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When thousands of Israelis this weekend attend the annual ceremony to mark the assassination in 1995 of Yitzhak Rabin, the prime minister who died attempting to make peace with the Palestinians, they will be shown a pre-recorded message from Barack Obama, urging them to re-engage with the peace process. At the same time, they will be reminded of just how far relations between Israelis and Palestinians have deteriorated since those heady days in 1993 when Mr Rabin signed the Oslo Accords with Yasser Arafat on the White House lawn, in front of a beaming Bill Clinton.

The collapse of the Oslo initiative, which was precipitated by Mr Rabin's untimely murder by a Jewish extremist, has led to a dramatic polarisation, with Israel now run by arguably the most Right-wing government in...