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Biography paints balanced picture
AARON LEIBEL
Washington Jewish Week
Nothing fogs up our historical lenses more than martyrdom. A murdered flesh-and-blood leader, with very human strengths and weaknesses, and sometimes great ability, suddenly becomes transformed into an unrecognizable god-like creature.
In America, it happened to John F. Kennedy. In Israel, the most notable example of the martyrdom syndrome is Yitzhak Rabin. The Rabin who has emerged in the public mind since his tragic assassination has often been a caricature of the real man.
But in "Soldier of Peace: The Life of Yitzhak Rabin" (HarperCollins, 1998, $30), author Dan Kurzman rescues Rabin from the smothering embrace of martyrdom.
This biography is written with great candor in a fast-paced style, and it is peppered with hundreds of fascinating anecdotes, based on interviews with 200 people.
Yitzhak Rabin was a warrior, who at the age of 26, made a major contribution to Israel's incredible victory over the Arab world in the 1948 War of Independence. During his subsequent military career as chief of staff, he helped to modernize the Israel Defense Forces, leading it to victory in the Six Day War.
Turning to politics, after a short stint as Israel's ambassador to the U.S., he spent much of his time in office as defense minister.
Rabin was a man who grew up in, and was attached to, the Israeli defense establishment. However, he also was a man who often and early thought about ways to reach peace with Israel's Arab neighbors.
He was blunt - sometimes rude. (Rabin didn't mean to be impolite, Kurzman writes. Once he was introduced to a woman who said, "Mr. Ambassador, I've always wanted to meet you." His straight-from-the-shoulder, insensitive response was, "So, now you have met me.")
Rabin was an insecure person and perhaps the most inarticulate (in both Hebrew and English) democratic leader of our time.
He also was loyal to his friends, dedicated to the well-being of the soldiers under his command and an honorable politician, trusted by the Israeli public to make war - and peace.
As a shy man lacking charisma, Rabin's success, both in the military and political areas, was truly astonishing, Kurzman noted in a recent interview.
"He got where he did on ability," the author said. "He was the best military analyst in the IDF." In his political career, "he built up enormous trust with politicians."
In his abbreviated diplomatic career, Rabin was famous for his undiplomatic behavior, to the extent that he reportedly got on the nerves of his colleagues, Kurzman said.
Rabin's shyness and lack of self-confidence may have stemmed from his early childhood, notably from a mother who was too busy saving the world to pay much attention to her children, Kurzman wrote.
The Rabin home in Tel Aviv was almost bare, no pictures on the walls, no carpets on the floors, little furniture. Yitzhak's ascetic upbringing, however, was not due to poverty. Both parents earned good salaries, but much of the family's money was given to the poor.
Breakfast was special to the young Rabin, the author noted, because "often it was the only time he got to see his parents until the next morning." With his mother's preoccupation with the underprivileged and his father involved in union politics after work, Rabin usually was left alone to take care of himself and his little sister.
One example of Rabin's predicament was his first day of school. At age 6, he had to go to school alone, as his mother was too busy. "Mother had no time to ease me through those first days of school, or perhaps she thought it was better for me to find my own way," Rabin was quoted as saying. "At any rate, I found myself standing there confused and on the brink of tears."
As a good biographer, Kurzman provides the reader with vignettes that encapsulate various phases of Rabin's life. But the author goes beyond his subject's life, putting it into historical context. He discusses what was going on in pre-state Palestine, in Israel and the world as he traces developments in Rabin's world.
Kurzman handles well the two major crises in Rabin's public life - his wife's illegal American bank account and his alleged breakdown before the Six Day War. In the latter, he presents Rabin's case, that he was suffering from exhaustion and possibly nicotine poisoning due to heavy smoking, and the version of Ezer Weizman, his adversary in this incident, who claimed that Rabin was a broken man who pleaded with Weizman to take over as chief of staff.
Rabin's problems with his bank account stemmed from his lack of concern with money, Kurzman said. His wife, Leah, was in charge of family funds and paying the bills. He knew of the account but thought she had closed it when his tour as ambassador was up.
When he was ambassador, Rabin would accept payment for speeches - a highly unusual practice - to have enough money so that his wife could keep up with her wealthy Washington-area friends.
As a soldier and later as a political leader, Rabin was a caring commander, some might even say too caring. In planning for battles in the Six Day War, "Rabin couldn't desensitize his heart or temper his sense of personal responsibility for the fate of every soldier." His original plan was to attack piecemeal, limiting casualties.
He advocated defeating Egyptian troops stationed in the Gaza Strip and demanding that Egypt open the Straits of Tiran in exchange for an Israeli withdrawal. Only if Cairo refused, would he send the IDF into the Sinai.
Ariel Sharon, then a division commander and later defense minister in Likud Cabinets, wanted to destroy the Egyptian army in a massive attack. "The two military men appeared to view differently the importance of the human element in fighting a war," Kurzman wrote. "To Sharon, the dead and the maimed were, unfortunately, an inevitable product of war. The idea was to win - at almost any cost."
History will remember Rabin most, of course, for his part in the peace process. The common wisdom is that then Foreign Minister Shimon Peres led the way, pulling a somewhat skeptical Rabin with him.
Actually, Kurzman reveals that in 1986, then Defense Minister Rabin appointed Yossi Ginosar, a former member of Israel's secret service, as his unofficial "ambassador to Arafat." In 1993, during the course of negotiations between Israel and the PLO, he used Ginosar as his secret emissary to Arafat.
It is clear that Kurzman admires and respects Rabin, but he presents a balanced picture of the man and his times.
Some readers will no-doubt feel, however, that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu deserves more credit for concessions for peace than Kurzman gives him. Those readers will point out that, as leader of the governing right-wing coalition, Netanyahu in effect endorsed the concept of land-for-peace, the basis of the peace process, by agreeing to give up much of Hebron - an astounding concession that Kurzman pooh-poohs.
Furthermore, Kurzman writes that Netanyahu yearns to thwart Yasser Arafat's dream of ruling a Palestinian state by pushing "Israeli settlement of much of East Jerusalem and most of the West Bank."
The author believes that had Rabin lived, he probably would have given up more territory because he would have worried about the viability of the Palestinian state that would be created; Netanyahu, on the other hand, is thinking in terms of giving up as little as possible.
Aaron Leibel is arts editor at Washington Jewish Week.
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