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Israel's Leah Rabin dies of cancer

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November 13, 2000 

JERUSALEM (AP) — Leah Rabin, who became an outspoken campaigner for peace after her husband, the late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, was struck down by an assassin's bullet, died Sunday of cancer. She was 72.

Mrs. Rabin had never hesitated to criticize friend or foe in the five years since her husband was shot by an ultranationalist Jew. Though she was viewed by some of her countrymen as a divisive figure, she was feted abroad as a promoter of Israeli-Arab coexistence. 

She counted political leaders, including President Clinton and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, among her close friends, and after her husband was killed she crisscrossed the globe to carry the torch for his peace policies. ``We have lost a dear friend, and the Middle East has lost a friend of peace,'' Clinton said. Former Prime Minister Shimon Peres, a Labor party ally of Mrs. Rabin's husband, said she was ``like a lioness.'' ``When she learned of her illness she did not surrender,'' Peres said, ``and went out to the great battle for her life, as she had fought, with the same courage, to eternalize the memory of her husband.

'' Mrs. Rabin had been suffering from cancer at least since the spring. The gravity of her illness became clear when she was unable to appear at a rally last Saturday marking the fifth anniversary of her husband's killing. 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 on Nov. 4, 1995, Israel television' second channel reported. Mrs. Rabin spared no one her sometimes acid-tongued opinions, even denouncing some peace moves of the man who emulated her husband, Prime Minister Ehud Barak: ``Yitzhak is spinning in his grave,'' she said when Barak offered Palestinians some control over parts of east Jerusalem. Barak, in a statement released while he flew to Washington for talks with Clinton, called Mrs. Rabin ``a courageous and devoted woman who worked together with her husband for two generations to bring Israel into a secure situation and, in recent years, to bring peace.'' Barak's wife, Nava, called her dear friend. ``Her voice was always loud and clear when she was leading the torch for peace throughout the world,'' said Mrs. Barak, who commented during a visit to Chicago. In Israel, Mrs. Rabin's detractors saw her as an arrogant standard-bearer of Israel's European-born elite. They blamed her for her husband's resignation from his first term as prime minister in 1977 over an illegal U.S. bank account she held.

Her harshest critics were supporters of hard-line leader Benjamin Netanyahu, whom she accused of fanning the hatred that led to her husband's killing at a Tel Aviv peace rally. Netanyahu opposed land-for-security agreements that Yitzhak Rabin signed with the Palestinians. In 1997, Mrs. Rabin was booed by vendors and shoppers as she walked through Jerusalem's outdoor Mahane Yehuda market, a stronghold of hawkish Israelis. She was born Leah Schlossberg on April 8, 1928 to well-to-do parents in Koenigsberg, a town in what was then Germany, later part of Russia. When Hitler came to power in 1933, her father sold his dry goods business and took the family to what was then British-ruled Palestine. In September 1940, the 12-year-old Leah narrowly escaped death when Italian planes bombed Tel Aviv, killing over 100 civilians and injuring many more.

As a high school student in Tel Aviv, she met Yitzhak Rabin, an officer in the Palmach, the elite force of the pre-state militia. She entered a teacher's training college but broke off her studies to join the Palmach. She and Rabin married during the 1948 Arab-Israel war. He commanded the forces that broke through the Arab encirclement of Jerusalem, lifting the siege. She worked in Tel Aviv on the Palmach's newspaper. Yitzhak Rabin rose through the ranks of the army and served as its chief in 1967, when Israel won a crushing victory over the combined armies of Egypt, Syria and Jordan. After the war, he was appointed ambassador to the United States and in 1974 was elected prime minister. Three years later, however, he was forced to resign when a journalist revealed that his wife had retained a dollar account in the United States, a violation of Israeli law at the time.

The prime minister stood by his wife and temporarily withdrew from public life. In 1994, during her husband's second term as prime minister, Mrs. Rabin drew criticism when an entire battalion of soldiers was ordered to search the sand for a brooch that had fallen from her dress during the desert signing ceremony of the Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty. And eyebrows were raised after Rabin's assassination when she demanded — and received — an office, secretary, chauffeur and all the services normally provided to former prime ministers, though not to their widows. Three prime ministers, including Netanyahu, approved the arrangement rather than antagonize her.When it was rumored that she might be appointed Israel's ambassador to the United Nations, she dismissed reporters' comments that she lacked qualifications. ``I've just returned from the United States and everybody, everybody, everybody says: you're suitable,'' she said.

Israelis of many political backgrounds were uncomfortable when she warmly hugged Arafat at a public ceremony. Yitzhak Rabin shook Arafat's hand at the 1993 signing of the Oslo agreement at the White House, but his reluctance was obvious. ``Leah always had the courage to speak her mind on issues of importance, and to fight on behalf of the nation, people, and values she cherished,'' Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said Sunday. ``She loved her country and devoted herself to the well-being of Israel throughout her life.'' Leah Rabin is survived by two children: Dalia Rabin-Pelossof, a lawyer and member of parliament who went into politics in the wake of the assassination, and Yuval Rabin, who, after a career in the army, represented an Israeli software firm in the United States. After the assassination he founded a peace movement among young Israelis. Mrs. Rabin also leaves behind three grandchildren, including Noa, a freckled redhead whose moving, personal eulogy of her grandfather moved world leaders and dignitaries to tears at his funeral.