In Praise of ... Yitzhak Rabin

Yitzhak Rabin was an unlikely peacemaker. Israel's gruff, bluff prime minister spent his life fighting Arabs from the 1948 war until the Palestinian intifada 30 years later. But he was also the first Israeli leader to have the courage to deal directly with the PLO. It was Rabin who broke the mould by shaking hands with Yasser Arafat on the White House lawn after the Oslo agreement in 1993. And it was Rabin who paid the ultimate price when he was assassinated by a rightwing Jewish extremist 10 years ago yesterday while addressing a rally in Tel Aviv.

Sentiment should not obscure the fact that Oslo was fatally flawed. Its advantage was its gradualism and reciprocity: Israel would hand over parts of the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip to a Palestinian Authority which would maintain security. But it left the status of settlements, Jerusalem and final borders to be negotiated - and the whole fragile process too vulnerable to fundamentalists on both sides. Rabin was excoriated as a traitor by the Israeli right. Arafat was assailed by Islamist opponents whose suicide bombings characterised a second, deadlier intifada after the collapse of the Camp David talks and rise to power of Ariel Sharon - an even tougher old soldier. Sharon's unilateral withdrawal from Gaza has brought fears of another political assassination but little prospect of a just peace, not least because of so much blood and despair in the last wasted decade. Rabin was a brave man whose strategic vision did not go far enough.