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

highlighter. Most teachers allowed students to flip through their books and notes during the tests. Amir was scoring 80s and 90s, among the highest grades in the class.
    Near the end of autumn, Amir attended the wedding of a friend in Tel Aviv, an event that would shape his thinking in the coming years. Ariel Schweitzer, a fellow student at seminary, was marrying a certain Shira Lau at one of the city’s most opulent wedding halls, Gan Ha’Oranim. The wedding drew publicity because of Lau’s pedigree: Her father, Israel Meir Lau, had recently been named Israel’s Ashkenazi chief rabbi and was renowned for his story of survival during World War II. Separated from most of his family at age five and sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp, Lau evaded the death march at the end of the war by hiding under a heap of corpses. He emigrated to Palestine a year later and became an ordained rabbi. Not long before his daughter’s wedding, Lau traveled to the Vatican for a meeting with the pope, the first of its kind in Israel’s history.
    Amir drove to Tel Aviv in his brother’s Beetle, the four-cylinder engine wheezing along the highway. In the hall, he sat with friends from the seminary, young men in white dress shirts and black skullcaps. A sliding partition separated them from the women. Soon Amir was taking stock of the prominent figures around the room, including Knesset members and ministers in Rabin’s cabinet. Then he spotted Rabin himself, sitting at a table with just one bodyguard at his side.The sight of him flooded Amir with adrenaline. The prime minister was so close at hand and so manifestly mortal, just flesh and blood. Amir had his Beretta jammed in his belt, covered by his shirt. He contemplated walking over to Rabin and shooting him in the back of the head. Other people approached to shake hands with the prime minister. A photographer snapped pictures from across the room.
    A minute elapsed and then another. Amir told himself he would come to regret passing up the opportunity. But he also felt a stitch of hesitation. Did God put him in the same room with Rabin so that he could eliminate the Israeli leader and his Oslo process? Or would Amir be imposing his own plan on God? He thought about the bullets in his magazine, the hollow points and the regular rounds. Then he turned his gaze back to Rabin and watched him leave the hall; Amir had missed his chance. But he gleaned valuable information. Rabin was hardly protected. If protests didn’t stop the peace process, killing him might be a viable alternative.
    At home, he related the events to Hagai. It was too early, he told his brother. He needed to build his inner readiness.

    THE ENCOUNTER WITH Rabin electrified Amir and he yearned to relive the experience. Hoping to get a glimpse of him again, he joined a group of people who demonstrated outside Rabin’s home on Rav Ashi every Friday. The protesters would gather across the street from the building at two in the afternoon, usually numbering no more than a few dozen. Eran Fogel, a senior in high school who lived next door to Rabin, liked to count them from his eighth-story window, knowing that a demonstration of fifty or more required a police permit. They seemed to know it as well, rarely exceeding the permissible number.
    Some of them had been motivated to attend by the continuing violence, which was now making headlines almost every day. In late October, Hamas gunmen posing as Jews picked up two reserve soldiers at a hitchhiking post near a settlement in the Gaza Strip. Aftera short ride, the Palestinian on the passenger side spun toward the backseat and shot both of them several times. A few days later, Palestinians lured a resident of the settlement Beit El near Ramallah, Haim Mizrahi, to a chicken coop where he regularly bought eggs in order to resell them to Jewish vendors and pocket the profit. The men stabbed him to death, put his body in the trunk of his car, and drove off with it. They ditched the