I had grown up with the notion that peace was not only a good thing, but also an achievable goal, to be reached at some point in the future when the surrounding Arab nations would finally come to the reluctant conclusion that Israel was here to stay and would sign peace accords. The Palestinian territories, I understood, were mainly bargaining chips, and would be given back to the countries they were conquered from in 1967 as part of these accords. The complicated question of Jerusalem would be sorted out somehow. An Israeli places a candle in front of a portrait of Yitzhak Rabin outside his Jerusalem residence on the morning after his assassination - Sunday, November 5, 1995. Credit:AP Then came the first intifada in the late 1980s, and I began to figure out that many Israelis - including the government of the day, led by Yitzhak Shamir - had a completely different take on this: for them, the territories were something to fight for. Still, there were signs of progress, however slow. And then came 1992, Rabin was elected, and things finally things started moving. Peace talks with the Palestinians were proceeding, Jordan signed a peace agreement, joining Egypt in what was looking like a growing list of former enemies. For my generation, it looked as if it was all going as planned: the Arabs finally recognising that Israel would not be defeated by force, with normalisation - perhaps even friendly relations - on the horizon. I say "my generation", but this was true only for roughly half of the Jewish population. The other half were getting extremely concerned. Since its foundation, Israeli society has had to contend with the inherent tension between two viewpoints: the first was secular, and saw the newly-founded state as a safe haven for a people who, as history showed, could not find it elsewhere. This was the prevailing attitude during the first years in Israel's history.

The Six-Day War in June 1967 is rightly remembered as a crucial point in the region's history, but it is also, inextricably, a turning point in Israel's collective consciousness. In the months leading to the war, it was all too easy for any Israeli to picture the dream collapsing into ruin: the young nation destroyed, a mere 19 years after declaring its independence; its people either killed or forced once again to flee their homes, becoming wandering Jews once more, forever. US president Bill Clinton with Rabin and Palestine Liberation Organisation chairman Yasser Arafat mark the signing of the first Oslo peace accord with a handshake at the White House in September 1993. Credit:AP Imagine, then, what it felt like after June 10, 1967, when the war was over. For all Jewish Israelis, the immense burden of fear was lifted from their shoulders. And for some this was not only a vindication of Israeli military might, but of a religious vision. For many Orthodox Jews, the fact that the Jewish state was founded as a secular state, by flesh-and-blood people, is actually a sort of blasphemy: according to the tenets of Orthodoxy, all Jews were supposed to stay in the diaspora and wait until their saviour - the Messiah - would come to deliver them to the Holy Land. To pre-empt God's will was wrong. Yitzhak Rabin, centre, then Israel Defence Forces chief of staff, is greeted by jubilant Israelis after the fall of east Jerusalem to Israeli forces in June 1967. Credit:AP

However, one stream of Orthodox Judaism - the so-called "national-religious" sector - saw the establishment of Israel as a necessary first step in bringing forth the Messiah. For them, the 1967 war and its results - the return to the holy sites of Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Hebron - were the fulfilment of a prophecy, and any talk of giving the land back was to be vigorously contested. Rabin's assassin, Yigal Amir, was not a madman or an attention seeker, nor was he (in his mind, at least) acting as a simple murderer. He was dutifully carrying out what he saw as the right and necessary thing to do in keeping with his cultural tradition and beliefs. The figure of the kana'i, or zealot, has appeared at various times throughout Jewish history, a lone figure standing up against sin, idol worship and secularism, and killing in the name of the Lord. Israelis take part in a rally marking the sixth anniversary of Rabin's assassination. Credit:AP The Bible tells of the prophet Elijah killing 450 priests of Baal on Mount Carmel; in Judea in the second century BC, Mattathias and his sons fight a bloody guerrilla war against the conquering Greeks and against those Jews who identified with Greek culture. These figures, and others like them, are still hailed and revered more than 2000 years later as upholders of the faith. Mainstream Judaism is today a much softer faith, but it is not hard to see how a religious man could interpret what was happening in the Holy Land in 1995 along much the same lines. Rabin was apparently willing to give away the holiest sites and to endanger the very existence of the Jewish nation in return for empty promises. To a zealot of the Jewish faith, the Greek concept of democracy is not something to be upheld; it is a foreign concept, to be used if necessary and rejected when it stops being helpful.

Yigal Amir smiles in a Tel Aviv court on December 6, 1995, during a hearing in which murder charges were brought against him. Credit:AP And, to such a religious man, the evidence that this assassination was the right thing to do just kept on coming: the peace process stalled. It is easy to make the case that every Israeli prime minister since Rabin who made any steps in the direction of peace was quickly ousted by some political, medical or legal catastrophe. What better indication of divine guidance could anyone ask for? Yet beyond cementing the future of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Rabin's assassination had another effect, deeper and more insidious, and once again entirely in keeping with the assassin's intent: it demolished the foundation of Israel as a democratic society. Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin delivers what turned out to be his final speech to a peace rally of more than 100,000 Israelis in the Tel Aviv square that now bears his name on November 4, 1995. He was fatally shot only minutes later. Credit:AP In the days following the assassination, I found myself increasingly confused. Amid the voices coming from the right and the left, there was something missing. It gradually dawned on me that both the Israeli right and the Israeli left were so focused on the subject of peace that no one was addressing a fundamental issue: that the assassination was intended to remove the decision of whether to carry on with the peace process or not from the hands of the Israeli public.

It may well be that, had Rabin not been assassinated, he would have lost the upcoming elections. Indeed, Rabin's successor, Shimon Peres, lost to Benjamin Netanyahu's right-wing Likud party in the elections that were held a few months later. It may also be that, had Rabin survived and won that election, the peace process would nevertheless have stalled as it subsequently did; Lord knows that even with the best intentions, the Israeli-Palestinian situation is a complicated one to solve. Yigal Amir is brought to court in Tel Aviv on November 6, 1996. Credit:AP However the assassin did not want to give the Israeli public the chance to choose. A US president or president-elect cannot decline to be protected by the US Secret Service. The rationale for that, as I understand it, is that even if the president is not concerned about his own safety, it is the Secret Service's mission to protect the presidency – to see that the electoral decision of the American people is honoured. Rabin's assassin made a calculated decision to sabotage the democratic process – and no one was talking about that; they were all still screaming at each other about peace. And to a large extent, they still are. The only person I could find who addressed this at all was Rabin himself. In his last speech, he said: "Violence gnaws at the roots of democracy. It must be condemned, denounced, isolated. This is not the way of the state of Israel. There is democracy, there may be disputes, but they will be decided by democratic elections."

He was shot a few minutes later. His killer sits in jail still, his mission fulfilled. Idan Ben-Barak is a science writer. His most recent book, about the human immune system, is called 'Why Aren't We Dead Yet?'