Last Monday marked the twentieth anniversary of the gruesome murder of two Israeli soldiers who took a fateful wrong turn and found themselves in the Palestinian city of Ramallah. Thanks to the presence of an Italian television crew at the scene, the incident was captured on video, and the image of one of the perpetrators victoriously displaying his bloodstained hands to a cheering crowd is, as Nave Dromi puts it, “seared into the minds of all Israelis over thirty years old.” In Dromi’s evaluation, the killings—which came two weeks after the riots that began the second intifada—convinced a great number of his countrymen that, for many Palestinians, the “lust for Israeli blood was greater than [their] desire for statehood.”

On the Jewish calendar, today is the 25th anniversary of Prime Minister Yitzḥak Rabin’s assassination at the hands of a fellow Jewish Israeli. Rabin, after a long and impressive career in the military and in politics, had not long beforehand signed the Oslo Accords, and was murdered by a zealous opponent of that decision. Reflecting on the occasion, David Horovitz writes: