Word: rabins
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Because of the logistical difficulties involved in getting world leaders to Israel within the customary 24-hour period between death and burial, Rabin's state funeral was put off a day--until Monday afternoon. But Israelis themselves poured out their confused and troubled emotions on Sunday in a remarkable rite of homage. As a motorized cortege bore the warrior statesman up the highway from Tel Aviv to the Holy City, teary-eyed mourners lined the route. And when he came to rest in the brilliant blue November afternoon on a catafalque outside the Knesset, hundreds of thousands of Israelis...
Perhaps if more of them had supported their fallen leader in the last hard years of his life, this moment would never have come. As former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger noted last week, Rabin was a leader who "was not trying just to hang on and preserve, but to build." Now it is up to those who survive to build that legacy for him. "The peace process," says former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Edward Djerejian, "has always been a race against violence on the ground and the extremists." Rabin's death will not have been in vain...
...ISRAELIS OF YITZHAK RABIN'S generation, perhaps the single most valued quality an individual can have is summed up by the word dugri. The concept is quintessentially Israeli even though the term itself, somewhat ironically, comes from Arabic. It refers to a manner of behavior that is simple, direct, honest. It conveys the idea of placing substance before style, of stripping away layers of subterfuge, of making no attempt at pretense or deception...
More than anything else, Yitzhak Rabin's life can be seen as an object lesson in dugri. When Rabin spoke, whether he was being cold or sentimental, he said what he meant. He once expressed a wish that the Gaza Strip would simply drop into the sea and disappear. But he also possessed a simple, human eloquence. Signing the Oslo accords at the Washington ceremony, he addressed the Palestinians with the following words: "We, like you, are people who want to build a home, to plant a tree, to love, live side by side with you--in dignity, in empathy...
During his lifetime, Yitzhak Rabin stood at the very center of nearly every major event in his nation's history. For that reason his own story, to a large extent, mirrors that of Israel itself. Four months after his birth on March 1, 1922, in Jerusalem, the League of Nations adopted the British mandate for Palestine, which affirmed Britain's commitment to support the establishment of a Jewish homeland. At age 15, Rabin entered Kadoorie Agricultural High School, convinced that the best way to serve his country "was to prepare myself to become a farmer." He graduated with that ambition...