Israel indulged in a bitter orgy of recrimination yesterday, the second anniversary of the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. Many allies of the former prime minister - who was shot dead by Yigal Amir, an Orthodox, rightwing extremist Jew, at the end of a peace rally in Tel Aviv - spent much of the day hurling abuse at the current rightwing Prime Minister, Mr Benjamin Netanyahu, for having fuelled the atmosphere of incitement that led to the killing.
Mr Netanyahu and his loyalists accused the Rabin camp, in turn, of trying to stain half the nation with responsibility for the murder.
After a memorial ceremony attended by some 500 people at Mr Rabin's graveside on Jerusalem's Mount Herzl, his widow, Leah, said bitterly that the campaign of incitement was continuing against those who supported her late husband's efforts to reach a permanent peace agreement with Yasser Arafat.
Mr Netanyahu's wife, Sarah, for her part, wailed to a Hebrew newspaper that her husband was now being demonised by the left. "They're accusing him of murdering peace," she complained.
Israel's inability to mark the anniversary with a serious attempt at internal healing, let alone in a true spirit of national reconciliation, demonstrated again how deeply the country remains divided over Mr Rabin's land-for-peace bargain with Mr Arafat, and thus over whether he should be mourned as a hero or coldly remembered as the instigator of a misguided policy of capitulation that is now being turned around under Mr Netanyahu's stewardship.
For every Israeli to whom the murder of Mr Rabin represented a sullying of Israel's innocence and the shattering of the country's best hope for peace with the Palestinians, there is another who has been relieved at the slowdown in the peace process since the assassination and rejoices that hardly any further West Bank land has subsequently been turned over to Mr Arafat's control.
It was symptomatic of this climate that, when Mr Netanyahu toured the southern town of Beersheba yesterday, peace activists trailed him screaming demands that he resign, while students at a high school he visited shouted his praises enthusiastically.
In radio interviews from one side, leftwing politicians urged Mr Netanyahu not to be so hypocritical as to deliver an address at next week's Knesset session in Mr Rabin's memory, or at least to use the occasion to issue a personal apology for his conduct over the months of vitriolic argument that preceded the killing.
From the other side, one of his own Likud Party loyalists, Mr Uzi Landau, claimed that vicious leftwing criticism at the time of the 1982 Lebanon War had shortened the life of the late Likud prime minister, Menachem Begin.
Yesterday's anniversary was also remarkable for the resurfacing of half-baked conspiracy theories, most of them long ago dismissed by the judicial commission that investigated the assassination, alleging the involvement of the Shin Bet domestic security agency in the killing.
Almost all mainstream politicians were united in their expressions of ridicule. The Justice Minister, Mr Tsachi Hanegbi, something of a rightwing firebrand himself, denounced the conspiracy theorising as the equivalent of Holocaust denial.
Finding against Mr Ariel Sharon in a libel case yesterday, the Tel Aviv district court ruled that the former defence minister, currently serving as Minister of Infrastructure, had led Israel into a full-scale war in Lebanon in 1982 when he had only received approval from then-prime minister Begin for a far more limited strike.
David Horovitz is managing editor of the Jerusalem Report