Yitzhak Rabin

Yitzhak Rabin spent more than a quarter of a century as a soldier, commanding Israel's army in the Six-Day War, before becoming prime minister twice, in 1974–1977 and from 1992. In his second term he signed the Oslo Accords with the Palestine Liberation Organization and a peace treaty with Jordan, sharing the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize. In November 1995 he was shot dead by an Israeli opponent of the peace process.

Rabin was born in Jerusalem on 1 March 1922 to Jewish immigrants from the Russian Empire, his father from what is now Ukraine and his mother from Belarus, and grew up in Tel Aviv in a Labour Zionist household. He studied agriculture and hoped to become an irrigation engineer, but as Arab-Jewish violence grew in the late 1930s he turned to military affairs. In 1941 he joined the Palmach, the new strike force of the Jewish underground army, the Haganah. After the Second World War he planned a 1945 raid that freed 208 interned Jewish immigrants from a British camp at Atlit, and in 1946 the British held him for five months.

In the 1948 Arab–Israeli War Rabin commanded the Harel Brigade in the battles for the road to Jerusalem. As deputy commander of Operation Danny he signed the order for the expulsion of the Arab inhabitants of Lydda after the town's capture, and he later served on the southern front and in the armistice talks with Egypt in 1949. His left-wing Palmach background slowed his career under David Ben-Gurion, but he became head of Northern Command and, in 1964, chief of the general staff. Under his command the army defeated Egypt, Syria and Jordan in the Six-Day War of June 1967.

From 1968 to 1973 Rabin was ambassador to the United States, which in those years became Israel's main arms supplier. Elected to the Knesset for the Labour-led Alignment, he succeeded Golda Meir as prime minister on 3 June 1974, after defeating Shimon Peres for the party leadership, beginning a rivalry that lasted two decades. His government signed the Sinai Interim Agreement with Egypt in 1975 and in July 1976 ordered the rescue of hostages held at Entebbe in Idi Amin's Uganda. In April 1977 he resigned as party leader after it emerged that he and his wife kept bank accounts in Washington in breach of Israeli currency law, and Labour lost the election that followed to Menachem Begin.

From 1984 to 1990 Rabin was defence minister in national unity governments. He pulled troops back from deep in Lebanon to a border "security zone", introduced an "Iron Fist" policy of detentions and house demolitions in the West Bank, and responded to the Palestinian uprising, the First Intifada, from December 1987 with orders to use "force, might, and beatings", a policy widely criticised abroad. He came to believe that the conflict had to be settled by negotiation.

Rabin won back the Labour leadership from Peres and led the party to victory in 1992. In September 1993 Israel and the PLO exchanged letters of recognition, and Rabin shook hands with Yasser Arafat at the signing of the first of the Oslo Accords, which set up a Palestinian Authority with limited self-rule in parts of Gaza and the West Bank. A peace treaty with Jordan followed in 1994. At home his government expanded privatisation, and introduced universal health insurance in 1995. The accords drew large protests from the Israeli right, while Hamas and other Palestinian groups opposed to them carried out suicide bombings.

On 4 November 1995, as he left a peace rally in Tel Aviv, Rabin was shot by Yigal Amir, a right-wing extremist and law student who opposed the accords; he died in hospital shortly afterwards. Amir was sentenced to life imprisonment. World leaders attended his funeral on Mount Herzl, and the square where he was killed now bears his name.

Our 1945 map shows British-ruled Palestine in the years of his Palmach service, and the 1960, 1985 and 1994 maps show Israel during his military and political career.