Yitzhak Rabin

Chief of the General Staff of the Israeli army, and twice Prime Minister of Israel.

He was born in Jerusalem on the first of March 1922 and meant to be an irrigation engineer. He joined the Palmach at nineteen instead and stayed a soldier for twenty-seven years. He commanded a brigade in the war of 1948 and was Chief of Staff in 1967, when the army took the Sinai, the Golan and the West Bank in six days.

He was ambassador in Washington, then Prime Minister from 1974 to 1977, then Defence Minister during the first intifada - where he was quoted as ordering force, might and beatings, and never escaped it.

He came back as Prime Minister in 1992 and did the thing nobody expected of a man with his record. He shook Yasser Arafat's hand on the White House lawn in September 1993, visibly reluctant, and signed the Oslo Accords. He was given the Nobel Peace Prize with Arafat and Shimon Peres the following year.

The opposition to it at home was ferocious. He was called a traitor and a murderer at rallies; posters showed him in an SS uniform. Rabbis were asked whether the religious law permitted killing him.

On the fourth of November 1995 he spoke at a peace rally in what is now Rabin Square in Tel Aviv, to a hundred thousand people. He sang Shir LaShalom - the song for peace - and folded the sheet of paper with the words on it into his breast pocket. He was shot in the back at the foot of the steps to his car. He was seventy-three. The paper in his pocket came out soaked in blood.

His wife Leah and their children Dalia and Yuval.