Like almost everything to do with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the upcoming 25^th anniversary of the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin has generated fierce controversy that reflects radically divergent approaches to the past and present - as well as profound uncertainty about the future.

 The Israeli prime minister was murdered on November 4, 1995, at a peace really in Tel Aviv. His assassin was Yigal Amir, a 25-year-old right-wing Jewish religious nationalist student who saw Rabin as a traitor for having signed the Oslo Accords with Yasser Arafat, the veteran leader of the Palestine Liberation Organisation.

 The current row was triggered by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a popular, progressive and highly influential Democratic congresswoman for New York. AOC, as she is widely known, withdrew from a virtual event commemorating Rabin on October 20. That was organised by Americans for Peace Now, a US-based group that supports the Israeli movement. “This event and my involvement was presented to my team differently from how it’s now being promoted,” AOC tweeted – triggering a storm of furious criticism – both for and against her change of mind.

 This latest controversy is about far more than just a simple cancellation. It reflects competing - and changing - attitudes to the conflict in general. Specifically it is about the Oslo agreement, signed on the White House lawn in September 1993. The deal, negotiated in secret, was a genuinely historic achievement, but an unbalanced and, crucially, only an interim one.

 Under its terms, the PLO formally recognized Israel while Israel recognized the PLO as the representative of the Palestinians. Israel agreed only to limited self-government, not an independent Palestinian state, pending “permanent status” talks. A final settlement was due to be reached by 1999. Twenty-one years later it still has not been. The last Israel-Palestinian peace negotiations were held, under US mediation, back in 2014.

 Oslo faced opposition from the start – and from both sides. Edward Said, the Palestinian-American intellectual, attacked the “supine abjectness” of the PLO. The Islamist movement Hamas agreed. Binyamin Netanyahu, then leading Israel’s Likud opposition, addressed a Jerusalem demonstration where Rabin had been portrayed in a Nazi SS uniform and was accused of making “a pact with the devil.”

 And in a basic sense, Oslo’s terms are still valid. The Palestinian Authority, under Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), Arafat’s successor as PLO leader, exists in Ramallah to this day. Israel retains control of the external borders of the PA and continues its illegal settlement activities. The Gaza Strip, under the control of Hamas – and which defines itself as a resistance movement -  remains under Israeli (and Egyptian) blockade.

 The status quo of Oslo has been undermined in recent years by the toxic combination of Netanyahu – now Israel’s longest-serving prime minister – and Donald Trump. The US president’s controversial “deal of the century” approved Israel’s unilateral annexation of parts of the occupied West Bank. That has now been suspended due to the Washington-brokered deal between Israel, the UAE and Bahrain - a highly significant move towards broader Arab “normalisation” with the Jewish state. But a just and mutually acceptable solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict seems as far away as ever.

 And it is that which accounts for the anger over the Rabin event. Americans for Peace Now naturally advertised the commemoration event in a positive way. It focused on the late Israeli leader as a courageous advocate of peace-making with the Palestinians. Dan Shapiro, a former US ambassador to Israel, said: “Honouring Rabin, an Israeli patriot killed for trying to make peace, in no way detracts from a commitment to Palestinians’ rights,” he tweeted.

 But Diana Buttu, a legal adviser to the Palestinian negotiating team, complained that Rabin’s legacy had been whitewashed. “While he was purportedly ‘seeking peace’ he continued to build Israeli settlements and when a settler massacred Palestinians in Hebron in 1994 instead of removing settlers he fortified them,” she wrote. And Rabin’s past – including the expulsion of Palestinians from Lydda and Ramle during the war of 1948 – known in Arabic as the Nakba – were cited too. Palestinians – and some Israelis – also remember Rabin’s role as defence minister during the first intifada in 1987 when he reportedly ordered his soldiers to “break the bones” of Arab protestors in the West Bank and Gaza.

  AOC’s withdrawal from the memorial event has been hailed by supporters as showcasing “the growing influence the Palestinian rights movement has on both the American progressive left and Congress.” Opponents have criticised her for giving into unacceptable pressure. “It was a small schedule change but an important symbolic moment,” wrote one critic.

 Nothing guaranteed that Rabin – had he lived - would eventually succeed in delivering a just peace with the Palestinians. And violence from both sides preceded his assassination. Everyone remembers his visibly reluctant handshake with Arafat as they signed the Oslo Accords under the beaming smile of President Bill Clinton. But there can be little doubt that the three bullets that were fired a quarter of a century ago in Tel Aviv ended a fleeting moment of hope for a solution to the Middle East – and arguably the world’s - most intractable and divisive conflict.

IAN BLACK