I am posting with an account that I asked the editors to delete. It’s hashgaha that they didn’t. I knew Goldstein rather well and he may have thought of me as a friend. Until he did what he did, my family and I joked about him, calling him “Dr. Kach” for his Kahanist fanaticism. Avira is spot-on. Goldstein snapped a month or so before the mass murder he committed; it was then that two dear friends of his died in his arms after being gunned down by Palestinian terrorists. As for Me’arat Hamachpela, its floor is made of flagstones, each probably as heavy as a person. No weapons can be stashed under them, let alone under thin rungs. No one in Goldstein’s position, as a captain in the IDF medical corps, could have exclusive knowledge of an impending massacre of Jews, to which the army refuses to respond. But someone with hard-core Kahanist views would regard a mass of Palestinian Arabs as targets for slaughter, because in Kahanist thought the seed of Amalek manifests anew in Israel’s enemies of each generation, in this case the Palestinians. And there’s no better time to observe the mitzva of obliterating the memory of Amalek than Purim. Allow me to anticipate another argument: that Goldstein had heard the Arabs chanting “slaughter the Jews” at the Me’ara the previous evening, where he had gone to hear the megillah. No. He heard the megillah in a small shul in Kiryat Arba, sitting with two of his sons about eight feet away from me.
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