Word: yitzhak
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Saying peace, peace, when there is no peace"--so reads the verse from Isaiah. It is an unbearably harsh truth to accept that, for the very reason that he was the most prominent of those saying peace, Yitzhak Rabin has become the most terrible illustration that there is no peace. If the wages of peacemaking are death, then we are all lost. Let us believe what the soldier believes, that death partners peace, and that in Rabin's martyrdom there is hope...
...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...
...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...