`Where were you before, when the right were calling Yitzhak a traitor?" demanded Leah Rabin of a 250,000-strong crowd a week after the assassination of her husband, the Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, in 1995. It was vintage Leah Rabin, who died on November 12th aged 72, fiery and direct, passionate yet unsentimental.
To many, it might seem like the end of an era. Ehud Barak, Yitzhak Rabin's putative heir, is trading insults with Yasser Arafat, and the Oslo peace process, the crowning achievement of the Israeli leader's premiership, seems to be in tatters.
Leah Rabin would probably not have seen it that way. Both before and (even more vigorously) after Yitzhak's death she travelled the world campaigning for Middle East peace. Like her husband, she saw peace as an unstoppable train. When some doubted that Arafat was "a real partner", she would remind them one has to make peace with enemies, not friends.
She never forgave the Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu for her husband's death; in her view, his violent invective led directly to it. And when Netanyahu won the election of June 1996, ousting Rabin's successor, Shimon Peres, many saw her as Margaret to his Richard III, reminding the new premier of past crimes. Detractors interpreted her fierce loyalty in a different light, and cast her as a Lady Macbeth figure.
Even on the left, some never forgave her for holding a $2,000 bank account in New York, where her husband was ambassador from 1968 to 1973. A trivial affair, maybe - a little nest-egg to help indulge her passion for Chanel suits and jewellery - but the account was illegal under Israeli foreign currency regulations, and it led to Rabin's downfall as prime minister in 1977.
Her weakness for fashion became the stuff of Israeli folklore. During the 1994 peace negotiations with Jordan, she lost a brooch, and reputedly ordered an entire regiment to recover it. To poorer and more hawkish Israelis, such vanity smacked of the Ashkenazi elite, and they heckled her in the old Jerusalem market.
Certainly, in terms of personality, she and her husband were poles apart. He could be gruff and contemplative, decisive in battle but almost shy in public. By contrast, she was strident and outspoken. What they shared was a mutual admiration that lasted a lifetime, and a commitment to what they considered to be Israel's best interests.
Born Leah Schlossberg in the German seaport of Konigsberg (now Kaliningrad in Russia), she came from a cultured, well-to-do family and arrived in Palestine, aged five, in 1933 - the year that Hitler took power in Germany.
In Palestine, she abandoned a teacher training course at 16 to join the crack zionist regiment, the Palmach, and fell instantly in love with its deputy commander, the dashing young Yitzhak Rabin - "he seemed to me like a King David", she once recalled. They married four years later, during Israel's war of independence, when she worked as editor of the Palmach's newspaper.
She taught briefly in 1958. For most of their first 27 years, however, she commanded the home front, while Yitzhak pursued a military, diplomatic and political career. Yet she was much more than a housewife, and was infinitely more subtle and perceptive than many Israelis gave her credit for.
A month ago, she criticised Barak for being prepared to sacrifice so much of Jerusalem to the Palestinians. As she told the Pope last February, the city had a double role: it was "the political capital of Israel and capital of the three religious confessions".
Israel's right felt vindicated by those comments. But what they missed was the codicil - what her husband would have done was to keep on talking to Arafat, not to treat him as an irritant.
Indeed, her opinion of Arafat was probably pivotal to the initial success of the Oslo process. When Yitzhak expressed reservations about shaking Arafat's hand on the White House lawn in 1993, it was apparently she who insisted that he had to do so to attain peace.
It was the start of an unusual, and unexpectedly close, relationship. After Yitzhak's death, Arafat broke a rule of a lifetime to enter Israel and pay his condolences at her Tel Aviv flat. In 1996, she told a German magazine he was like "part of my family" - an extended gathering that also included Bill and Hillary Clinton, King Hussein of Jordan and his wife, Noor.
Her dignity at Yitzhak's funeral did much to bind national wounds, as did the moving eulogy of her granddaughter, Noa Rabin-Philosoff. Yet personally, she admitted the moment of assassination recurred endlessly in her mind, like "a repeating videotape".
Leah Rabin maintained influence to the very end. She prevailed upon a reluctant Barak to allow Peres to meet Arafat, in a bid to end the current violence. And her daughter, Dahlia, and son, Yuval, continue to bear the torch of peace.
Leah Rabin: born 1928; died, November 2000