Yitzhak Rabin

Biography

Yitzhak Rabin was born in Jerusalem on 1 March 1922 to Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe and grew up in Tel Aviv in a Labor Zionist family. He studied agriculture, finishing at the Kadoorie Agricultural High School in 1940, and as a teenager joined the Haganah and then the Palmach, rising to become its chief of operations during the 1948 Arab–Israeli War.

He stayed in the new Israel Defense Forces for a long professional career, helped shape its training doctrine, headed the Operations Directorate from 1959 to 1963 and became chief of the general staff in 1964, leading the army to victory in the Six-Day War of 1967. On leaving the army in 1968 he became ambassador to the United States, serving until 1973 at a time when American arms supplies to Israel grew sharply.

Elected to the Knesset for the Alignment, he succeeded Golda Meir as prime minister in June 1974, the first native-born holder of the office. His first government signed the Sinai Interim Agreement with Egypt and ordered the Entebbe raid; he stepped down in 1977 amid a financial scandal. He was defence minister from 1984 to 1990, including the outbreak of the First Intifada.

Returning as prime minister after Labor's victory in 1992, he pursued a negotiated peace with the Palestinians, signing the Oslo Accords with Yasser Arafat, and concluded a peace treaty with Jordan in 1994; that year he shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Arafat and Shimon Peres. On 4 November 1995 he was shot dead after a peace rally in Tel Aviv by Yigal Amir, a Jewish extremist who opposed the accords.