The signs are that Amir acted alone on the day. He took a bus to the rally and later told investigators: ‘I never believed it would be so easy.’ Investigators believe Amir would have aborted his plan had the opportunity not been there. ‘He didn’t know he was going to do it until he pulled the trigger,’ said one.

But while he may have acted alone on that night, police believe the others helped him procure weapons, and did not report the possibility of his plans to police. ‘We think there was a connection between a group of persons … who established a form of organisation to assassinate the prime minister and other political persons based on their ideology to try to prevent the peace process,’ Moshe Shahal, the police minister, said.

All week, mourners visited Rabin’s grave side at Mount Herzl cemetery and his widow’s home, leaving flowers, candles in makeshift cans or just a handwritten note. Tonight, at the end of seven days of mourning, hundreds of thousands, the largest crowd ever seen in Israel, are expected to gather at the Kings of Israel Square in Tel Aviv for a ceremony renaming the plaza where Rabin died in his honour.