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A few months later, Rabin saw--and seized--a chance to run as Labor's candidate for Prime Minister. In so doing, he found himself competing against a man with whom he would lock horns for the rest of his career. Although Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin never had significant ideological or political differences (and even lived within two blocks of each other in a Tel Aviv suburb), the hostility between them ran so deep that at times they seemed almost to have difficulty pronouncing each other's name. During this period, they emerged as the most promising of a new generation of Israeli leaders; their rivalry would color the nation's politics for the next two decades, eventually turning into something of a national spectator sport, spiced by innumerable tales of barbed exchanges, shouting matches and table thumpings.
Rabin defeated Peres for the party leadership and went on to become Israel's youngest Prime Minister and the first sabra to hold that post. He won by a narrow margin, however, which meant he was compelled to include Peres in his Cabinet as Defense Minister (a concession he agreed to, he later confessed, with "a heavy heart"). His first term included several significant events, among them his authorization of the dramatic 1976 raid on Entebbe, Uganda--a decision that Peres, in an effort to undermine his rival, later suggested was "forced" upon a reluctant Rabin by the Cabinet. The youthful Prime Minister was finally brought down in April of the following year, after a scandal exploded over the discovery that he and his wife had held a foreign bank account in Washington, a violation of Israel's unusually strict currency laws. The Labor Party went on to defeat, and the right-wing Likud for the first time gained control of the Knesset.
For the next seven years, Rabin retreated to Labor's back bench until a national-unity government turned to him as Defense Minister in 1984. In this post, he proved implacable in his determination to suppress the Palestinian intifadeh, the uprising against Israeli rule that exploded across the occupied territories in 1987. When the beatings and deportations he ordered proved ineffectual, Rabin decided that 1.7 million captive people could not be ruled by force, and he made the idea of a negotiated peace the theme of his 1992 campaign against Likud Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir. To achieve peace, he told the voters, Israel would have to jettison the siege mentality that had formed such a central part of its identity since the state's inception.