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It took eight months for the British to catch him. Arrested in June 1946, he spent five months in a Gaza detention camp. The British had decided to turn the problem of Palestine over to the United Nations, which in 1947 voted to partition the land into two states, one Jewish, the other Arab. No sooner did Israel declare itself a sovereign state than five Arab nations invaded, touching off the Arab-Israeli War of 1948. During the ensuing struggle, Rabin was given a number of difficult missions. Early in the war he was ordered to break the Arab blockade of Jerusalem and keep the road open to Tel Aviv. The brigade he commanded lost 70% of its members, and to this day, Israel maintains the wreckage of the convoys as memorials along the highway.
In Israel's early years, Rabin spent several years training, building and equipping the army. By 1964 his career had flowered to the point where he was named army chief of staff, a post that not only placed him at the pinnacle of the military but also ushered him, for the first time, into a position of political leadership. His highly aggressive posturing with the Syrians, however, soon began to draw some harsh criticism. Such tactics had worked well in the Palmach, but matters of state called for more subtlety than the young general yet possessed. Critics--and even his mentors--began to charge that his belligerence was pushing the tiny state to the brink of war. Stung by the accusation and overwhelmed with exhaustion, on May 23, 1967, Rabin succumbed to a nervous breakdown that left him unable to perform his job for 24 hours.
Less than two weeks later, the Six-Day War began as Israel launched pre-emptive strikes against Egypt, Jordan, Iraq and Syria. When he recovered, Rabin prosecuted the war brilliantly, coordinating maneuvers that enabled the army to take so much ground in the Sinai, the western banks of the Jordan river and the Golan Heights that by the time hostilities ended, the territory under Israel's control had swelled three-fold. The international media seized on the more colorful figure of Dayan, who was then Minister of Defense, but for many Israelis, Rabin had become a true hero.
Just before the war, Rabin had proposed himself to Prime Minister Levi Eshkol as Israel's ambassador to Washington. Eshkol had a blunt response. "You're no diplomat!" he told his chief of staff. Nevertheless, in 1968 Rabin was sent to Washington as Jerusalem's emissary. For the next five years he aggressively cultivated a close relationship with the U.S., pushing for economic and military aid and persuading the Americans to keep pumping a steady stream of Phantom jets, Skyhawk fighter-bombers and sophisticated weapons into Israel. The paramount importance he placed on the U.S. arms pipeline reflected his conviction, as he expressed it years later, that "you can always make peace with an F-16 in your pocket." Shortly after he returned home in 1973, Egypt and Syria launched surprise attacks that provoked the October War. Israel emerged from that war victorious, and in its aftermath, Rabin ran for parliament, winning a Labor seat in the Knesset.