The 30th Anniversary of Yitzhak Rabin's Assassination, and the Reverberations Today

Recorded on November 4, 2025. Organized by the UCLA Y&S Nazarian Center for Israel Studies. Co-sponsored by the UCLA Department of History, the UCLA Department of Public Policy, and the UCLA Center for Middle East Development.

About the Program:
November 4, 2025, marks the 30th anniversary of the assassination of former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin at the hands of a Jewish gunman. The assassination shocked Israel and stunned the world. King Hussein of Jordan and other Arab leaders attended his funeral. In hindsight, the assassination marked the beginning of the end of the Oslo Agreements and the nascent Israeli-Palestinian peace process. We are honored to host Itamar Rabinovich, Rabin's biographer and the former Israeli Ambassador to the United States, for a webinar discussion regarding Rabin's life and legacy, and the reverberations of his tragic assassination today.

About the Featured Speaker:
Ambassador Itamar Rabinovich is Professor Emeritus of Middle Eastern History at Tel Aviv University. He is Israel’s former ambassador to the United States and former Chief Negotiator with Syria in the mid-1990s, and the former President of Tel Aviv University (1999-2007). He is the President of the Dan David Foundation (sponsor of the world’s largest history prize) and is President Emeritus and Counselor of the Israel Institute (Washington and Tel Aviv), and a Distinguished Fellow of the Brookings Institution’s Foreign Policy Program. He is the Vice Chairman of the INSS (Institute for National Security Studies), an external institute of TAU and Israel’s leading think tank. He is also a senior research fellow at the Dayan Center for Middle Eastern studies and is co-editor of the Center’s review journal, Bustan.

Ambassador Rabinovich is the author of numerous books on the Modern History and Politics of the Middle East and the co-author and co-editor of several other volumes, and he is the author of numerous essays and papers. Several of his recent books are Yitzhak Rabin: Soldier, Leader, Statesman (Yale University Press, 2017); Syrian Requiem: The Civil War and Its Aftermath (Princeton University Press, 2021); and Middle Eastern Maze: Israel, the Arabs, and the Region, 1948–2022 (Brookings Institution Press, 2023).

Over the years, Ambassador Rabinovich has held several public positions in Israel and in other countries. He has held visiting appointments in several academic institutions, including the Institute of Advanced Studies in Princeton, Cornell University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Toronto. He was for several years the Andrew White Professor at Large at Cornell University, and has served as Visiting Professor at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, and Distinguished Global Professor at NYU.

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Introduction @ 00:00
Ambassador Rabinovich's Presentation @ 03:06
Audience Q&A @ 30:36


DISCLAIMER: The views or opinions of our guest speakers and the content of their presentations do not necessarily reflect the views of the UCLA Younes and Soraya Nazarian Center for Israel Studies. Hosting speakers does not constitute an endorsement of the speaker's views or opinions.