"Not a charismatic man, but rather a logical, skilful captain." — Amos Oz, on Rabin
"Rabin was a careful, analytical person and Peres, a high-flying, imaginative adventurer." — Itamar Rabinovich, his biographer
"One does not make peace with one's friends. One makes peace with one's enemy."
Yitzhak Rabin was quite consistently described as having no campaign manners and not much interest in acquiring them, either. None the less, he was twice made prime minister. As a schoolboy he was "so shy that few people knew he was intelligent", as a candidate, his biographer records, "picking up the phone and asking a complete stranger for his vote was a herculean task". In office, testimonies say, he was "shyly gruff — reflecting less an innate rudeness than a man forcing himself to do what he did not like to do." Note that in itself, this is a small argument against the "classical" LSI, who (as "emotivist" and declatim) assimilates the social manners of his circle quite well. What carried such a man to the top twice was reliability — the sense that here was someone who saw the situation exactly, told you exactly what he saw, and would do exactly what he undertook. He was closest to LSE, with, at most, a tint of his sterner structural "contrary."
Rabin was not a Dayan/Sharon style field commander (he thought Dayan "totally reckless"). His genius, as an appreciation put it, "was as a planner": the Six-Day victory of 1967 "grew from his meticulous designs, especially his emphasis on manpower and training". His gift, in the same writer's diagnostic phrase, was "the capacity to see reality and then to create a plan to bend that reality toward his objectives." Not to imagine a new reality or even to enforce a received order; to see what is and organize what works. As a "quartermaster" type, he willingly delegated responsibilities to people he trusted (compare him to Isser Harel's grip on Israeli security). His decision-making was quite quick: in May 1967 he broke down for a day under the weight the open, undecided, unbearable future, but after the decision crystallized, he ran the war without a tremor.
Rabin "didn't tailor his remarks or his persona to his audience, and seemed always to be precisely as he presented himself" — one reviewer's summary that other characterizations (like the "anti-politician" epithet) confirm. He conflicted with Ben-Gurion and was shunted to staff college for it, then he stood up to AIPAC itself. He was "direct, frank, reliable and always willing to take responsibility" — and his record in this matter is remarkable. Before the Entebbe raid he dictated his letter of resignation in advance. In 1977 he resigned the premiership over his wife's technically illegal American bank account — an infraction a more supple politician would have survived without effort. And beneath the brusque surface, those who knew him agree, sat real feeling about the one cost he never learned to book cleanly: he was "brusque, taciturn, but deeply emotional about the cost of war," and the anguish of the casualty lists is the thread his biographers follow from the general to the peacemaker.
Highly differentiated LSI's do not update much: As we saw on this blog, Metternich never accepted 1848 and Lefebvre never accepted the Council. Rabin's stubbornness was real but of a different construction. "Once he settled on a strategic plan," the shrewdest appreciation of him noted, "Rabin's mind closed to alternatives and would reopen only under the impact of a great shock" — and the operative word is reopen. He would not redo the analysis without new data, and when the data came, he redid it. Rabin was certainly no dove, contradicting the overly sentimental "soldier of peace" accounts — the 1948 explulsion of Palestinians from Ramla and Lydda/Lod alone proves that (the episode was considered explosive enough that Israeli censors cut his account of it from his own 1979 memoirs, with the New York Times publishing the excised passage) — but when he concluded that the reality had changed, he reversed the central position of his life, extending his hand — with visible, unperformed discomfort (which is actually one of Talanov's diagnostic markers of Qe, at least theoretically a strongvalued LSE function) — to the enemy of forty years. There was no conversion experience: the compromise was presented to the country exactly as he had presented war, as the plan that the seen reality now required. The stubbornness of his judgments was more thoroughness of empirical and practical finished staff work, rather than fidelity to a structure that has value in itself. As skeptical analysts pointed out later, the scale of the update was smaller than the mythology says — his final October 1995 Knesset speech explicitly envisioned "an entity which is less than a state" for Palestinians — but his assassination still was a turning point in history. Amir, his assassin, may have understood it better than the sceptics. He was murdered for the updated plan — shot at a peace rally by a zealot who, unlike Rabin, believed an order could be sacred. He was a particularly unperformative leader (which points, perhaps, to a weakened Fe even compared to LSE/LSI standard), who saw reality, planned accordingly, told everyone precisely what he had concluded, and paid the full price of the one thing he could never see: what had not yet happened.
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