Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin
Yitzhak Rabin was shot dead on 4 November 1995 at the end of a peace rally in Tel Aviv attended by more than a hundred thousand people. The killer was Yigal Amir, a twenty-five-year-old law student at Bar-Ilan University, religious and nationalist, who fired three shots at close range as Rabin walked to his car. Amir said he acted to stop the Oslo process and that he had rabbinical grounds for it under the doctrines of din rodef and din moser, which some extremist rabbis had been invoking against Rabin by name. Rabin was a former chief of staff who had commanded in the 1967 war and, as defence minister, had ordered the suppression of the first intifada. He had signed the Oslo Accords with Yasser Arafat on the White House lawn in September 1993, shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994, and made peace with Jordan the same year. Oslo II, signed six weeks before his death, had extended Palestinian self-rule across the West Bank. The preceding months had been poisonous. Rallies had shown him in a Nazi uniform and in the keffiyeh of an enemy; Benjamin Netanyahu addressed some of them and was criticised afterwards for not stopping the incitement. He had a copy of the peace song the crowd had just sung in his jacket pocket, soaked in blood. Shimon Peres succeeded him and lost the election in May 1996 to Netanyahu by less than one per cent, after a wave of Hamas bombings. Amir is serving life and has expressed no regret. Whether the peace process would have survived Rabin is unanswerable and is argued in Israel to this day.
- Year: 1995 CE
- Category: Political
