Leah Rabin; Activist, Israeli Leader’s Widow

JERUSALEM —  Leah Rabin was just 15 when she met her future husband, Yitzhak Rabin, in a Tel Aviv ice cream store. The auburn-haired, blue-eyed 21-year-old officer in an elite Jewish commando squad “looked like King David himself,” she later recalled.

He was shy and awkward; she was outspoken and sharp-tongued. Their romance, born at a time of intrigue and danger during the struggle to create an independent Jewish state, lasted more than 50 years.

Through wars, political triumphs and disasters, and historic peacemaking efforts, Leah Rabin, who died Sunday of lung cancer at 72, was at her husband’s side. She even titled her first memoir: “Always His Wife.”

She was just paces behind him the night a Jewish religious extremist gunned down Yitzhak Rabin at a Tel Aviv peace rally on Nov. 4, 1995.

She heard the bullets fired from Yigal Amir’s gun and saw her husband’s bodyguards throw themselves on the prime minister before she was whisked from the scene by security guards. By the time they finally got her to Ichilov Hospital, he was dead.

She spent the rest of her life preserving Rabin’s memory and defending his vision of trading land for peace with the Palestinians.

“The government of Israel, the people of Israel and the Jewish people as a whole, as well as millions in the world, are mourning today the passing away of Leah Rabin,” said Prime Minister Ehud Barak, en route to Washington for a meeting with President Clinton.

“Since [Rabin’s] assassination five years ago, Leah held the torch of his legacy and brought his voice loud and clear to us Israelis and to the whole world.”

Clinton, who had called Leah Rabin on the anniversary of her husband’s death Nov. 4, said, “the Middle East has lost a friend of peace, but the work to which she and Yitzhak dedicated their lives must and will continue.”

Shimon Peres, who was her husband’s political rival for years and ultimately his partner in making peace with the Palestinians, said Leah Rabin’s death was “a great loss for our people.”

“Leah started from the point Yitzhak was assassinated to carry on with deep conviction, in total devotion, without fear, in a crystal clear voice, the need for peace, the call for peace, the heritage of her husband,” Peres said.

Palestinian President Yasser Arafat, who shared the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize with Yitzhak Rabin and Peres, said: “God, it is so sad to lose this lady, wife of my partner in making the peace of the brave. . . . May God grace her with his mercy.”

She is to be buried Wednesday in a plot next to her late husband’s in Jerusalem’s Mount Herzl cemetery. First her coffin will lie in state at Rabin Square in Tel Aviv, where Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated.

The White House said it had not yet decided who would represent the United States at the funeral.

Likened in her youth to Jacqueline Kennedy, the raven-haired and elegant Rabin, whose taste tended to black pantsuits and heavy gold jewelry, was a controversial figure in Israel, particularly in the wake of her husband’s killing.

As the nation reeled from the shock of its warrior-turned-peacemaker being murdered by a fellow Jew, she publicly blamed the political right for creating an atmosphere of hatred toward her husband.

At the state funeral, she turned a cold shoulder to Benjamin Netanyahu, then leader of the opposition Likud Party. But she warmly welcomed Arafat into her home on a condolence call, the first trip the Palestinian leader had made to Israel proper since the birth of the Jewish state in 1948.

“How many Israelis should have touched Yitzhak’s coffin to apologize for the inflamed rhetoric and hostility that created the climate that brought about his death?” she wrote in a second memoir after the prime minister’s assassination. “How many now--left and right, unspoken and outspoken--feel remorse for Yitzhak’s death?”

For right-wing Jews, both in Israel and the diaspora, her attacks were pure political opportunism.

“I believe that after her husband passed away, she should have been a national healer and not so controversial,” said right-wing Israeli politician Michael Kleiner. “She was by far more politically left wing than her husband.”

In fact, like many Israeli political wives, Rabin remained largely in the background through much of her husband’s career. Born in Konigsberg, Germany, on April 8, 1928, Rabin immigrated to what was then Palestine in 1933. She was still in high school when she met her future husband, who was an officer in the underground Palmach. She joined after her graduation.

From War to Politics

The couple married in August 1948, during a cease-fire in Israel’s war of independence. Yitzhak Rabin was soon off to fight on the southern front. His bride quit teaching and became a stay-at-home mother after the birth of her first child, Dahlia.

The couple subsequently had a second child, Yuval. Leah stayed in the background as her husband rose through the ranks of the army to become chief of staff during the 1967 Middle East War, then ambassador to the United States and finally, in 1974, prime minister.

But Leah Rabin made headlines in 1977, when it was revealed in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that she had a bank account in the United States, a violation of Israeli foreign currency laws. The account contained just $2,000, but the attorney general decided to prosecute her. Yitzhak Rabin resigned as prime minister, saying he was equally responsible for maintaining the account.

The matter caused an uproar in the ruling Labor Party, and much of the nation blamed Rabin for her husband’s political downfall. She, in turn, blamed the media and the party. She stepped up her philanthropic activities, becoming a patron of the arts and an advocate for autistic children.

After the assassination, the left embraced the prime minister’s widow as a passionate supporter of the peace process growing out of the 1993 Oslo peace agreement. She focused her energies on the implementation of the accords, for which her husband, Arafat and Israel’s then-foreign minister, Peres, shared the Nobel.

Rabin did not hide her disappointment when Peres, her husband’s longtime rival within the Labor Party, lost the prime minister’s post to Netanyahu in 1996. But she never made good on her threat to leave the country if Netanyahu won.

Instead, she stayed in her Tel Aviv apartment, where right-wing hecklers had gathered on Friday nights before her husband’s death to hurl curses at them and where left-wing Israelis came after his death to weep and light candles.

She kept his pillow beside hers on their bed and his clothes hanging in the closet, and spoke out whenever she thought Israel’s leadership was straying from the path she believed her husband would have taken to achieve a comprehensive peace with the Palestinians.

Her relationship with Barak was a complex one. Barak, a military and political protege of Yitzhak Rabin, angered her when he was a member of her husband’s government by voting against the Oslo accords.

“I did not speak to him for two months,” she said in an interview with the Hebrew daily Maariv shortly before her death. “I thought that this was an act of treason, not to support Yitzhak.”

Eventually, Leah Rabin forgave Barak, enthusiastically supporting his successful election bid against Netanyahu in 1999 and hailing him as the true successor to her husband--a general who could persuade the Israeli public to trade land for peace.

But Rabin turned against Barak again in July when he attended a peace summit at Camp David with Arafat and Clinton.

She told an interviewer that her husband was “spinning in his grave” over Barak’s willingness to share sovereignty over Jerusalem with Palestinians and determination to abandon the phased steps toward peace of the Oslo accords in favor of an immediate, full peace treaty with the Palestinians.

“Before he left for the summit, he came here and I said to him: ‘Ehud, I am disappointed with you,’ ” Leah told Maariv. And she laid the blame for the outbreak of violence in the Palestinian-controlled territories on Sept. 28 at Barak’s feet.

“He went to Camp David and said: I will bring a historic solution to replace Oslo. This was the outcome,” she told the newspaper.

Israeli newspapers reported that she initially wanted him banned from the annual memorial service at Yitzhak Rabin Square on Nov. 4, but she ultimately relented. Barak visited her in the hospital before addressing the crowd and promising to pursue Rabin’s goal of making peace with the Palestinians.

Rabin also expressed disappointment with the political left over its reaction to this year’s outbreak of violence. The wholesale abandonment of the Oslo accords after the riots erupted was misguided, she said.

The trouble, she added, was that the relationship of trust that her husband and Peres built with the Palestinian leadership had been abandoned by Netanyahu and never revived by Barak.

As violence raged in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and the chances for peace dimmed, an ailing Rabin stayed in touch with Arafat and wrote a note to Barak, urging the prime minister to authorize Peres to meet with the Palestinian leader.

Barak agreed, and Peres and Arafat reached a cease-fire accord that eased the violence shortly before the fifth anniversary of Yitzhak Rabin’s murder.

Even as Barak was saying that Arafat was no longer a peace partner, Rabin was empathetic with the Palestinian leader.

“He is in a labyrinth of pressures,” she told Maariv. “He has to maintain his status in the street and in the Arab world. It’s not simple. It’s also not easy to hear him say we will fight for a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital. I am confident that we wouldn’t be hearing this language had Yitzhak been alive.”

Rabin lay in the hospital, where she was being treated for cancer and heart problems, as tens of thousands of Israelis gathered once again in Rabin Square to reaffirm their commitment to seeking peace.

Dan Oppenheim, a doctor at the Rabin Medical Center near Tel Aviv where she was treated, said her family was with her when she died.

“In the last few days her condition deteriorated and this morning she took a turn for the worse and today, at about [3:55 a.m. PST] Mrs. Rabin died,” Oppenheim said.

She left behind a nation still struggling to decide whether her husband’s legacy, the Oslo peace accords, was a visionary leap or a misstep that had brought Israel to an existential crisis in its long, bloody struggle with the Palestinians.