Anwar Sadat – assassinated during the annual commemoration of Egypt winning back the Sinai during the Yom Kippur war in 1973. Sadat was Gamal Abdul Nasser’s protégé. (Discuss Nasser and pan-Arabism).
In 1979, Sadat and Menachem Begin won the Nobel peace prize for signing the Israeli/Egyptian peace treaty. Many Arabs and particularly Palestinians reviled this treaty because it ignored the fate of the Palestinian territories Israel occupied since June, 1967. Egypt was suspended from the Arab league for ten years.
Members of the Egyptian Army were sympathetic to the Palestinian struggle and viewed the treaty as a capitulation to Israel. They decided to plot his murder. They were aligned with the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and led by a fatwa issued by Omar Abdul-Rahman, who was later convicted in the US for his role in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. He was imprisoned in Egypt but never convicted. He was kicked out of Egypt and went to Afghanistan, where he made ties with Egyptian Ayman Zawahiri, and helped lay the groundwork for Al-Qaeda. Nasser and Sadat’s outlawing of the Muslim Brotherhood and its affiliates were outlawed, rounded up and imprisoned. This process was part of the fuel that fired the recruitment of Al- Qaeda fighters and sympathizers.
The attack was planned and orchestrated by Khalid el Islambouli, a first Lieutenant in the Egyptian Army.
This group was part of the original formation of what would become Al-Qaeda. Obviously, this group saw no room for negotiation with what they considered a Zionist presence in the Holy Land.
Yitzhak Rabin – Prime Minister of Israel 1992-1995. Commander in Chief for the IDF during the 1967 war. A hard line Zionist with expansionist goals (in his 1979 memoirs, he even confessed to his role in forcing over 50,000 Palestinians from their homes by gunpoint in 1948). However, after the invasion of Lebanon and the first Intifada, global pressure was beginning to isolate Israel, especially in regards to the massive expansion of Jewish colonies in the West Bank (settlements). As Defense Minister, he presided over the withdrawal of Israeli troops from Lebanon in 1986. This emboldened Hezbollah and allowed them to garner a massive political backing in Lebanon.
By the early 90’s, Yasser Arafat and the PLO were weakened by the dissolving of the Soviet Union. Arafat was weak enough to finally “make peace.” The Oslo Accords were a disaster for the Palestinians and the consequences of the accords still devastate the possibility of a Palestinian state (the accords completely disregarded UN resolution 242). Arafat was also the victim of assassination in 2004, though by far less spectacular and public means (most likely by polonium poisoning). However, any attempt to make a settlement with the Palestinians (especially the condition that settlements would be dismantled and stopped from being built in the Occupied Territories) was met with fierce resistance by devoted Zionists and settlers in Israel and the Occupied Territories. The Oslo Accords created the Palestinian Authority (folding the PLO into this semi-governing body) which gave governing Palestinian factions a small amount of civil control over the Occupied Territories but left Israel as the primary governing force, where the IDF controlled all movement, trade, etc. and allowed Israel full access to the territories unconditionally.
To make matters worse for Rabin, in 1994, he signed a peace treaty with King Hussein of Jordan, normalizing and opening trade relations between the two countries and settling disputes over water. However, like Egypt, this peace agreement would be a separate peace from the primary conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. That conflict remains to this very day.
As Prime Minister, Rabin was followed by Shimon Peres and Binyamin Netanyahu; two leaders who did everything in their power to undermine the sovereignty of the PA and expand Israel’s territories through the colonial (settler) movement.
All of these measures to help Israel’s status in the international community would come at a dear cost to Rabin. On November 4, he was killed by an extreme right wing Zionist named Yigal Amir. Rabin was killed after participating in a huge peace rally in Tel Aviv. Amir came from a Yemenite background (Mizrahi Jew) and was raised in an extremely orthodox household. He was primarily infuriated by the Oslo accords, and held Rabin responsible for the partial compromising of Eretz Yisrael. He acted with two accomplices, his brother, Hagai and a friend, Dror Adani.
Benazir Bhutto – Bhutto came from a prestigious and politically entitled family (her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was also a Prime Minister of Pakistan). She was Prime Minister twice, from 1988-1990 and 1993-1996. In 1988, she became the first female head of state in an Islamic nation. She was an uncompromising political figure, never pulling punches in her attitude towards political rivals. In 1996, she was ejected from her position after charges of corruption were leveled against her and her family. She left Pakistan in 1999 to Dubai and returned in 2007. She was assassinated a year later while campaigning in parliamentary elections against the party of Pervez Musharraf.
She publicly admitted that her return to Pakistan posed a threat to her life and in October 2007, she survived an assassination attempt by suicide bombing that killed 138 other people. In December 2007, gunmen stormed her southern offices and killed three of her supporters.
On December 27, 2007, Bhutto was leaving a campaign rally when she stood up through the sunroof of her bulletproof vehicle and was shot multiple times before a suicide bomber detonated explosives nearby that killed an additional 20 people.
Al-Qaeda claimed responsibility for the attack. Bhutto’s family vehemently rejected this claim and pointed the finger at Musharraf. Musharraf was charged by a Pakistani anti-terrorism court with knowledge of the attack through the Pakistani Taliban. In April of 2013, Musharraf was ordered under house arrest for contributing to the murder of Bhutto. In May of 2013, Ali Chaudhry Zulfiqar, a special prosecutor in charge of investigating Bhutto’s murder was himself assassinated by gunmen as he drove to the courthouse. Bhutto’s killers have still not been definitively identified. Many assume there was cooperation between Pakistan’s ISI (Inter-Service Intelligence) and the Pakistani Taliban. But no other figures than Musharraf have been isolated and singled out.