Israel

Ariel Sharon And The Burden of Leadership

Bill Thompson

Israel and Hamas are at war. It’s the latest chapter in a long history of cconflict and struggle for the Jewish state

One who participated in many of those struggles and conflicts was Ariel Sharon.

I met him in the fall of 1989, when he published his autobiography, called Warrior.
So here now, from 1989, Ariel Sharon.

He was there in 1948 at the formation of the Israeli army,and rose steadily in the ranks in the years that followed.

Among the battles he saw: the 1956 Suez Crisis, the 1967 Six-Day War, the War of Attrition, and the Yom-Kippur War of 1973.

In the 1982 Lebanon War Sharon was Israel’s Minister of Defense.

And he served as prime minister of Israel from 2001 to 2006

Ariel Sharon died in 2014 just days before his 86th birthday.

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Colin Powell

Leah Rabin

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Leah Rabin

Bill Thompson
Photo: Kingkongphoto

It was an iconic White House photo. Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, shaking hands on a peace deal at the White House, with a smiling President Bill Clinton looking on.

Just a couple of years later, in 1995 – on this day in 1995, November 4th – Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated.

Less than a year-and-a-half later, his widow, Leah Rabin, wrote a memoir. Not just a memoir of the military and political leader Yitzhak Rabin, but of the husband, father, and grandfather Yitzhak Rabin was.

So here now, from 1997, Leah Rabin

Leah Rabin died in 2000 at the age of 72.

Peter Z. Malkin

Bill Thompson
Peter Z. Malkin

Sixty years ago this week, May 1960, a team of Israeli Mossad agents quietly traveled to Argentina, where they found and captured Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi officer who was instrumental in organizing the extermination of millions of Jews during World War II.

A key member of that Israeli team was a young man named Peter Z. Malkin.

I met him in 1990, around the 30th anniversary of that famous episode. He had just published a book called “Eichmann In My Hands.”

Adolf Eichmann

And as he told me in that interview, the man he had been sent to capture had escaped from post-war Germany in the first place because of a mispronunciation of his name.

So here now, from 1990, Peter Z. Malkin:

Adolf Eichmann was brought back to Israel by Malkin and his team. Eichmann was tried and found guilty of war crimes, and was executed by hanging in 1962.

Peter Z. Malkin spent his final years in New York with his wife and children. He died in 2005 at age 77.