Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin (1995): Murder at a Peace Rally

The assassination of Yitzhak Rabin took place on 4 November 1995, when Israel’s prime minister was shot dead by a Jewish extremist as he left a mass peace rally in Tel Aviv. Rabin had signed the Oslo Accords with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and his killer hoped to stop the peace process in its tracks. The murder shocked Israel and the world and remains one of the most painful turning points in the country’s history.

Background: Rabin and the Oslo process

Yitzhak Rabin was born in Jerusalem in 1922 and spent most of his life in uniform. He fought in the 1948 war and was chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces during the Six-Day War of 1967, which made him a national hero. He served as prime minister for the Labour Party from 1974 to 1977 and returned to office in 1992.

In his second term Rabin took a step that surprised many Israelis. Secret talks in Norway led to the Oslo Accords, signed on the White House lawn in September 1993, where Rabin shook hands with PLO leader Yasser Arafat. The agreements set up the Palestinian Authority and a step-by-step transfer of land in Gaza and the West Bank, with the hardest questions left for later talks. In 1994 Rabin, his foreign minister Shimon Peres and Arafat shared the Nobel Peace Prize, and Israel signed a peace treaty with Jordan the same year.

The interim agreement known as Oslo II, signed in September 1995, extended Palestinian self-rule to the main West Bank cities. The Knesset approved it on 5 October 1995 by just 61 votes to 59.

A country divided

Oslo bitterly divided Israeli society. Palestinian militant groups opposed to the process, notably Hamas and Islamic Jihad, carried out suicide bombings that killed dozens of Israelis, and many voters doubted that the PLO could deliver security. On the right, opposition parties staged angry demonstrations against the government.

A radical fringe went much further. Some settler activists and a small number of rabbis described handing over land of the biblical Land of Israel as a grave religious sin, and a few spoke of Rabin in terms that critics later said gave licence to violence. At some protests, posters showed Rabin in Nazi uniform or wearing a Palestinian keffiyeh. Security officials warned of the danger of an attack on the prime minister, but Rabin disliked wearing a bulletproof vest and continued to appear in public.

The rally and the shooting

On the evening of Saturday 4 November 1995, supporters of the peace process held a rally under the slogan “Yes to peace, no to violence” in Kings of Israel Square, outside Tel Aviv city hall. The crowd is usually estimated at more than 100,000 people. Rabin, normally a reserved speaker, told the crowd that he had been a military man for 27 years and now believed there was a real chance for peace. At the end he joined singers on stage in the peace movement’s anthem, Shir LaShalom (Song for Peace).

At about 9.40 pm Rabin walked down the steps at the back of city hall towards his car. Yigal Amir, who had waited in the supposedly secure parking area, stepped behind him and fired three shots with a pistol. Two bullets struck Rabin in the back; a third wounded his bodyguard, Yoram Rubin. Amir was seized immediately.

Rabin was driven to Ichilov Hospital nearby, but he had lost a great deal of blood and died on the operating table. Shortly after 11 pm his chief of staff, Eitan Haber, announced the death to the crowds waiting outside the hospital. In Rabin’s jacket pocket was the folded sheet with the words of the Song for Peace, stained with his blood.

The assassin

Yigal Amir was a 25-year-old law student at Bar-Ilan University near Tel Aviv. He came from a religious family and moved in far-right circles, and he said he had acted to stop the transfer of territory to the Palestinians. He showed no remorse at his trial and claimed religious justification for the killing, a claim rejected by the great majority of Israeli rabbis and public figures.

In March 1996 a Tel Aviv court convicted Amir of murder and sentenced him to life imprisonment, with additional years later added for conspiracy and wounding the bodyguard. His brother Hagai Amir and a friend, Dror Adani, were convicted of conspiring with him. A state inquiry, the Shamgar Commission, found serious failures in the work of the Shin Bet security service, whose head, Carmi Gillon, resigned in early 1996. The inquiry also examined the role of Avishai Raviv, a far-right activist who turned out to be a Shin Bet informer and who was later acquitted of failing to prevent the crime.

Funeral and immediate consequences

Rabin was buried on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem on 6 November 1995. Dozens of world leaders attended, including US President Bill Clinton, King Hussein of Jordan and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. Clinton ended his eulogy with the Hebrew words “Shalom, chaver” (“Goodbye, friend”), which became a widely used slogan of mourning. Young Israelis gathered for weeks in the square, lighting memorial candles; it was soon renamed Yitzhak Rabin Square.

Shimon Peres became acting prime minister and pressed on with Oslo. Israeli troops withdrew from most West Bank cities by the end of 1995, and the first Palestinian elections were held in January 1996. But a series of Hamas suicide bombings in February and March 1996 killed some 60 people and eroded support for the government. In May 1996, in Israel’s first direct election for prime minister, Peres lost very narrowly to Benjamin Netanyahu of Likud, a critic of the Oslo terms.

Legacy

Historians still debate whether Rabin, had he lived, could have reached a final peace agreement. What is clear is that the killing removed the one Israeli leader whose military record gave him broad credibility on security, and that the process lost momentum in the years that followed. Final-status talks failed at Camp David in 2000, and the Second Intifada broke out soon after.

The assassination also became a lasting question about political violence and incitement in a democracy. Israel marks an official memorial day on the Hebrew date of the killing, schools hold commemorations, and an annual rally takes place in Rabin Square. Leah Rabin, his widow, spent her remaining years defending his legacy until her death in 2000.

Conspiracy theories about the killing, including claims that the Shin Bet staged it, have circulated since 1995. They are rejected by the courts and the state inquiry, which found that Amir fired the fatal shots and that the failures of security were negligence, not a plot.

Timeline

• 1993, 13 September: Rabin and Arafat shake hands at the signing of the first Oslo Accord in Washington.
• 1994, 10 December: Rabin, Peres and Arafat receive the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo.
• 1995, 28 September: The Oslo II interim agreement is signed in Washington.
• 1995, 5 October: The Knesset approves Oslo II by 61 votes to 59.
• 1995, 4 November: Rabin is shot by Yigal Amir after the peace rally in Tel Aviv and dies in hospital.
• 1995, 6 November: State funeral on Mount Herzl, Jerusalem, attended by world leaders.
• 1996, 27 March: Yigal Amir is sentenced to life imprisonment.
• 1996, 29 May: Benjamin Netanyahu narrowly defeats Shimon Peres in the prime ministerial election.

Why it matters

Rabin’s assassination is one of the few cases in which a single act of political murder plausibly changed the course of a peace process. It showed how deep the divisions over land and peace ran within Israel, and it remains a reference point in debates about incitement, security and the fragile path to Israeli-Palestinian peace.