Word: rabins
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After the war the British government prevented the immigration of Holocaust survivors from Europe and forced the return of those who had already entered "illegally," actions that drew the wrath of Jewish settlers in Palestine. In the fall of 1945, thanks to his growing status in the Palmach, Rabin found himself a key participant in a dramatic raid to rescue 200 Jewish refugees whom the British were holding at the Athlit detention camp...
...months later, Rabin saw--and seized--a chance to run as Labor's candidate for Prime Minister. In so doing, he found himself competing against a man with whom he would lock horns for the rest of his career. Although Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin never had significant ideological or political differences (and even lived within two blocks of each other in a Tel Aviv suburb), the hostility between them ran so deep that at times they seemed almost to have difficulty pronouncing each other's name. During this period, they emerged as the most promising of a new generation...
...Rabin defeated Peres for the party leadership and went on to become Israel's youngest Prime Minister and the first sabra to hold that post. He won by a narrow margin, however, which meant he was compelled to include Peres in his Cabinet as Defense Minister (a concession he agreed to, he later confessed, with "a heavy heart"). His first term included several significant events, among them his authorization of the dramatic 1976 raid on Entebbe, Uganda--a decision that Peres, in an effort to undermine his rival, later suggested was "forced" upon a reluctant Rabin by the Cabinet...
...next seven years, Rabin retreated to Labor's back bench until a national-unity government turned to him as Defense Minister in 1984. In this post, he proved implacable in his determination to suppress the Palestinian intifadeh, the uprising against Israeli rule that exploded across the occupied territories in 1987. When the beatings and deportations he ordered proved ineffectual, Rabin decided that 1.7 million captive people could not be ruled by force, and he made the idea of a negotiated peace the theme of his 1992 campaign against Likud Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir. To achieve peace, he told the voters...
...Rabin's change of heart was motivated mainly by simple pragmatism. Military rule over the territories would mean endless war, while annexing them wholesale would dilute forever the ethnic character of the Jewish state; a negotiated peace was the only solution. Hard-edged realism was not his only motivation for adopting this approach, however. He also suggested that he preferred it because it was more in keeping with his sense of humanity. In his inaugural speech to the Knesset in July 1992, he argued that it was antithetical to the democratic traditions of the Jews to subjugate another people. Moreover...