The assassination two decades ago of Yitzhak Rabin, the warrior who became Israel’s peacemaking prime minister, has proved one of the most successful in history.

Like Mahatma Gandhi, assassinated by a Hindu fanatic, Rabin was killed by one of his own, a fanatical Jew who could not abide territorial compromise for peace. Yigal Amir, the assassin, was a religious-nationalist follower of Baruch Goldstein, the American-born killer of 29 Palestinian worshipers in Hebron in 1994.

Reason ebbed. Rage flowed. The center eroded. Messianic Zionism, of the kind that claims all the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River as God-given real estate, supplanted secular Zionism of the kind that believes in a state of laws.

An opportunistic right-wing politician named Benjamin Netanyahu, who had compared Rabin to Chamberlain, rose to power. He may supplant David Ben-Gurion as Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, but his legacy looks paltry beside the founding father of Israel.