assassination of Yitzhak Rabin
assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, mortal shooting of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin following a mass peace rally on November 4, 1995 in Tel Aviv’s Kings of Israel Square (later renamed Rabin Square). Rabin was killed by a Jewish extremist, Yigal Amir, who was angry about the Oslo Accords, in which Rabin agreed to cede some of the territory occupied in the Six-Day War (1967) to the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in exchange for peace. Amir fired two bullets that hit Rabin. One bullet went into Rabin’s back, rupturing his spleen and puncturing his left lung; the other went into his rib cage and passed through his right lung. Rabin died that night.
From hawk to peacemaker
Rabin, who was 73 years old at the time of his assassination, had the military experience and hawkish reputation to be a credible voice for security among an Israeli population that was leery of the PLO, which had engaged in militant resistance to occupation, including guerrilla warfare and terrorist attacks. As The New Yorker observed in 2015, Rabin “was a kind of Israeli Nixon,” an allusion to former U.S. president Richard Nixon, whose longtime anti-communist record enabled him to pursue normalization with the communist government of China with public confidence during his presidency.
During Israel’s War of Independence in 1948, Rabin fought against the Egyptian army in the Negev and oversaw military actions in Jerusalem and surrounding areas. He was hailed as a hero of Israel’s 1967 victory in the Six-Day War, which led to the country seizing territory from Arab enemies Jordan, Egypt, and Syria, including the West Bank and the Gaza Strip territories that were later negotiated in the Oslo Accords. He first became prime minister in 1974, and two years later he burnished his military bona fides with a daring hostage rescue raid at Entebbe, Uganda (see Entebbe raid).
Rabin, a career military man, initially took a hard line against protests by Palestinians under Israeli rule. In 1988—as defense minister during the first intifada, a Palestinian uprising—he ordered soldiers to break the bones of Palestinians who were throwing rocks at them. But he realized this approach to the uprising was unsustainable, and later that year he told fellow Labor Party members, “I’ve learned something in the past two and a half months. Among other things, that you can’t rule by force over one and a half million Palestinians.”
In 1993, during his second stint as prime minister, he agreed to the Oslo peace deal with his longtime enemy, PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat, in which the PLO recognized Israel’s right to exist and Israel committed to withdrawing from much of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank and granting the Palestinians limited self-rule. At a White House ceremony that year, he shook Arafat’s hand. In his remarks during the ceremony, he said, “We say to you today in a loud and a clear voice: enough of blood and tears. Enough.” The following year Rabin, Arafat, and Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres were awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace for the initiative. Although a majority of Israelis supported the deal, it stoked a furious reaction from some hard-right Israelis, who expressed fears that it would force evacuations of Israeli settlements in the occupied territories.
Killed at a peace rally
Some ultranationalists, including three rabbis, publicly declared Rabin a rodef—a “pursuer” of harm against innocent Israelis—for his role in strengthening the PLO. Signs at demonstrations against the Oslo Accords depicted Rabin wearing Nazi garb or a Palestinian keffiyeh styled in the manner of Arafat. Opposition leaders who attended, most notably Benjamin Netanyahu, stood by as the crowd chanted “Death to Rabin.” Amir, who had led rallies in Israeli settlements in opposition to the agreement, openly told friends and fellow law students that he wanted to kill the Israeli prime minister. But, with hard-line Palestinian groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad engaged in a campaign of suicide bombings in an effort to disrupt the peace process, Israeli security officials were focused on threats posed by Palestinian terrorism, not Jewish ultranationalism.
On the day he was killed, Rabin was worried not about an attack but about an embarrassingly small crowd, and he thought about skipping the event. His concerns were unfounded, and roughly 100,000 people attended. He told the crowd, “I always believed that most of the people want peace and are ready to take a risk for it,” and then he joined in a singing of the popular Israeli song “Shir la-Shalom” (“A Song for Peace”). At 9:45 pm, as Rabin was leaving the rally and getting into his car, Amir made his way through the crowd and shot the prime minister twice. Police immediately wrestled him to the ground, and on the way to the police station he gave them a full confession. When Rabin was declared dead at the hospital and police told Amir he faced charges of killing the Israeli leader, he asked for a schnapps to toast the occasion.
The government announced Rabin’s death at 11:15 pm outside the hospital. Arafat reportedly wept when he heard the news. He later sat shivah—bareheaded and without his keffiyeh—at the Rabin home. Netanyahu called the slaying “one of the worst tragedies in the history of the state of Israel, and even the history of the Jewish people.” Rabin was replaced as prime minister by Peres, who was the next highest-ranking member of Rabin’s party but whom the public viewed as more conciliatory than Rabin toward the Palestinians. Peres called for early elections, hoping for a mandate to carry out the Oslo Accords, but Hamas continued to carry out attacks. When the elections were held in May 1996, Peres lost to Netanyahu, who made security the focus of his campaign, and the Israeli peace movement became marginalized over the ensuing years. Amir was convicted of murder and received a life sentence in March 1996.