“We realize even more so what we have lost.”
Nov. 4 will mark the first anniversary of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s slaying, which Rabin called “that horrible Saturday night.”
Flanked by the American and Israeli flags in Peninsula Temple Beth El’s social hall, Rabin called her late husband a “leader of remarkable achievement.”
“I regard myself as very privileged to have been there as he devoted his life to peace and security,” she said. “There wasn’t one day he took leave…from his sense of purpose.”
She also repeatedly lauded his peace-process partner, Yasser Arafat.
“We feel to him like an old friend,” Rabin told the 200-member audience. “Walls of animosity can fall very easily.”
After the funeral last fall, Arafat sat shiva with the family.
“I can’t begin to tell you how miraculous it was,” she said. “He kissed the children. He kissed me. He couldn’t have been warmer or nicer or kinder.”
At Rosh Hashanah this year, Arafat called to wish her “shanah tovah.”
“Doesn’t it say something about the man? He keeps referring to Yitzhak as `my brother,'” Rabin said.
Appearing poised and assured, Rabin wore a red suit-jacket over a black skirt and swept back her jet-black hair in combs.
Though much of her 40-minute speech was solemn, she nonetheless created ripples of laughter at least a half-dozen times.
At one point, she told the audience that Arafat came to sit shiva without his trademark kaffiyeh.
“You want to know?” she quipped. “He’s bald.”
Despite her repeated attacks since the assassination on Likud’s Benjamin Netanyahu, last week Rabin never directly referred to either the new prime minister or the recent Palestinian-Israeli violence — not even when answering an audience member’s question specifically addressing Netanyahu’s performance.
“I will never, ever discuss it in San Francisco. I think this is wrong. You should not wash linen — clean or dirty linen — outside the border of your country,” Rabin said, receiving enthusiastic applause.
But she did comment on her faith in the peace process, which has been hanging by a thread since the opening of the ancient tunnel in Jerusalem’s Old City late last month and the nearly 80 deaths that followed.
“I believe the legacy of Yitzhak Rabin about peace is strong enough and forceful enough, and this train of peace has gone on long enough,” she said.
“This train will get there to the final station. And we will have peace in the Middle East.”
Rabin, who has been touring the United States, also took time to praise the 76-year-old Women’s International Zionist Organization and its 250,000 members worldwide.
The group assists impoverished women and children in Israel. It runs day-care centers and battered women’s shelters. The group fights domestic violence and works for women’s rights.
After lauding this organization for helping to unite Israel and integrate waves of Jewish immigrants, she discussed the sociopolitical split among Israelis today.
“I blame the Israeli society that gave the religious parties so much political power,” Rabin said. Religion should be respected, she said, but Israel should have kept it separate from the state.
“Now we are suffering from it,” she said. Convicted assassin Yigal Amir, a religious Jew, was not a lone lunatic, she added. “He represents a large group.”
Still most of Rabin’s speech was dedicated to honoring her husband’s memory.
“Yitzhak, I think, was a very lucky person…who got second chances in life,” Rabin said.
In 1948, he fought for Jerusalem, but the city remained divided. As the Israeli army’s commander, he helped unite the city 19 years later.
In his second term as prime minister, he decided to change the country’s priorities and work toward regional peace.
“Yitzhak said: `We take risks for war. Why not take risks for peace?'” she recalled.
In fact, Rabin says that even when her husband was battling Arab armies or building Israel’s military strength, it was only to ensure a peaceful future for the Jewish state.
“I believe actually all his life he was fighting for peace.”