The law student charged with assassinating Rabin could well prove mentally unhinged. Yigal Amir, 27, told police God had personally instructed him to carry out the attack. Still, the alleged killer appears to have played a role in a campaign of vituperation that has shattered previous standards of decorum in Israeli politics. Students at Bar Ilan University near Tel Aviv reportedly said Amir was a member of a far-right group called Eyal (Ram), an offshoot of the Kach organization founded by the late Rabbi Meir Kahane.
Israeli politics is at a dangerous crossroads. Founded by secular-minded European Jews, the nation turned steadily more conservative as Jewish immigrants from the Arab world found a stronger political voice. In 1977, the Likud bloc of Menachem Begin took power on a platform that invoked a Biblical justification for settling the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. A new type of pioneer emerged: the religious Zionist. And among the most conservative of the 130,000 people who answered the call to move to the occupied territories were followers of Kahane, who claimed a scriptural basis for violence against Arabs.
Israel’s belated efforts to check such radical groups have had only mixed success. The government banned Kach and several other organizations only in March of last year, after a U.S.-born settler, Dr. Baruch Goldstein, gunned down 29 Muslims at prayer. As many as several hundred radicals may still be armed and active. The fact that most settlers are army veterans complicates the threat; Amir reportedly served with the elite Golani Brigade and is licensed to carry a pistol. The new head of Israel’s internal security service, the Shin Bet, reportedly was chosen because he’s a specialist in Jewish terrorists. But even for such experts, Amir might have been hard to spot. He grew up not on the West Bank but in the central town of Herzliya; neighbors there described him as modest, quiet and polite.
Rabin knew of the danger. Security around him had been beefed up in recent weeks. But the prime minister didn’t take all the precautions that his advisers had recommended, such as wearing a bulletproof vest. In any case, Rabin was never one to shy away from a fight. After his bodyguards hustled off a man who tried to rush up to him at one public appearance last month, Rabin attacked the demonstrators frontally, calling them “Kahanists, racists and a blot on the Jewish people.”
The assassination is bound to bring down the full weight of police on the radical right. “I’m sure some of [the radicals] are happy, but they are not very smart,” says Ehud Sprinzak, Israel’s leading expert on the right. “The prudent among them realize that this is a disaster.” Police may have to arbitrate which kind of protest is within bounds. “A poster of Rabin as a Nazi is telling you that he is fair game,” says Sprinzak. The professor said he has been fearful for more than a month, since a yeshiva student warned him his friends were talking seriously of targeting the prime minister. But the police already knew of such threats. It took a tragedy in Tel Aviv for the nation to fully appreciate the danger.
