Rabin; Our Life, His Legacy

New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1997. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/good. xii, [2], 320, [2] pages. Illustrations. Index. Some creasing to DJ edges. Signed by the author. Leah Rabin (née Schloßberg; 8 April 1928 - 12 November 2000) was the wife of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who was assassinated in 1995. Leah Rabin was born Leah Schloßberg in Königsberg, East Prussia, Germany (now Kaliningrad, Russia), to an upper-middle-class family of Russian-born parents. Immediately after Adolf Hitler's election as Chancellor of Germany in 1933, Schloßberg emigrated with her family to Mandate Palestine. Her father had bought a piece of property near Binyamina on his first trip to the area in 1927. She met her future husband, Yitzhak Rabin, at school. They married in 1948, the year of Israel's independence. Yitzhak became Prime Minister in 1974 following Golda Meir's resignation, but in 1977 a US Dollar bank account (illegal at that time in Israel) held by Leah was exposed by Haaretz journalist Dan Margalit. As a result, her husband decided to take responsibility, resigned from office. This came to be known as the Dollar Account affair. Rabin supported the peace efforts of her husband in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and worked further for a solution after his assassination. She wrote a book about her memories of her husband, which was released in 1997, under the name Rabin: Our Life, His Legacy. Rabin supported Shimon Peres in the elections of 1996, calling people to vote for him so that her husband's death "would not be in vain." In the election of 1999 she supported Ehud Barak. During Barak's term as prime minister she changed her opinions about him. Yitzhak Rabin (1 March 1922 - 4 November 1995) was an Israeli politician, statesman and general. He was the fifth Prime Minister of Israel, serving two terms in office, 1974-77, and 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 led a 27-year career as a soldier. 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. 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. Rabin signed the Sinai Interim Agreement and ordered the Entebbe raid. He resigned in 1977. 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 who opposed the terms of the Oslo Accords.

Derived from a Kirkus review: A straightforward account of the life and times of Israel's late prime minister Yitzhak Rabin by his widow. Rabin chronicles his life as a farmer, general, and statesman, and his many successes. The author targets Bar-Ilan University, where Yigal Amir was a student, as the main force behind Amir's assassination of her husband. Although the university is a center of nonideological Orthodoxy, Rabin contends that "a core of extremist rabbis" there have led their students to believe that "the 'holy land' of Judea and Samaria is more holy than the life of the prime minister who was willing to compromise on this land for peace." She also blames the left for her husband's death, for remaining silent when right-wing protesters camped outside the Rabin home, taunting the couple and comparing them to Nicolae and Elena Ceauescu of Romania. And it was the left's complacency, contends Rabin, that gave Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu his subsequent victory. "Why had they not used me more extensively in their campaign?" she wonders. She glosses over many of the controversies that surrounded the Rabins. She accused President Ezer Weizman of spreading rumors that her husband had a nervous breakdown in the exhausting days preceding the Six-Day War. The lifelong rivalry between Rabin and Shimon Peres seems to dissipate in their joint pursuit of the Oslo agreement. The author clearly delights in her contacts with notables, and this book takes on an informal tone when she alludes to the likes of Henry Kissinger, Betty Ford, Barbara Bush, and Suah Ararat. Always interesting, this is both a eulogy and a memoir.