The last real chance of avoiding the tragic conflict being waged between Israel and Hamas was destroyed by a single killing: the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995. The assassin was not a Palestinian militant, but an Israeli extremist opposed to the Oslo Accords, by which Rabin sought a ‘land for peace’ deal that was anathema to Israeli radicals, for whom Jewish sovereignty in the Holy Land is non-negotiable.

Rabin’s assassination occurred at the end of a peace rally attended by more than 100,000 Israelis, hopeful of an end to hostilities between Israel and Palestinians. At the time, that hope seemed realistic. The great beneficiaries of the assassination were Israeli nationalists, above all Benjamin Netanyahu, the leader of the right-wing Likud party.

Netanyahu had rejected the Oslo Accords, because they required Israel to withdraw from the territories it had occupied after the Six-Day War in 1967. In a protest against the accords, and against Rabin, Netanyahu led a mock funeral procession, complete with a coffin and hangman’s noose.

www.aspistrategist.org.au/the-spiral-of-...e-that-led-to-hamas/

history.state.gov/milestones/1993-2000/oslo