'The last 30 years since Rabin's death have shown us that we were naive and wrong.'
Today is the anniversary of the death of Yitzhak Rabin, the former prime minister of Israel who was assassinated in 1995. He should be remembered by all of us, and there are lessons found in his life that we all need to learn.
Born in 1922, he joined the Palmach (the elite commando unit pre-1948 that was the predecessor of the IDF) as a teenager and rose to become its chief of operations in the 1948 War of Independence. He served in the military for 27 years, rising to the rank of lieutenant general and overseeing the Six-Day War in 1967.
After that war, he became the ambassador to the U.S. in 1968; then, in 1874, he was appointed prime minister in after Golda Meir's resignation. As prime minister he oversaw the Raid on Entebbe and also made a Sinai land-for-peace deal known as Sinai II with Egypt. For much of the '80s he was the defense minister, and in 1992 he was reelected as Prime Minister.