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heart of Tel Aviv. He was worried that not enough people would show up, and that those who did would be from the left: Meretz, not Labor, people who would be there mainly to criticize him for not going far, or quickly, enough in pulling out of the West Bank.

In the end, he was persuaded it should go ahead. In fact, by the time the date approached – Saturday evening, November 4 – he seemed to be feeling more energized, and upbeat. I wouldn’t be there, because I was going to New York as the government’s representative at a fundraising dinner that same night for the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial. A few hours before leaving, however, I met with Rabin. We’d found a 15-minute window in his schedule, but we ended up talking for an hour. He said he knew that, in some ways, the difficulties surrounding the peace talks were likely to get worse. Hamas would not abandon terror. The kind of intolerance we were seeing from the right wing was not going to go away. He was furious at Bibi, who in his view was hypocritically going through the motions of calling for restraint and pretending to be unaware that the mobs were full of Likud voters. “They’re his people,” he said, “and he knows it.”

But he was relishing the idea of taking on Bibi in the next election, due in about a year’s time. Though Rabin was trailing in the polls, he was confident of turning that around once the campaign began. “The main thing is that the party isn’t focused. We have to get serious about preparing,” he said. He was worried about the effect of inevitable tensions between his supporters and Peres’s over how to run the campaign. “Bring back Haim Ramon,” I suggested. I knew by now that Haim had helped orchestrate the false story which Yediot had run about Tze’elim. But I also realized he was a Labor heavyweight and that, although he’d left the government, he remained personally close to Yitzhak. “Yes,” Yitzhak replied, nodding, suggesting that we talk through the idea in detail when I returned from New York.

I was in my room at the Regency Hotel, on New York’s Upper East Side, when the phone rang on Saturday afternoon. I was dimly aware that the Tel Aviv rally had been going on back home, but was more focused on preparing my speech for the Yad Vashem event. “Ehud, Ehud!” It was Nava, her voice barely understandable through the sobs. “Rabin has been shot!”

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