On the Front Line. Marie Colvin
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