Sympathy For The Devil?

The movement to free Yigal Amir and what it says about Israeli society. Michele Chabin, The Jewish Week New York, 9.11.07. Jerusalem — The assassin, now a proud daddy, was dressed in his prison uniform, his legs shackled but his hands free to cradle his infant son. On Sunday, 12 years to the day that he gunned down Israeli Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin, Yigal Amir was celebrating his son’s brit in a tent set up on the grounds of the Rimonim Prison near Netanya, where he is serving a life sentence. The next day, every media outlet in the country showed images of Amir’s brother, Amitai, smiling and waving to supporters with his right hand and holding the bassinet with his left. (Photos of the killer were prohibited by prison officials.) Dressed in a button-down beige shirt and khaki pants, a kipa and tzizit (ritual fringes) hanging over his belt, the baby’s uncle looked like any proud Orthodox Jew welcoming a nephew (who was conceived during a conjugal visit) into the Jewish people. To the horror of Israeli government officials and many private citizens, sympathy for Yigal Amir appears to be gaining momentum in circles not considered ultra-right wing. The campaign, which has so far included demonstrations at the prison where Amir is confined for life; bumper stickers declaring “Free Yigal Amir” and the circulation of 150,000 copies of a video designed to pull at the heart strings of the Israeli public (now being widely distributed over the Internet), was begun — perhaps not coincidentally — less than a month before Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is expected to make territorial concessions to the Palestinians at the Annapolis summit conference. Oz Almog, a sociologist at Haifa University specializing in Israeli society, agrees that such views are “not a shame anymore and [have] become, particularly in religious circles, quite common. Let’s not exaggerate: this opinion is not held by most of the Israeli public. But if 12 years ago there was one Yigal Amir, today there are 1,000. This illustrates to what extent Israeli society is losing its moral character.”