Yitzhak Rabin
Yitzhak Rabin, the prime minister of Israel who was assassinated on November 4, 1995 at age 73, was a soldier turned politician, statesman, and peacemaker. He lad his country into uncharted territory to make peace with Palestinians and put an end to the wars and bloodshed and terrorism that had plagued his country since its founding.
It was Rabin, the commander-in-chief of Israel’s armed forces in 1967, who had led the lightning strike that captured broad swaths of Arab territories.
Then, 26 years later, on September 13, 1993, it was Prime Minister Rabin who reluctantly extended his hand to Yasser Arafat, leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, to put a symbolic seal of approval on an accord that would lead to the return of much of that territory and to the Palestinian self-rule on the Israeli-occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
In an unusual ceremony on the South Lawn of the White House, one that few had ever expected to see in their lifetimes, Rabin came face-to-face with the man who had been reviled for decades by the Israelis as the mastermind behind one attack after another on their men, women and children.
"The time for peace has come," Rabin declared. "We, the soldiers who have returned from battles stained with blood, we who have seen our relatives and friends killed before our eyes,. . .we who have come from a land where parents bury their children, we who have fought against you, the Palestinians---we say today in a loud and clear voice: Enough of blood and tears. Enough."
He said Israel was not seeking revenge. It was seeking peace.
The tragedy was that some of Rabin’s own people were seeking revenge. As Rabin came closer and closer to achieving his goal of peace, a wide schism opened within the Israeli populace. The bitterness of those opposed to the peace ended with Rabin’s assassination. Rabin became the soldier who paid the ultimate price to make peace.
The decision to come to terms with the Palestinians meant more than making peace with a mortal enemy.
As Rabin explained in a television interview shortly after the White House ceremony, it represented a rededication to the concept of a Jewish state.
He said it would be alien to the democratic tradition of the Jews to keep people under subjugation; and it would be destructive to the meaning of a Jewish state to absorb a large Arab minority and give full voting rights to a group that could comprise as much as 35 percent of the electorate.
For their part, the Palestinians were ready to deal. With the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the PLO was deprived of diplomatic, financial, and military support. At the same time, the PLO was reeling from the loss of contributions from wealthy Arab states that were angered by Arafat’s support of Iraq during the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
Rabin had been at the center of the major events in his nation’s history for five decades.
In 1948, he fought in the siege of Jerusalem during Israel’s war of independence. In 1967, as chief of staff of the Israeli army for the three years before the Jun war, he brought to fighting strength the formidable force that rolled over three Arab armies in six days.
Later, as ambassador to the United States, he helped assure Israel a steady supply of sophisticated weapons. In his first term as prime minister he negotiated the critical---and lasting---disengagement of Israeli and Egyptian forces in Sinai that paved the way for the Camp David accords. And as defense minister in 1986 he presided over the withdrawal of Israeli forces from Lebanon although he continued to respond with force to terrorist attacks.
As a boy growing up in Palestine, Rabin wanted to be an agronomist, and attended the Kadoorie Agricultural School in Galilee where he won the High Commissioner’s Gold Medal as the best student in Palestine.
Like many patriotic young people of his time he gave up his childhood ambition and joined the Palmach, the elite strike force of the Haganah, saw action in World War II, and developed into a brilliant military tactician.
He also developed into a politician. Israelis trusted him for this single-minded devotion to the good of the country and he was repeatedly asked to accept high government positions.
Rabin was born in Jerusalem on March 1, 1922. His father, Nehemiah, who came from a poor family in Ukraine, escaped from czarist Russia and went to Palestine by way of Chicago and St. Louis.
In Palestine, he became a trade union organizer in the labor movement of David Ben-Gurion. His mother, Rosa Cohen, born to a well-to-do family in Gomel, Russia, was active in politics and became the dominant influence on the young man, and was one of the first members of Haganah.
With his parents often away for long periods of time, Rabin remembered that he became a "withdrawn, bashful child." He wrote in his memoirs: "I did not show my feelings or share them with others." It was a trait he carried with him all his life.
He was 7 when Arabs began attacking Jewish settlements. Later, during the 1936 Arab riots and general strike, he was at the Khadouri school, where he was trained in the use of arms by Yigal Allo, who was later to become his commander and mentor.
Five years later, during World War II, Moshe Dayan, then a young commander in the Haganah, invited Rabin to join the Palmach. As part of the British invasion of Greater Syria which was in the hands of the Axis powers, Rabin was sent across the border. He was the youngest in his unit, and it was his job to climb up telephone poles to cut the wires so the Vichy French forces could not call up reinforcements.
In June 1945, just after the end of the war in Europe, Rabin commanded a daring raid to liberate about 200 illegal Jewish immigrants held by the British in a camp at Athlit, on the Mediterranean just south of Haifa.
The exploit was said to be the prototype for a similar raid in the novel "exodus," and Rabin the prototype for Ari Ben Canaan, the here, played in the movie version by Paul Newman. The shy Rabin always insisted that he was not the fictional Ari Ben Canaan.
Rabin was arrested by the British and interned for six months in a camp in Gaza. Soon after he was released, the British turned the problem of Palestine over to the United Nations, which, in 1947, voted for a partition into a Jewish and an Arab state.
The Arabs attacked, and, as hostilities intensified between the Jews and the Arabs, Allon, then the commander of the Palmach, appointed Rabin his deputy.
During the 1948 Israeli war of independence, Rabin commanded the Har-El Brigade, a makeshift unit that failed to take Jerusalem for Israel but kept open the crucial supply lines between Jerusalem and the sea.
When Rabin disclosed in his 1979 memoir his role in forcing 50,000 Arab civilians to leave their homes at gunpoint during the war of independence, there was a furor in Israel, where officials had long denied that Arab civilians were pushed out of their lands.
Upon publication of the book, Rabin’s former commander, Allon, said he had never given orders for what Rabin described as one of the most difficult actions he ever undertook.
In the middle of the war, on August 23, 1948, Rabin married Leah Schlossberg, who had joined the Palmach and served in his battalion. They had two children, a son, Yuval, and a daughter, Dalia, and three grandchildren. All survive him.
In 1953, having finally committed himself to a career in the army, Rabin went to England to study at the British Staff College at Camberly. Back home, he went on to hold a series of high posts in the Israeli army, mainly involving manpower training, and was named chief-of-staff in 1964.
He became Israel’s top expert on military matters. With his formidable memory he could recite budgets, the history of each unit, the name of each officer, where a unit was posted, and where it would be posted. As he rose through the ranks, he became known as the man who knew more than the generals. Eventually, he became a lieutenant general.
The army that fought the six-day war in 1967 was essentially Rabin’s army. Shab’tai Teveth, professor of history at Tel Aviv University, said: "It was the army he trained, planned, built, and armed in his three years as chief of staff." But, he added: "There his glory ends."
His "glory" ended when, on the eve of the fighting, Rabin had a nervous collapse. A story was circulated that he had nicotine poisoning, but, according to Zeev Schiff, the military editor of the newspaper Haaretz, it was a breakdown.
In 1968, Rabin was appointed ambassador to the United States, where he became known as an effective advocate for Israel and a master at procuring American Phantom jets and other sophisticated material.
In his five years as ambassador he developed a close relationship with Henry A. Kissinger, President Nixon’s national security advisor and later his secretary of state. Kissinger called on him for intelligence about troop movements in the Middle East and even consulted him on Vietnam. On one occasion, he said Rabin was the only general who was able to forecast precisely where the forces of North Vietnam would strike.
Shortly after he returned to Israel in 1973, Rabin entered national politics for the first time. Then, on Yom Kippur, while the country was in the middle of an election campaign, Syria and Egypt launched a surprise attack.
The country’s leaders---Prime Minister Golda Meir and her minister of defense, Dayan---were held responsible for the country’s lack of preparedness in that October war, but the Labor Party won enough votes to form a new government. Rabin won in his first attempt at election and was given the post of minister of labor.
Within a month of forming her Cabinet, Meir resigned and the party turned to Rabin, who was out of power at the time of the war and therefore untainted by the heavy casualties.
Rabin won a narrow majority in the party vote and in 1974, became Israel’s fifth prime minister, and, at 52, its youngest. "the time has come," he said, "for the sons of the founders of the state to take over their role."
During his term as prime minister, Rabin faced down terrorists who hijacked an Air France plane en route from Tel Aviv to Paris.
At first, he was seen as vacillating and weak because he waited several days before dispatching an assault group to Entebbe, Uganda, where the plane and almost 100 Israeli citizens were being held hostage. When he finally approved a military operation, and when the daring raid succeeded, he was hailed as a hero.
In 1977 an Israeli newspaper disclosed that he and his wife had violated currency laws by maintaining bank accounts in the United States after he had returned home.
He was forced to step down, opening the way for the victory of Menachem Begin and the Likud party. Rabin accepted responsibility for the bank accounts which were used mainly by his wife, Leah.
The Rabin’s paid a fine imposed by an Israeli court, but six months after Rabin resigned, the currency regulations were rescinded.
Rabin returned to government as minister of defense in a Labor-Likud national unity coalition that presided over the Israeli pullout from Lebanon. His was the policy of the "iron fist," which promised swift retaliation for guerrilla raids against Israelis withdrawing from southern Lebanon.
Military positions:
1941-1947 Member of the Palmach
1947 Operations Officer of the Palmach
1948 Commander of the Harel Brigade
1953-1956 Commander, IDF Training Branch
1956-1959 OC Northern Command
1959-1963 IDF Deputy Chief of Staff
1964-1968 IDF Chief of Staff
1968-73: Served as Israel's Ambassador to the US.
1973: He returned to Jerusalem and became active in the Labor Party. Yitzhak Rabin entered the Labor Party and the 8th Knesset.
1974: He headed the new government of 2 June 1974, after the fall of Golda Meir's government.
1975: As Prime Minister, with American mediation, he conducted the negotiations which resulted in the 1975 interim agreement between Israel and Egypt.
1976: June, the government headed by Yitzhak Rabin ordered the Entebbe operation to rescue Jewish Air France skyjack hostages from Uganda.
1977-84: Yitzhak Rabin was an active opposition MK.
1985-90: Rabin joined the National Unity Government of the 10th Knesset, serving as Defense Minister until March 1990.
1989: May. The Israeli Government adopted his plan for an arrangement with the Palestinians, in stages, which served as the blueprint for subsequent peace-making efforts.
1992: Following his election as Chairman of the Israel Labor Party in March, Yitzhak Rabin led the Labor Party to election victory in June 1992.
1993: As Prime Minister, he signed the Israel-Palestinian Declaration of Principles on 13 September 1993
1994: the Cairo Agreements with the Palestinians in May 1994, the Peace Agreement with Jordan on 24 July 1994 and 1994: Yitzhak Rabin was also one of the three laureates awarded the highest accolade recognized by the entire world: the Nobel Peace Prize, on 10 December 1994.
1995: the Interim Agreement with the Palestinians on 28 September 1995.
4 November 1995, 21:40 Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated.
RABIN'S ASSASSINATION
November 4, 1995
TEL AVIV, Israel (CNN) -- Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated at a peace rally Saturday night in Tel Aviv’s Kings Square, a top aide confirmed. He was reportedly shot in the arm and back by a Jewish man in his mid-20s who is allegedly affiliated with right-wing extremist groups.
Rabin was walking to his car after the rally when he was shot. The 73-year-old prime minister later died in surgery at Ichilov Hospital in Tel Aviv.
The gunman has been identified as Yigal Amir, a law student at Bar Ilan University who had been involved in right-wing causes, Israel television reported. It said Amir, a resident of the central town of Herzeliya, had connections to the far-right group Eyal. Israeli television said police arrested Amir after the shooting. (376K QuickTime movie)
Amir confessed to the assassination and reportedly told investigators, "I acted alone on God’s orders and I have no regrets."
A senior aide said that Foreign Minister Shimon Peres will assume the role of acting prime minister.
At a press conference in Tel Aviv late Saturday, Peres called on the divided country to unite. He referred to his friend Rabin as his comrade, not in arms, but in hope.
He said the peace process was not one between two men, Rabin and Arafat, but a peace between two nations. When he was asked about the identity of the man who allegedly shot Rabin, Peres said, "The killer is a killer. We are not a nation of killers. It’s not the violence that frightens me, it’s the fear of violence." But, he added, Rabin was not afraid.
Peres was with Rabin at the hospital. Witnesses said that Peres kissed the prime minister on the forehead as he died.
An emergency cabinet meeting was called in Tel Aviv. Grim-faced, the members of the cabinet left the hospital where Rabin died and headed for the meeting, where a memorial took place.
Rabin will be buried Monday afternoon, Israel’s radio reported. The radio also said that despite the Jewish custom of burying the dead within one day, Rabin’s funeral has been delayed for an extra day to allow world leaders to attend. The burial location has not been announced.
In a Rose Garden appearance at the White House at 5:50 p.m. EDT, an emotional President Clinton said that the world has lost one of it’s greatest leaders. He called Rabin a "martyr for his nation’s peace." The president said he sent his love to Rabin’s family and said, "Now the peace process belongs to us."
The president was informed of Rabin’s death by National Security Adviser Anthony Lake.
PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat said he was "very sad and very shocked for this awful and terrible crime."
"He is one of the brave leaders of Israel and the peacemakers," Arafat said. "I hope that we will have the ability, the Israelis and Palestinians, to overcome this tragedy. I offer my condolences to his wife, his family, the Israeli government and the Israeli people."
Secretary of State Warren Christopher issued a statement Saturday. He said that "history will record Prime Minister Rabin as one of the towering figures of the century."
"Israel has lost one of it’s finest sons, and we have lost a strong and true friend of the United States," Christopher said.
As Israelis mourn the loss of Yitzhak Rabin, they look to his one-time rival, Shimon Peres, to carry forth his plans. (See Below for Bio on Perez)
Longtime political foes, Peres and Rabin had managed to forge a friendship in recent years built on the shared hope for peace in the Middle East.
There was no clearer demonstration of how close the two had become than at the peace rally Saturday only moments before Rabin was slain.
Standing before a crowd, the two men embraced. "You see?" Rabin told reporters.
"Things change not only in the world, but also in the Middle East—also for us."
Indeed, hours later things had changed swiftly for the two men, in ways neither could have imagined when they embraced.
With Rabin’s death, the Israeli Cabinet named Peres acting prime minister. After years of battling Rabin for leadership of Israel, Peres, 73, accepted the mantle of leadership somewhat reluctantly.
"This is very hard for me to talk (about) him as a deceased man," Peres said following the assassination. "We have stood together for so long. We had such a good friendship."
Still, it is a position for which Peres is well-prepared.