HE DIDN'T MUCH CARE FOR shaking hands. It wasn't that he didn't like people, just that he had no patience for formalities. It is an irony of history that the most lasting image of Yitzhak Rabin—the Israeli prime minister who fell to an assassin's bullets Nov. 4 in Tel Aviv—may be his historic 1993 White House handclasp with Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat. The more private Rabin was a rough-edged career soldier, an almost dour man with no taste for the glad-handing and pomp that came with high office. He smoked four packs of cigarettes a day, lighting each new one with the butt of the last. He had a healthy taste for Scotch. His sense of humor, often barely perceptible, was as dry as the Judean desert, and, in his gravelly monotone, he spoke an unrefined Hebrew peppered with crude street slang. All of which caused many of his people to love him. He was one of them.

Rabin, who was 73, was the first sabra, or native-born Israeli, to become prime minister, and in many ways his gruff, intense manner embodied a sort of Israeli ideal: no pretense, no nonsense. "He was a tough, rough guy, who at times annoyed and disturbed his admirers because of his boldness," says Hyman Bookbinder, retired Washington representative for the American Jewish Committee, who had known Rabin since the late '60s. "But we also came to love him for it."

Former Middle East negotiator Sol Linowitz says, "He always gave an honest answer and did not suffer fools gladly." As Israel's ambassador to the United States during the Nixon years, Rabin once encountered an overeager woman at a Washington party. "Oh, Mr. Rabin!" she gushed. "I've always wanted to meet you." "Well," Rabin said with a wry smile, "now you've met me." With that, the conversation ended. During a 1977 White House visit, President Jimmy Carter asked Rabin if he wanted to drop by Amy's room to say good night. He did not.

His taciturn toughness came in part from growing up as a Jew in the ever-embattled atmosphere of prewar Palestine. Rabin was born in Jerusalem on March 1, 1922, and raised in Tel Aviv, the elder of two children of Rosa Cohen and Nehemia Rabin, both immigrants from Russia who had come as pioneers to an incipient Jewish homeland. His father was a trade-union organizer, his mother a political activist who served on the Tel Aviv municipal council under British authority. Eliezer Shimeli, his teacher, once said Rabin was a combination of the parents: "On one side Nehemia, the quiet, balanced soul. His inclination for public service, his need to fight for truth, that is Rosa." Wanting to organize agricultural settlements, Rabin enrolled at 15 in the Kadoorie Agricultural School where, said classmate Moshe Netzer, a lifelong friend, "despite his introverted nature and his shyness, he was involved with his classmates in his own way"—particularly as a skilled soccer goalie. Rabin planned to study hydraulic engineering at the University of California at Berkeley, but when World War II began, he refused to leave his homeland. He joined the Haganah, the militia precursor to Israel's army, which fought both raiding Arabs and, later, British occupational forces.

It was in the Haganah that he met his future wife, Leah Schlossberg, in 1944 in Tel Aviv. Leah subsequently served in the battalion in which Rabin was deputy commander—"one of the rare occasions in our life together when she was under my command," he would later say. They married in 1948 and had two children, Dalia and Yuval, now 45 and 40. When her young son wouldn't eat, "I would lose my patience," Leah recalled. "[Yitzhak] would tell a story to Yuval about tanks and then feed him, and he would eat." Leah was one of Rabin's few confidantes, and the pair were known as close, trusting political partners. Samuel Lewis, U.S. ambassador to Israel under Presidents Carter and Reagan, played weekly doubles tennis matches with the Rabins. "On the court, they would squabble," he says. "He would complain and rail at her for making mistakes, and she would jump all over him. It was very much an equal relationship."

It was as a military leader that Rabin made his name as Mr. Security, playing a key role in the 1948 battle for independence, then as the chief of staff who orchestrated the nation's sweeping victory in 1967's Six Day War. Yet two weeks before the '67 fighting, he had received such a browbeating from former Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion—who said Rabin's policies had put the country in grave danger—that he suffered a breakdown and had to leave his post for 24 hours of bed rest.

After his stunning success on the battlefield, Rabin was made ambassador to the United States in 1967. But even in Washington he remained the cautious military man, once dispatching a driver 24 hours before a party to calculate how long it would take to get to the event. His role as ambassador led to a term in 1974 as prime minister, but he was forced to leave office when it was revealed that Leah had maintained an illegal bank account back in the United States. In 1992 Rabin was voted into office once again, promising that his Labor party would lead the way toward peace with the Palestinians and the surrounding Arab nations.

Despite the antagonisms that role inevitably generated, he had almost no regard for his own protection. "When you would visit his house, he would come to the door himself," says John Wallach, a writer on the Middle East who knew Rabin for three decades. "The door was frequently unlocked." Amid recent assassination fears, he often mingled in crowds and was reluctant to wear a protective vest.

To the end, he remained spartan and unpretentious. When he took his first foreign post at 27, a colleague had to tie a necktie for him, which he loosened carefully each day, preserving the knot. At last year's ceremony to sign the peace treaty with Jordan, Rabin stood among the dignitaries in a blue baseball cap. In his eulogy, President Clinton recalled Rabin's showing up for a White House black-tie event without the black tie. He borrowed one, "and I was privileged to straighten it for him," said Clinton. "It is a moment I will cherish as long as I live."

THOMAS FIELDS-MEYER
HERB KEINON in Jerusalem; GLENN GARELIK, MARGIE SELLINGER and SANDRA McELWAINE in Washington

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A Granddaughter Says Goodbye
SHE CAME TO MOURN NOT THE statesman but her beloved grandfather. "Others greater than I have eulogized you," Noa Ben-Artzi Philosof, the 18-year-old granddaughter of Yitzhak Rabin, said at the cemetery in Jerusalem, "but none of them ever had the pleasure I had to feel the caresses of your warm, soft hands, to merit your warm embrace that was reserved only for us, to see your half smile that always told me so much."

Philosof may have been the youngest speaker at the funeral last week, but her grief touched everyone, from heads of state to TV viewers around the world. At one point, even her Hebrew-to-English translator had to pause to choke back tears. Afterward, Philosof told reporters she had risen at 6 a.m. the morning of the service to write the eulogy. "I sat at [grandfather's] desk. I took his stationery and started writing, and I didn't stop until I finished."

The bond between grandfather and granddaughter, always strong, seemed to grow after Philosof's mother, Dalia, a lawyer who is divorced from Noa's father, Avraham Ben-Artzi, began suffering from a serious heart ailment several years ago. For comfort, Philosof turned to Rabin, who had spent much of his own youth tending to his mother's frail health.

Despite his official duties, Rabin made a point of showing up for special occasions. Last July he spoke at Noa's high school graduation in the Tel Aviv suburbs where she lives with her mother, the elder of Rabin's two children, and stepfather, businessman Avi Philosof. (Her brother Yonatan, 21, is an Israeli paratrooper.) Last summer Noa began two years of mandatory service working for the army journal. At a ceremony for new women recruits, her grandfather again was on hand, unexpectedly, to welcome her. "Noa, what are you doing here?" Rabin joked, feigning astonishment. Startled for a moment, Philosof quickly realized she was being put on and burst out laughing. Then, as the new troops marched off, she bade him farewell in words she would later echo at his funeral. "Shalom, Saba," she said. "Peace be with you, Grandfather."