Free Killing a King: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel by Dan Ephron

Bar-Ilan in the 1950s as an alternative to the prestigious—and very much secular—Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Its board of governors usually included the country’s top rabbis and Orthodox politicians. Though the campus was open to all applicants, the criteria for acceptance favored graduates of religious schools, a policy that guaranteed a largely religious student body. Bar-Ilan was the only university in Israel to include Jewish studies in its required curriculum.
    The Six-Day War marked a turning point for the university. The religious stream of Zionism had long associated the return to biblical Israel with the coming of the messiah. Now that Israel had restored its rule in Judea and Samaria, the messianic age had clearly arrived, a premise that stirred both excitement and extremism on campus. In 1980, a campus rabbi published an article in one of the university’s student journals predicting an inevitable holy war for the “annihilation of Amalek,” a clan described in the Old Testament as an enemy to the Jews. The remark was widely understood as a call for ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians or, worse, genocide. The university eventually fired the rabbi but the air of extremism remained strong on campus. In a book years later, an Israeli legal scholar referred to the rabbi as the “evil in the heart of Bar-Ilan.”
    Already in the first weeks of the school year, activists formed a group to oppose the Oslo deal—Students for Security. Amir spotted their booth at the entrance to campus one day and stopped to give it a look. The students had hung posters on the booth and around campus depicting Rabin shaking hands with Arafat while handing him a gun or Rabin clad in a kaffiyeh, Arafat-style. But the people Amir encountered seemed tepid, not quite the stalwarts he hoped to enlist for his militia. Still, he put his name to a petition on the table calling for Rabin to step down and volunteered to join the rotation of activists manning the booth.
    Among the students, one did stand out, a blue-eyed firebrand with a slight stutter named Avishai Raviv. In their first conversation, Amir learned that Raviv had been active in Kahane’s Kach movement as a youngster, then joined a combat unit hoping to see action but suffered a leg wound when a fellow soldier discharged his gun accidentally.He liked rolling up his pant leg to show people the scar. With a physical-disability discharge, Raviv cycled through a series of extremist groups, including a quasi-apocalyptic one dedicated to rebuilding the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem. Recently, he had founded the Jewish Nationalist Organization, a group with sharply anti-Arab positions that went by the acronym EYAL. Pleasant-looking but rough around the edges, Raviv had caught the attention of the media as an agitator who craved attention and controversy.
    Raviv boasted to Amir that he’d been investigated for a series of alleged crimes, including running a training camp for Kach-affiliated youngsters and assaulting a left-wing Knesset member. Yet somehow he managed to avoid prison—so many times that some people on the right wondered what pull he had with the police or the Justice Department. Though he seemed to have no paying job, Raviv owned a car and a cell phone, both of which he put to use in the organizing of rallies—of a kind that even some fellow rightists found gratuitously provocative. He rarely showed up for class.
    Amir made a mental note to talk to Raviv about the militia. He also told himself not to let school get in the way of the plans he made with Hagai. First-year students in his program carried a heavy load of courses, including Jewish law, the penal code, contracts, and constitutional law— konstee , as people in the department referred to it. But since professors almost never took attendance, Amir figured out quickly that he could skip most lectures and study from the notes of more diligent students. One of them was Amit Hampel, whom he’d met