The Portrait |
In November 1995, Yigal Amir shot Yitzhak Rabin at point-blank range at a peace rally in Tel Aviv. I was in Brazil when it happened, and I remember the sensation of understanding, even then and from so far away, that something had ended. Rabin was the Israel I admired from another continent, the soldier who had become a peacemaker, the man who shook hands with Yasser Arafat while the whole world watched and held its breath. The assassin believed that a Jewish prime minister who negotiated with Palestinians was a traitor to his people and deserved to die for it.
Itamar Ben Gvir, who kept a portrait of Baruch Goldstein, the man who massacred twenty-nine Palestinians in a Hebron mosque in 1994, hanging in his living room, is today Israel’s Minister of National Security. He was rejected by the Israeli army for being considered too extremist to serve. The movement that created him politically is the direct heir to Yigal Amir’s ideology; this is the factual chain that links Rabin’s assassination to the cabinet of Benjamin Netanyahu in 2026, and those who live here know it and........