JERUSALEM (AP) -- Ten years after Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated for trading land for peace, Israel has given up land without peace. It is fearful of another political murder. And it is divided over whether the Middle East conflict would be nearer its end had Rabin lived.Yigal Amir, the young Jewish ultranationalist who shot the 73-year-old leader at point-blank range after a November 4, 1995, peace rally, has still shown no remorse -- and about a fifth of Israelis think he should be pardoned. But memories of Rabin's murder may have kept tempers in check among the nationalists who campaigned against the withdrawal this summer from Gaza and a slice of the West Bank.Still, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who had been the nationalists' darling at the time of Rabin's murder, surrounds himself with an exceptionally large phalanx of bodyguards. Calls for his death spiked in the months before the pullout."I'm afraid we have not learned all the necessary lessons," said Uri Savir, the chief Israeli negotiator of the Israeli-Palestinian peace accords forged in Oslo, Norway, during Rabin's tenure.Rabin's murder stunned not just Israelis but a whole world that had pinned its hopes on the former general's bold peace agenda.State commemorations will be held November 14, the Jewish calendar anniversary of his murder. Events beginning this weekend include gatherings to be addressed by former President Bill Clinton, Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas and high-ranking visitors from Jordan and Egypt, the two countries formally at peace with Israel.Rabin took power in 1992, a war hero trusted by his people to navigate the rocky road to peace -- even if that meant giving up lands Israel captured in 1967 when he was military chief.The Oslo accords and a peace treaty with Jordan followed, but by 1995, Palestinian suicide bombings had soured the public mood.Hard-liners branded Rabin a traitor for handing back land to the Arabs. Rabbis issued rulings calling for his death, and leaders of Sharon's right-wing Likud party spoke at a tempestuous rally featuring posters of Rabin in a Nazi SS uniform.Critics said it was this climate of incitement that emboldened Amir to act moments after Rabin told cheering thousands that "people really want peace."Some argue that with the shots he fired into Rabin's back, Amir radically changed the course of Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking.Six months after the murder, the dovish Peres lost an election to Likud's hawkish Benjamin Netanyahu, who in turn was defeated by Rabin protege Ehud Barak. Neither could drive peace forward. Rabin and Peres were "a very powerful combination to lead the peace process," said Savir, now president of the Shimon Peres Center for Peace in Tel Aviv. "From that point of view, I think they had a much better chance of making a deal."Ultimately there will be peace, he said, "but because of the assassination, it will take much more time, and many casualties will have been in vain."Others say the peace process would have run aground anyway, because the Oslo deal didn't address contentious issues such as conflicting claims to Jerusalem and the fate of West Bank Jewish settlements.Rabin got Palestinians to understand Israel's security concerns, said political scientist Jonathan Rynhold, but on the other big issues that finally buried the peace effort in 2000, "I don't think he would have been able to bridge the great differences between the Palestinians and Israel."After five years of Palestinian uprising and more than 4,600 deaths, Israelis and Palestinians seem as far apart as ever on the biggest issues, despite new openings created by the Gaza pullout and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's death a year ago.Israelis today are less riven over land concessions than in 1995. The Gaza pullout met less resistance than feared, and polls show most Israelis supporting the idea of a Palestinian state.But Carmi Gillon, the man in charge of Rabin's security in 1995, said Amir has become a poster boy for radical right-wingers. Now the focus of their hatred is Sharon, and "The assessment that the next political assassination is upon us is correct," Gillon told the Yediot Ahronot newspaper.Some say Israelis haven't yet fully internalized the lessons of Rabin's assassination."An entire group in Israeli society, the leaders of religious Zionism, tried to downplay it saying it was one person, a fringe element," said Arye Carmon, head of the Israel Democracy Institute. "We weren't witness to a serious discussion that explains how a climate was fostered that engendered the very violent vocabulary and physical violence that allowed someone to take a pistol and shoot the prime minister."The institute's just-released "2005 Democracy Index" shows 84 percent of Israelis think another political assassination could take place."I see a serious degeneration in the tenor of public discourse," about Israelis and Arabs, secular and religious, rich and poor, Carmon said.If, a decade ago, Rabin's assassin was a pariah in a nation shocked that a Jew could murder the democratically elected leader of Israel, now a considerable portion would forgive him.A survey by the Dahaf polling institute showed one-fifth of those questioned saying Amir should be pardoned now. It gave no margin of error.Amir, who is serving a life sentence without parole, has been married by proxy in jail to an admirer he met after the murder.His family has been lobbying for his early release, and on its Web site compares the assassination to the "killing of a criminal." The site also calls for the prosecution of Israeli leaders who supported the Gaza pullout."Unlike what was thought at that time, (Rabin's slaying) didn't lead to unity, but only deepened the chasm" in Israeli society, said Yoram Peri, head of the Chaim Herzog Institute for Media, Politics and Society at Tel Aviv, who has written books on the Rabin assassination.Still, Rabin's legacy has been deep, Savir said.Although he never accomplished what he hoped to achieve, "the Oslo process is still alive and kicking," he said. "Whatever is done, either in Gaza, or in the future in the West Bank ... is all based on what Rabin and Peres started in Oslo."Copyright 2005 The Associated Press. 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