November 4, 1995, 30 years ago: I got home from watching the football team at my Alma Mater, East Brunswick High School, defeat neighboring Sayreville, 36-29, at Jay Doyle Field in East Brunswick, Middlesex County, New Jersey. I turned on the TV, to ABC, and began watching a college football game: Michigan State ended up defeating arch-rival Michigan, then ranked Number 7 in the country, 28-25 in East Lansing.
At around 5:00 PM, U.S. Eastern Time, the game was interrupted by a Special Report from ABC News. There was no music over the announcement. I knew from experience that such a report was not going to be one of good news.
The announcer, Kevin Newman -- apparently, anchor Peter Jennings hadn't yet gotten to the studio -- announced that Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin of Israel had been assassinated at a peace rally in Tel Aviv.
Rabin, a 73-year-old native of Jerusalem, was one of the founding fathers of the State of Israel in 1948. He was Chief of Staff of the Israel Defense Forces during the 1967 Six-Day War. Levi Eshkol was Prime Minister, Abba Eban was Foreign Minister, Moshe Dayan was Minister of Defense, and the leading General was Ariel Sharon.
Rabin then served as Israel's Ambassador to the United States, and as Minister of Labor. In 1974, upon the retirement of Golda Meir, he was named to succeed her as Leader of the Labor Party, and thus as Prime Minister, but fell into a corruption scandal, and lost the 1977 election as a result.
Slowly but surely, he returned to influence. He was named Minister of Defense in 1984, serving until 1990, and then became Labor's leader again. In 1992, he led them to victory, and returned to the Premiership. He served as his own Minister of Defense, and negotiated the Oslo Accords with Palestinian Chairman Yasser Arafat in 1993. The following year, he negotiated a peace treaty with King Hussein I of Jordan, ending an official status of war (though not a continuous shooting) between those nations that had lasted from Israel's independence.
The process of implementing the Oslo Accords was not going well in 1995, so he called the rally in Tel Aviv, hoping to show the nation that the peace process should be supported. But at 9:30 PM -- 2:30 PM, U.S. Eastern Time -- he was shot by Yigal Amir, a 25-year-old extremist who was part of a right-wing movement that considered any concession to the Palestinians, no matter how small, to be treason. He remains in prison 30 years later, serving a life sentence, and both he and the leaders of the movement remain unrepentant.
Israel has never fully recovered. Most of its governments since have been conservative and belligerent. There is some justification for this, but not nearly as much as the conservative parties would have you believe.
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