Hagai Amir says Rabin assassination was planned two years in advance

Hagai Amir, who helped his brother Yigal Amir plot the assassination of slain former prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, said Wednesday that the two were not incited by public figures to carry out the murder, which had been planned well in advance.

“There is no connection between incitement and Rabin’s elimination,” Amir wrote on Wednesday night in response to user comments on Facebook. “That is just a leftist tool for hounding the right wing, which in its stupidity is going along with it and even bothers to respond to it. We decided to eliminate Rabin two years beforehand with the signing of the Oslo (A) Accords.”

Amir, who two months ago was released from prison after serving 16 years for his part in the plot, became involved in an online debate after another Facebook user posted a photograph of graffiti calling for current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to “burn.” The user who posted the picture commented against incitement and warned that the lessons of Rabin’s murder had not yet been learned.

“The writing is on the wall,” the user wrote.

Amir responded by writing that incitement had nothing to do with the decision to kill Rabin, but rather it was the signing of the Oslo Accords that was the motivation. The Oslo Accords, signed in at the White House in 1993, created the Palestinian Authority and ceded some areas of the West Bank to Palestinian control.

Following Rabin’s assassination in 1995, a bitter political and social debate developed in Israel over how much Amir was influenced by inflammatory comments made by right-wing rabbis and politicians in the months before the killing.

The Hebrew daily Maariv reported that Amir’s comments drew responses from other Facebook users, one of whom questioned his use of the world “elimination,” usually reserved for targeted assassinations of terrorists, rather than “murder.” Amir responded that “all of Hamas together has not done as much damage to the Jewish people as Rabin and his helpers.”

Since his release from prison Amir has become an avid user of the Facebook social networking site. He regularly posts political musings, poems, and excerpts from a journal he kept during his time behind bars.

Amir has infamously never expressed regret for the 1995 assassination in Tel Aviv. His brother, Yigal, who pulled the trigger, is serving a lifetime sentence in prison.

Times of Israel