Israel: The anniversary of Yitzhak Rabin's murder reminds Israel of its bitter divisions, writes Nuala Haughey in Jerusalem
A decade has passed since Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin was shot dead by a Jewish fanatic at a peace rally in Tel Aviv.
It was a political assassination which exposed bitter divisions among Israelis over the veteran leader's efforts to begin negotiations with the Palestinians. Ten years later, Rabin's legacy - and even the circumstances of his murder - remains as divisive as ever.
The commemorative events taking place serve to remind Israelis of the intractable gulf between this state's majority secular population and its mainly religious nationalist far right.
While most Israelis supported the Rabin-fostered Oslo Accord, the country's right-wing religious fringe was bitterly opposed to the plan, which envisaged Israel's withdrawal from occupied Palestinian territories.
Yigal Amir (35), Rabin's self-confessed killer, has always maintained he would never have pulled the trigger "without the spiritual go-ahead from a rabbi".
Fast forward to last summer's unilateral Israeli withdrawal of troops and 8,000 Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip, a plan which saw the current prime minister, Ariel Sharon, vilified by the extreme right for handing to Palestinians territory which they view as the Jews' biblical inheritance.
Sharon received a number of death threats over his Gaza plan, including an arcane religious hex by right-wing rabbis similar to a curse levelled against Rabin shortly before his assassination.
Israel's security establishment, heavily criticised for its failures to protect Rabin, has made Sharon one of the most closely guarded political leaders in the world. He is constantly surrounded by a phalanx of guards and rarely makes public appearances.
Now two opinion polls show that the Israeli public remains haunted by the prospect that another lone extremist could carry out a future political assassination. In one survey, 84 per cent of people said they feared a political assassination over the summer's Gaza pull-out.
Carmi Gillon, the man who was responsible for Rabin's security when he was killed, said in the past week that the premier's bodyguards should have killed Amir on the spot "like a dog". Instead, the unrepentant killer received a life sentence. This has allowed him to become a symbol for the radical right, said Gillon, the former head of the Shin Bet security service.
Referring to far-right opponents of the Gaza "disengagement" plan, Gillon said: "There is a group of hundreds of thousands, not all of whom are murderers, but all of whom believe that the murder of Yitzhak Rabin achieved its aim, when it halted the Oslo plan." Amir's relatives recently began lobbying for his early release.
A petition on the family's newly launched website compares Rabin's murder to "an offence committed against a criminal", which calls for a much lighter punishment than an offence committed against "an ordinary citizen".
However, during a ceremonial lighting of the "Yitzhak Candle" in Jerusalem last Thursday, Israel's president Moshe Katsav vowed he would never grant a pardon to Amir.
Meanwhile, conspiracy buffs are having a field day reviving claims that the upper echelons of the Shin Bet secret service orchestrated either an assassination attempt which backfired, or an actual assassination.
One activist website even claims that a videotape of Rabin's shooting was staged and that he was actually shot in his car by Shin Bet agents acting on the instructions of his Labour Party colleague and chief rival, Shimon Peres.
The website recently posted an airbrushed photo of Peres showing his hands and lips dripping with blood. Israel's attorney general is due to determine whether the operators should be accused of incitement.
Dozens of private and public events are scheduled to mark the anniversary of Rabin's death. These include a gathering next Saturday in the square in Tel Aviv where the prime minister was gunned down, and which is now named after him.
Former US president Bill Clinton, who paid tribute to Rabin at his funeral, will attend the event, which takes place amid an altogether less hopeful political climate than 10 years ago.
Sharon, 10 years ago a leader of the pro-settler right, which repeatedly poured scorn on the Oslo process, will not attend the gathering. Local media reports say this is due to security concerns.