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Israel welcomes Arafat to attend Leah's funeral

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November 14, 2000 

JERUSALEM (AP) - Israel said Monday that Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat is welcome to attend the funeral of Leah Rabin, the fiery peace advocate peace he befriended after her husband, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, was assassinated.

American first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton and U.S. Mideast peace envoy Dennis Ross plan to attend Wednesday's funeral, Israeli media reported. It was not immediately clear if Arafat would participate in the ceremony or pay a private condolence call - as he did in secret after the 1995 Rabin assassination.

"For us, she was a very close friend to our people, to our cause, from the beginning, and no doubt it was a big catastrophe for those who are working on the peace process," Arafat said of Mrs. Rabin, speaking in Doha where he is attending the Organization of the Islamic Conference summit.

Palestinian officials said they did not know whether they would send a representative to the funeral which comes as Israeli-Palestinian fighting is in its seventh week, with nearly 200 people killed, the vast majority Palestinians.

Mrs. Rabin died Sunday of cancer. She was 72.

On Monday, Israeli newspapers published photo spreads of Mrs. Rabin and her husband as a young couple in the 1940s, and Mrs. Rabin posing with world leaders and celebrities, including Jacqueline Kennedy.

After the prime minister was killed, Mrs. Rabin 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," said U.S. President Bill Clinton.

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.

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 on Nov. 4, 1995. Netanyahu opposed land-for-security agreements that Yitzhak Rabin signed with the Palestinians.

"She had an opinion about almost everything and she didn't hesitate to utter her opinion even when they begged her not to. Leah Rabin was not looking for approval. She wanted to utter the truth and she did," Eitan Haber, one of Yitzhak Rabin's senior aides, wrote Monday in the Yediot Ahronot daily.

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 assassination.

She is to be buried Wednesday in a plot next to her late husband's in Jerusalem's Mount Herzl Cemetery. Although Jewish tradition calls for a swift burial, the funeral was pushed back in order to give her son Yuval time to return from the United States where his wife is scheduled to give birth Monday, Yediot said.

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.

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.

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.

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.