Leah Rabin Awarded Anwar Sadat Peace Achievement Award

Leah Rabin could never forgive Benjamin Netanyahu, for fostering a ''hostile climate'' that led to her husband's assassination in 1995.

WASHINGTON, News Reports, April 97 - Leah Rabin, the wife of slain Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, has accepted the Anwar Sadat Peace Achievement Award, she was presented with honoring her slain husband. The award is named for Anwar Sadat, the Egyptian leader slain after making significant moves to establish peace with Israel and in the region. Lea Rabin told an audience of senators, Israeli, Egyptian and Palestinian officials, that her husband's work in orchestrating the Mideast peace process should not die with him. ''We don't want to do to others what we don't want done to us.''

She noted that when Israel was created the country played David to other Goliath nations in the regions. But over the years, Israel has become the Goliath entering into peace talks with Palestinian leader, and former bitter enemy, Yasser Arafat.

The ceremony came only days after Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu met with Clinton. He rejected all but one suggestion to save peace negotiations. President Clinton vowed, ''The United States will continue to be a full and active partner in this noble endeavor.'' Clinton added that all involved must avoid ''confrontation and violence.'' Earlier in the day, Rabin and her son Yuval met privately at the White House with Clinton. Mrs. Rabin presented Clinton with a copy of the biography she wrote on her husband. She is attempting to help launch a grassroots peace movement in Israel, and continues to criticize the right-wing Likud government.

Leah Rabin said, she could never forgive his successor, Benjamin Netanyahu, for creating and using the hostile climate that led to her husband's assassination in 1995. ''I hold him responsible for creating the very hostile climate which eventually led to his murder, so how can I ever forgive,'' she said in an interview on the CNN program World View. Mrs. Rabin described a photograph of Netanyahu leading a demonstration in which people were carrying a coffin bearing the sign ''Yitzhak Rabin - the murderer of Zionism.''
''He bears the responsibility for creating a politically horrible climate against my husband, saying this man doesn't know where he's taking us, he's misleading us, he is really destroying our future,'' she said. Asked if she could ever forgive Netanyahu, Mrs Rabin replied: ''I don't believe so. I really don't believe so.''

Bibi Netanyahu, leader of the nationalist-conservative Likud Party, was elected prime minister, five months after Rabin was shot dead by the right-wing Israeli Student of Bar-Ilan University, Yigal Amir.

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