IN the space of barely six weeks at the tail end of 1995, Israel and the Palestinians took their peace process past the point of no return. Israeli troops pulled out of six major West Bank cities and hundreds of smaller towns and villages, liberating almost a million Palestinians from 28 years of occupation.
But while the popularity of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat soared to unprecedented heights as the concrete results of his accommodation with Israel became tangible to the delirious inhabitants of each newly-liberated town, his Israeli partner, Yitzhak Rabin, paid for the process with his life.
Although the gradual ending of the occupation frees the Israeli army from the unedifying ritual of patrolling Palestinian areas in a climate of hatred, and although Israel can rightly consider itself a more moral nation now that the handover has proceeded this far, a large number of Israelis still remain implacably opposed to the pull-out.
There are those who regard any compromise" with the Palestinians as an intolerable humiliation for the proud Jewish nation. There are those who consider Mr Arafat a trickster, who, having got hold of the West Bank and Gaza will now seek to grab parts of sovereign Israel as well. There are those too who fear for the security of the 135 West Bank Jewish settlement islands. increasingly isolated in the sea of Palestinian self-rule.
Most of all, there are those who consider that it is, for want of a better expression, "not kosher" for the secular modern state of Israel to relinquish control over land promised to the Jews in the divine biblical covenant with Abraham.
Yigal Amir, the 25-year-old Israeli law student who gunned down Mr Rabin in Tel Aviv on November 4, has cited all four of those reasons at various times to justify his actions. But his most powerful motivation was unquestionably the last argument. the sense that he was following God's orders in trying to save the Jewish people from Mr Rabin's iniquitous policies.
What is most disturbing at the end of a year that saw what amounts to the first serious attempt to destroy Israeli democracy and to replace it with a fundamentalist leadership bound by "halacha" (Jewish religious law), is that even the horrific assassination of prime minister Rabin does. not seem to have pulled his critics back from the brink.
In the weeks since the murder, all the old vitriol has quickly resurfaced. Shimon Peres, Mr Rabin's unhappy successor, is already being branded a traitor by people who used the same term against Mr Rabin. He, too, is receiving telephoned death threats.
Most worryingly, much of the Israeli spiritual leadership, the rabbis whose approval, whether implicit or explicit, was crucial to Mr Amir, is again inciting hostility to the government, again undermining its legitimacy. Dozens of rabbis are again endorsing "halachic" spiritual rulings that describe the evacuation of West Bank settlements as illegal" under Jewish law. And far from excommunicating the most extreme rabbis - those questioned by police on suspicion of sanctioning the assassination - the mainstream spiritual leadership has rallied round to offer support, while the handful of left wing" rabbis, urging a rethink of where Orthodox Judaism has gone wrong, are being boycotted and even physically threatened.
For Israel, 1995 should have gone done as a year of real success and progress, a year when the economy boomed, when thousands of new immigrants from the former Soviet Union were smoothly absorbed, when the peace treaty with Jordan proved warm and durable. when ties with more remote Arab states grew stronger.
Instead, it is a year stained irrevocably by the assassination, and it leaves Israel tottering unsteadily on the threshold of 1996. Mr Peres, bravely, seems determined to press on with his predecessor's mission to complete the "circle of peace" by reaching speedy accords with Syria and Lebanon. But the price for these final peace accords will be high a full withdrawal from the Golan Heights and there is absolutely no guarantee that the Israeli electorate will be willing to pay it.
There is no doubting that 1996 will be the most decisive year in the short history of modern Israel, the year in which its people. rocked by the death of Mr Rabin will be asked to choose at general elections between starkly different futures between Mr Peres's vision of trading land for full acceptance in the Middle East and the hardline Likud party's alternative of maintaining Israeli rule over as much territory as possible to maximise the national sense of security - even if that means bracing for more war.