It’s a political axiom that the best way for a political leader to be remembered in glowing terms is to be assassinated.
There are those who would have been venerated anyway, such as Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi — men whose brave, decisive actions brought their people together and changed the course of history during their lifetimes. But other leaders who fell to assassins’ bullets might not have been hoisted above their peers in the history books if not for their violent deaths.
Where, then, shall we place Yitzhak Rabin?
He was a military hero before he was a political figure, and that earlier role always informed the latter. The fact that he fought in all of Israel’s early wars, and as chief of staff oversaw the victorious Six-Day War, gave him the experience and the status to rise through political ranks as well.
Assassinated at the height of his popularity, one year after signing a peace treaty with Jordan and two years after the Oslo accords, his brutal murder has come to represent so much more than the death of a man. For many Israelis, and Jews around the world, Rabin’s death shattered hopes for peace between Israel and the Palestinians — if he wasn’t around to do it, they said, then it couldn’t be achieved. His murder at the hands of a right-wing extremist Jew came to embody the growing political and social divide within Israeli Jewish society; if he had lived, according to this line of thinking, the distrust between right and left, between religious and secular, might not have grown so deep.
That’s a lot to lay at the feet of a man who led his nation bravely, on the battlefield and in the political arena, but who was, after all, one of a number of key figures who contributed decisively to his country’s well-being.
Perhaps Rabin’s real legacy lies elsewhere, deeper inside the man himself. Yes, Rabin was a “warrior of peace,” as he’s often eulogized, but that phrase contains within it his true strength: Rabin moved in his decades of service from a man of the sword, a no-nonsense military officer (as defense minister, he famously told Israeli soldiers to use force against Palestinian rock-throwers), to a pragmatic political leader who understood that the best way to protect his beloved Israel was to shake hands with Yasser Arafat, a man he despised.
Yitzhak Rabin made peace with the PLO not because he loved the idea of Palestine, but because he believed it was the right course of action. And once he made up his mind, he didn’t backslide. He moved forward resolutely, without complaint, upon the path of peace he had chosen so deliberately, with eyes wide open.
Rabin’s real heroism is the example he set of a political leader courageous enough to change when reality so demands. That is a lesson today’s leaders might do well to heed.