Biography

Yitzhak Rabin was an Israeli politician, statesman and general. He was the fifth Prime Minister of Israel, serving two terms in office, 1974-77, and from 1992 until his assassination in 1995.

Rabin was born in Jerusalem to Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe and was raised in a Labor Zionist household. He learned agriculture in school and excelled as a student. He led a 27-year career as a soldier and ultimately attained the rank of Rav Aluf. As a teenager he joined the Palmach, the commando force of the Yishuv. He eventually rose through its ranks to become its chief of operations during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. He joined the newly formed Israel Defense Forces in late 1948 and continued to rise as a promising officer. He helped shape the training doctrine of the IDF in the early 1950s, and led the IDF's Operations Directorate from 1959 to 1963. He was appointed Chief of the General Staff in 1964 and oversaw Israel's victory in the 1967 Six-Day War.

Rabin served as Israel's ambassador to the United States from 1968 to 1973, during a period of deepening U.S.-Israel ties. He was appointed Prime Minister of Israel in 1974 after the resignation of Golda Meir. In his first term, Rabin signed the Sinai Interim Agreement and ordered the Entebbe raid. He resigned in 1977 in the wake of a financial scandal. Rabin was Israel's minister of defense for much of the 1980s, including during the outbreak of the First Intifada.

In 1992, Rabin was re-elected as prime minister on a platform embracing the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. He signed several historic agreements with the Palestinian leadership as part of the Oslo Accords. In 1994, Rabin won the Nobel Peace Prize together with long-time political rival Shimon Peres and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. Rabin also signed a peace treaty with Jordan in 1994. In November 1995, he was assassinated by an extremist named Yigal Amir, who opposed the terms of the Oslo Accords. Amir was convicted of Rabin's murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. Rabin was the first native-born prime minister of Israel and was the only prime minister to be assassinated and the second to die in office after Levi Eshkol. Rabin has become a symbol of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

- IMDb Mini Biography By: Bonitao

His parents were Russian-Jewish emigrants. After attending Jewish schools in Tel Aviv, Rabin fought in the Second World War on the side of the Jewish self-defense organization "Haganah". After the end of the war, he was taken prisoner by the British in 1946 as a result of the beginning of the conflict with the British mandate. In the first Arab-Israeli war of 1948/49, Rabin was significantly involved in the defense measures for the newly founded state of Israel. Following military training in England, Rabin headed the training department of the Israeli army from 1953. From 1956 to 1959 he was in command on the Syrian border.

Rabin was then deployed to the Israeli army in Tel Aviv, where he served as deputy chief of general staff from 1960 to 1964. In 1964 he was promoted to Chief of General Staff. Because of his decisive role in the Israeli victory in the Six-Day War of 1967, Rabin became a national hero in the Israeli public. However, towards the end of the year he left active military service to devote himself to diplomacy. From 1968 to 1973 he was Israel's diplomatic representative in Washington. Rabin returned to Israel in the spring of 1973 to join the Labor Party, for which he entered parliament, the Knesset, for the first time. At the same time, he joined Golda Meir's government as labor minister. As a result of Meir's resignation in the spring of 1974, Rabin became the new Prime Minister.

He held this office until his resignation in April 1977, when Shimon Peres briefly became head of government. During the subsequent Likud Bloc government, Rabin was in opposition from 1977 to 1984. He then took over the management of the Ministry of Defense in the grand coalition between the Labor Party and Likud in 1984. In this role, which Rabin held until 1990, he contributed to the Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon in 1985, but also from 1987 to the bloody suppression of the "first Intifada", the uprising of the predominantly young Palestinian population. Nevertheless, the defense minister also developed initiatives for a long-term peace process in the Middle East. In the run-up to the Knesset elections in June 1992, Rabin finally prevailed as the Labor Party's top candidate over his rival Shimon Peres.

After the elections, the Likud left the government and the new Prime Minister Rabin formed a new government in July 1992. During his subsequent term as head of government, Rabin, who also served as defense minister, continued to push the peace process forward despite constant stalls and despite resistance from both at home and abroad. The climax of the peace efforts was the signing of mutual recognition and the Israeli-Palestinian Declaration of Principles by Yasser Arafat and Rabin in Washington in September 1993. As Foreign Minister, Shimon Peres played a key role in bringing about the Gaza-Jericho Agreement. In 1994, Rabin received the Nobel Peace Prize together with his Peres and Yasser Arafat.

Although the agreement initially brought diplomatic rapprochement between Israel and its Arab neighbors and won Rabin, Peres and Arafat the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994, its implementation soon stalled. Rabin had to contend with domestic political resistance from Jewish fundamentalists and settlers when implementing the agreements. On the Palestinian side, radical groups like "Hamas" torpedoed the peace process through acts of terrorism in Israel. Nevertheless, the pacification of the region was made further progress through the autonomy agreement for the West Bank in September 1995. Shortly thereafter, Rabin was assassinated at a public peace meeting in Tel Aviv by a fundamentalist Jewish Israeli student.

Yitzhak Rabin died in Tel Aviv on November 4, 1995. Although numerous Arab statesmen attended Rabin's funeral and even long-time opponent Arafat recognized Rabin's political work through a condolence visit to Israel, the laboriously initiated peace process petered out under the subsequent Israeli governments. In view of the renewed intensification of Israeli-Palestinian antagonism, which finally erupted at the turn of the millennium in the outbreak of the so-called "second intifada", both sides seem to lack the appropriate integration figure who, like Rabin, could position themselves at the head of a real peace process. Rabin left behind his wife Lea Schloßberg, with whom he had been married since 1948, and two children.

- IMDb Mini Biography By: Christian_Wolfgang_Barth