Rabin, Leah (1928–2000)

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Rabin, Leah (1928–2000)

First lady of Israel (1974–77 and 1992–95). Born Leah Schlossberg on April 8, 1928, in Koenigsberg, Germany (now Kaliningrad, Russia); died of cancer onNovember 12, 2000, near Tel Aviv, Israel; father was a textile manufacturer and real-estate investor; attended high school in Tel Aviv; received a teaching degree; married Yitzhak Rabin (1922–1995, prime minister of Israel [1974–77, 1992–95]), on August 23, 1948; children: daughter Dalia Rabin-Pelossof (a lawyer and member of Israeli parliament); son Yuval Rabin.

First lady of Israel from 1974 to 1977 and again from 1992 to 1995, when her husband Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated, Leah Rabin was warmly admired in the United States and Europe during and after her husband's career, less so in Israel. Strong willed, intelligent, and outspoken, she became an untiring advocate of peace between Israel and the Palestinians after her husband's death, carrying on the cause he had championed, and while she remained a controversial public figure in her country, she had earned the respect of many Israelis by the time of her death from cancer in November 2000.

Leah Rabin was five years old when her father, a well-off textile manufacturer, moved his family from her birthplace of Koenigsberg, Germany (now Kaliningrad, Russia), to Palestine in response to Hitler's ascension to power. Palestine was then under British rule, and Jews comprised somewhat less than 30% of the population. While a high school student in Tel Aviv, Leah met Yitzhak Rabin, who was then a 22-year-old officer in the Palmach, the top force in the underground Jewish militia. After graduating from high school the following year, she attended teachers' college briefly before dropping out to join the Palmach, working on propaganda. (She would later return to college and earn a teaching degree.) The state of Israel was created on May 14, 1948, and in the midst of the ensuing Arab-Israeli war, Leah and Yitzhak were married on August 23, 1948. Yitzhak, who served as brigade commander in that conflict, rose through the hierarchy of the Israeli army in the years that followed, finally becoming chief of staff, while Leah raised their two children. The couple remained close throughout their marriage, partners and confidants in both personal life and politics. After Yitzhak oversaw the strategies that led to Israel winning the Six-Day War (called the June War by Arabs) in 1967, he was named Israel's ambassador to the United States in 1968.

The Rabins were popular hosts in Washington, D.C., where Leah charmed the political establishment. The couple also opened a bank account, the existence of which would come back to haunt them. In 1974, after Golda Meir resigned as prime minister in the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War (called the October War by Arabs), Yitzhak was elected prime minister. Three years later, prior to a general election, the Israeli media made public the fact that the Rabins' U.S. bank account had been kept open, albeit with only a small amount of money, after they returned to Israel (Leah had closed the account on a recent trip to Washington). Since they no longer lived in the U.S., the bank account had been illegal under Israeli law. A scandal erupted, an investigation ensued, and Leah, whom many in the country had come to perceive as arrogant and overly European during her tenure as first lady, stood trial and was fined some $27,000. Yitzhak resigned as prime minister and temporarily withdrew from politics, and his Labor Party lost the election to the opposition Likud Party.

Although her husband remained steadily on her side, Leah was widely blamed for his political downfall, and her name was regularly invoked when he returned to politics some years later and began climbing to the top of the government again. He won reelection as prime minister in 1992, intent upon ending the continual violence between Israel and the Palestinians, and in 1993 Leah accompanied him to Oslo where he signed a historic peace accord with Yasser Arafat (head of the Palestine Liberation Organization and later president of the new Palestinian National Authority). The Oslo accords, while rabidly denounced by ultranationalists on both sides, won Yitzhak Rabin, Arafat, and Shimon Peres, the Israeli foreign minister, the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994. That year Leah also traveled with Yitzhak to Jordan for the signing of a peace treaty with that country, and provoked much indignant comment at home when she lost a piece of jewelry during the signing ceremony and ordered accompanying Israeli army troops to search through the sand for it.

Death threats directed at Yitzhak Rabin became common as the peace process, however slowly and delicately, forged ahead. Both Leah and her husband were heckled in public, and demonstrators held rowdy, emotional rallies against Yitzhak (on occasion calling him a traitor) and the peace process. On November 4, 1995, a religious ultranationalist Jew opposed to peace with the Palestinians assassinated Yitzhak Rabin in Tel Aviv. Leah remained composed during his funeral, crying only once, and received condolences from numerous attending heads of state with stoicism. In the days that followed, however, she gave interviews blasting those Israelis (including Likud head and soon thereafter prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu) whom she perceived as having encouraged with their rhetoric the poisonous divisiveness of the anti-peace process faction, and she remained vocal in support of Israeli-Palestinian peace for the rest of her life.

While Leah Rabin never served in an official government position, in the 1990s she became internationally known for her advocacy of peace, and her opinions on the various twists and turns in the peace process during those years were widely sought and quoted in the world media. (Many nationalists and ultra-religious Jews at home remained markedly less impressed.) In 1997, she published Rabin: Our Life, His Legacy (she and her husband had published another memoir, Wife by His Side, in 1991). She continued her public activities after being diagnosed with lung cancer in the late 1990s, and only hospitalization prevented her from attending the commemoration of the fifth anniversary of her husband's assassination in early November 2000. She died just over a week later, on November 12, 2000, while Israel was convulsed with the worst Israeli-Palestinian violence it had seen in years. Eulogies poured in from international leaders and politicians, including Arafat, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, American Secretary of State Madeleine Albright , and President Bill Clinton, who noted, "We have lost a dear friend and the Middle East has lost a friend of peace, but the work to which she and Yitzhak dedicated their lives must and will continue." Her coffin lay in state for several days before she was buried beside her husband in Mount Herzl cemetery in Jerusalem.