Thirty years ago, Yitzhak Rabin, the then prime minister of Israel, was assassinated as he left a peace rally in Tel Aviv. He had been cut down essentially because he had signed a Declaration of Principles – the Oslo Accord – with Yasser Arafat, the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) in September 1993. The killing was a watershed moment in the gradual disintegration of the peace process and cast doubt on the belief that peace was more beneficial than war.

Rabin’s address at the signing in 1993 stated that Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs were ‘destined to live together on the same soil, in the same land’. This was anathema to both right-wing Israelis and Palestinian Islamists. They shared the common belief in opposition to any partition of the Land into two states. In Israel, the far right had mounted a long campaign of incitement. Rabin had expected the reaction to the Oslo Accord to be ‘ugly’, but it gradually exceeded all predictions. It ended in his murder.

The newly elected leader of the Likud, Benjamin Netanyahu, had come to power on the back of his expertise as an eloquent pundit, explaining Israel’s case to the US media. He had grown up in both Israel and in the US during the 1960s, but exhibited a profound disdain for the counter-culture of the decade. He did not care for the liberal views of the over 70 per cent of Jewish Americans who had consistently voted Democrat since the New Deal of President Roosevelt, regardless of their socio-economic status. He preferred registered Republicans and evangelical Christians.

During his time as an Israeli diplomat in the US, Netanyahu had cultivated a coterie of Jewish and non-Jewish businessmen who had transferred their allegiance to the Republicans. This included a certain New York estate agent, Donald J. Trump. This has stood him in good political stead up until the present day.

Demonstrations in 1995 went beyond the rabble-rousing periphery. Netanyahu enthusiastically participated in the protests against Rabin. He was aware that his great rival, Ariel Sharon, had positioned himself on the far right – and Netanyahu was determined not be outflanked ideologically.

The Likud, however, spoke with many voices. There were three Likud members of the Knesset who had actually abstained in the vote on the Declaration of Principles, including the party’s candidate for mayor of Tel Aviv. Fifteen Likud mayors, representing major locations such as Netanya and Herzliya, declared their support for the Oslo Accord.

Netanyahu had to be all things to all Likudniks. On the one hand, he said that he would honour all past agreements and condemned acts of violence on the streets. On the other, he noted a growing sense of disillusionment with the Accord within the Israeli public.

Palestinian Islamists, opposed to the Oslo Accord, had introduced suicide bombing into the conflict. It had originated during the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s and been imported from Tehran into Israel. After Rabin’s handshake with Arafat in Washington, the number of Israelis killed through acts of terror had almost doubled compared with the same period before the rapprochement. Many Israelis now began to ask why the Accord had not brought peace and security but inaugurated instead a reality of violence and death.

The Accord was an example of constructive ambiguity, interpreted positively by both sides. Arafat – with his history of endorsing the armed struggle as well as gradually embracing a two-state solution after 1974 – was increasingly seen by Israelis as untrustworthy and devious. Arafat had to balance Islamists with nationalists, ideology with pragmatism, and peace with war.

Israelis criticised Arafat for not dealing severely enough with his Islamist opponents whose political fortunes were now on the rise. The Islamists were viewed as being only loyal to their own authorities and only disposed to carry out their orders.

Moreover, the Islamist Hamas was winning local elections within the likes of the Palestinian Doctors’ Union. The Islamic University of Gaza had become a bastion of support for Hamas. Islamic symbolism now permeated various Palestinian organisations. The Marxist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine had begun to sport quotations from the Quran and there were frequent armed clashes between Palestinian Islamists and Palestinian nationalists.

Rabin’s poll ratings fell dramatically after each Islamist suicide bombing and on each occasion his rate of recovery was markedly slower. The next election was due to be held in 1996 and Netanyahu understood that the growth of disillusionment presented an opportunity to be exploited.

Netanyahu therefore decided to embrace the wave of incitement. He described the Oslo Accord as ‘a new Munich’, an act of appeasement in which Yitzhak Rabin was accorded the role of Neville Chamberlain and the Palestinians were the new Nazis. Netanyahu accused Rabin of being responsible for stirring up ‘Arab terror…you are guilty. This blood is on your head’.

Netanyahu tried to unite the far right and radical religious parties around the Likud. These parties met every Monday morning to coordinate parliamentary actions and street protests against the Rabin government.

In the weeks before the assassination, journalists noted that the rhetoric of criticism had grown acerbic and now included: ‘wicked’, ‘insane’, ‘diseased’, ‘treacherous’, ‘reckless’, ‘obsequious’, ‘mentally deranged’, ‘assimilated’, ‘destroying the dream of the Jewish people’, ‘possessed with making concessions’, ‘disconnected from Jewish values and tradition’, ‘a two time collaborator – once with a terrorist organisation and once against Jews’, ‘leading Israel to suicide’, ‘shrinking Israel into Auschwitz borders’.

At one demonstration, Rabin was depicted in the uniform of a Nazi gauleiter.

Rabin’s assassin, Yigal Amir, was subsequently branded as an unhinged and deranged individual, yet before the killing he was seen as just another right-wing activist. His academic institution, Bar-Ilan University, had not placed him on a list of dangerous extremists. After the murder, Amir implied that he had the blessing of a few unnamed rabbis. During his interrogation, he commented that ‘once something is a ruling, there is no longer any moral issue’. He said that he was inspired by the example of the zealotry of Pinchas ben Eleazar in the Bible (Numbers 25:6-9), who killed Zimri ben Salu for having sex with a Midianite woman.

On searching Yigal Amir’s accommodation, investigators found Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal on his bookshelf in addition to religious works.

Itamar Ben-Gvir, the Minister for National Security in Netanyahu’s current government, was very active in the campaign against Rabin in 1995. In 2007, Ben-Gvir was among those that formed the Committee for Saving Democracy and produced a video that called for the release of Yigal Amir. There was no sympathy in Israel for Rabin’s killer. Amir has now been in prison for longer than Nelson Mandela.

Ben-Gvir went on to become a lawyer and often defended his friends on the far right in court. Among other issues, they opposed the mixing of Arabs and Jews on Israeli beaches and the Gay Pride parade in Jerusalem.

At the funeral, Rabin’s wife refused to shake Netanyahu’s hand. Time and politics does not stand still – and those circles, close to Amir, have moved from the margins of protest to the centre of Netanyahu’s government. Palestinian Islamists and the Israeli far right that rejected the Oslo Accord three decades ago now rule in both Tel Aviv and Gaza. Yet Rabin’s words on the signing of the peace accords with Arafat in 1993 have carried down the years. They were repeated just a few days ago at a large rally in Tel Aviv:

We say to you, the Palestinians, in a loud and clear voice: enough of blood and tears. Enough. We have no desire for revenge. We harbour no hatred towards you. We, like you, are people – people who want to build a home, to plant a tree, to love, to live side by side with you – in dignity, in empathy, as human beings, as free men. We are today giving peace a chance, and saying again to you: Enough.