Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's assassination November 4, 1995 by Yigal Amir, an Israeli extremist Jew, who was opposed to the Oslo Accords and the handing over of control of parts of the West Bank to the Palestinians as a part of a landmark peace agreement with Palestine Liberation Organization President Yasser Arafat

As Rabin and the Labor Party’s fortunes sank, those of the Likud and its followers rose and they stood by as Rabin was vilified.

Journalist Dan Ephron places Benjamin Netanyahu at a rally, about a month before Rabin’s murder, where crowds spent two hours chanting “Death to Rabin.” Netanyahu did nothing to discourage them.

Rabin’s widow blamed Netanyahu, then head of Israel’s conservative Likud party, for contributing to the atmosphere that led to her husband’s death — and said so on worldwide television.

But Netanyahu’s close aide at the time disputed that in an interview with FRONTLINE. “The attempt to pin on him the murder of the prime minister is a cheap, political propaganda trick that was taken by his political opponents, mostly from the left, in order to delegitimize Netanyahu,” former Netanyahu advisor Eyal Arad tells FRONTLINE.

Others see it differently:
“There were moments when Netanyahu was advised that there are real nutcases in the national religious camp that we see, that we need to calm down, even gesturally,” David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker tells FRONTLINE. “Netanyahu never did that, he never did that, to his enormous discredit.”

As the nation mourned Rabin’s assassination, FRONTLINE reports, Netanyahu talked about the political costs of Rabin’s death.
“I remember Netanyahu saying to me, ‘Look, look at this. He’s a hero now. But if he had not been assassinated, I would have beaten him in the elections and then he would have gone into history as a failed politician,'” Martin Indyk, former U.S. Ambassador to Israel