The widow ended her silence the next day. Men of state might avoid discussing politics during a time of mourning. But not Leah Rabin. She had a great deal to say about the sweep of her husband’s life, the climate of hatred she blamed for his assassination and the necessity to continue the peace process. She seemed, for a day at least, to be everywhere on television. At times, she turned her rhetorical fire on Netanyahu and the Likud bloc (“I do blame them,” she bluntly told CNN). She dismissed Yigal Amir, the confessed killer, with devastating simplicity, telling ABC, “The person who did the shooting . . . doesn’t interest me a bit.” But mostly, she tried to focus the country on its future. “This horrible, horrible tragedy is a milestone,” she told one interviewer. Israel had lost its innocence but was on the verge of “a new era.” And as the surest token of that new era, she received a sympathy call at her home in Tel Aviv from PLO Chairman Yasir Arafat, his first reported visit to Israel.

Leah’s life with Yitzhak Rabin was a mirror of Israeli history. After her family immigrated to Palestine from Germany, Leah, a high-school student, met Rabin, then a 22-year-old soldier in the Jewish underground, in 1944. They married four years later- the same year Israel became an independent state-and she became his confidante through three wars, diplomatic missions and his up-and-down-and-up-again political career. They had two children, a son and daughter, and three grandchildren. She saw him through his transformation from warrior to peacemaker-a change she insists took place right after the Six Day War in 1967, when Rabin approached Levi Eshkol,who was then Israel’s prime minister, and said, “Now I want to go to Washington to reap the fruits of this war.”

Instead, he reaped a political near-death–thanks to Leah’s financial indiscretion. In 1977, at the height of his popularity during his first term as prime minister, reports of illegal bank accounts he and LeahRabin to resign as Labor Party leader. Leah pleaded guilty to foreign-currency violations and avoided a jail sentence by paying a $27,000 fine. Rabin stood by his wife–even as Israel reviled her–and tumbled into political limbo for almost a decade.

But last week Rabin’s widow was looking beyond the cycles of political life. She didn’t mention her husband’s remarkable comeback in 1992, when he broke Likud’s 15-year dominance. But she warmed frequently to the subject of peace. “Two years ago, we might have thought ’never’,” she said. “And when the handshake, the famous handshake, took place, from then on it all started rolling, moving in the right direction”–a process which, she predicted, would end in an eventual deal with Syria. Leah brushed aside the personal risks of waging peace. “I must confess,” she said, “that he wasn’t for a minute aware that his life could be in danger.” On a different occasion, she recalled meeting a woman in a Jerusalem shopping center who asked her if she was afraid of walking alone. No, Leah said. The woman admitted she was fearful of being stabbed. “So I said, ‘Well, this is then your problem. If you feel and live like that, this is your problem’.”

Mother courage: She refused to live that way, even as the death threats became a weekly occurrence. The day before the assassination, a small crowd heckled Leah as she arrived home in the afternoon, shouting, “Do you remember Mussolini and his mistress? That’s what we are going to do to you!” When the assassin finally hit, she had a hard time believing it was for real. In the moments after Rabin was shot, Leah was convinced that someone had fired a toy gun. Rabin’s security detail whisked her away to Ichilov Hospital in Tel Aviv where they told her, “It’s serious, but not hopeless.” But the truth finally knifed through her. “And then,” she told ABC, “I asked to say goodbye to him.”

Leah spent last week showing her family and her country how to say goodbye. It was not by keeping mum. “All of us who believe in peace,” she said, “should stop being silent about it.” Speaking up, nudging hope along–that’s how Israel’s mother courage plans to move on.