(Adnkronos) – Thirty years ago, on the night of November 4, 1995, three gunshots ended the life of Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli general who became a man of peace. Born in Jerusalem in 1922, a fighter in the Palmach unit tasked with protecting Palestine from the Nazi threat, and commander of the Harel Brigade in the 1948 war, Rabin led the Israeli army to a lightning victory in the Six-Day War of 1967 as Chief of Staff. As prime minister, in 1974 and then again from 1992, he transformed his military career into a political project based on dialogue and compromise.
With the Oslo Accords of 1993, signed on the White House lawn alongside then-head of the Palestine Liberation Organization Yasser Arafat and Israeli President Shimon Peres – in addition to ‘mediator’ Bill Clinton – Rabin became the symbol of a new season of hope. “We who have fought against you, Palestinians, tell you today loudly: no more blood and tears, enough!”, he declared on that occasion. That gesture earned him, along with Peres and Arafat, the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994 and consecrated him as the first Israeli leader willing to exchange ‘land for peace’.
On the evening of November 4, 1995, in front of one hundred thousand people gathered in King of Israel Square in Tel Aviv (today Rabin Square) for a demonstration “Yes to peace, no to violence”), the prime minister concluded his speech by singing “Shir LaShalom” (“Song for Peace”). A few minutes later, as he was descending the stairs to head to his car, he was shot at point-blank range by a young right-wing extremist, Yigal Amir, who opposed the agreements with the Palestinians. Rabin died in hospital shortly after, at the age of 73.
The assassin, then a 25-year-old law student, declared that he had acted to “stop the handover of the land of Israel to the enemies” and invoked the Jewish religious law of ‘rodef’, according to which it would be permissible to eliminate those who endanger the lives of other Jews. Sentenced to life imprisonment, Amir is still in prison. The blood-stained shirt and paper with the text of Shir LaShalom, found in Rabin’s jacket pocket, are now preserved at the Rabin Center in Tel Aviv.
