This coming Wednesday will be the 14th anniversary of the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin at a Tel Aviv rally for the Oslo peace accords. Like the initial rally itself, the memorial--scheduled for Saturday, October 31, but postponed due to what turned out to be only light rains--was to be a highly charged political event. Except that in 1995, Israel was still stirred by hopes of bringing the decades of war with the Arabs to an end. Yet, at the same time, foreboding grew that these hopes themselves constituted a trap, a mortal trap. (I admit that, already in September 1993 during the ceremonial handshakes on the White House lawn from which Oslo emerged, I felt like a mourner at the wedding feast. And the fact is that I did not go, Al Gore's imprecations to the contrary. The New Republic editorial roughly reflected this disposition.) From the edges but mostly from the edges of the Israeli right this discord turned into hatred and vengeance. When Rabin was getting into his car to go home a young man, a self-designated emissary, calmly stepped from the crowd and shot two bullets from his Beretta semi-automatic pistol into the prime minister's body. Rabin was dead within 40 minutes.

I was in Israel, having dinner with friends at a Jerusalem restaurant, the night the assassination occurred. I remained for the funeral and stayed on for a few days thereafter to experience the aftermath. Israel went into spectral mourning, and even among the Zionist ultra-right there was some self-reproach. The left, although traumatized by the shooting of someone who was for them a very new and remote hero, did its utmost to get what it could politically from the murder. It is his killing that made him their lion.

Every year, when the yahrzeit of the killing comes around, the remaining faithful of Oslo, an ever-declining cohort, by now a pathetic cohort, tries to stir up the memories and the hopes. It is a forlorn venture. Almost nobody believes in "peace now" or, for that matter, in "peace soon." There may be a few handfuls who can still see "peace in our time." But that is not a politics; it is a disposition. Now this cosmic and concrete pessimism can change on a dime or on 10 agurot. Still, this is the public temper now and it has been the public temper for a long time.

It is just about 15 years since Yasir Arafat received the Nobel Peace Prize. Everybody understood that the two leaders of the State of Israel who shared the award with him, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, actually deserved it. But Arafat's primary deed in life was to be a terrorist. A tactician of terror and a strategist of terrorism. Thinking about Arafat in the royal palace made me cringe then. When I went to Al Gore's installation two years ago, I could not get out of my head that the rais had stood in the same spot, a usurper and a fraud. It was he who denied the Palestinians a state in 2000 and 2001 by refusing Ehud Barak's far-too-generous terms, terms which will never be offered again. Never. This is Arafat's real achievement: He protected Israel from its own good will.

But it is not Arafat's prize that absorbs us now. It is Barack Obama's. Edward Jay Epstein knows about the quotidian rules of the honors. Here they are:

Imagine the likelihood of thousands of American students, intellectuals, and Hollywood celebrities marching in support of George W. Bush, and you will begin to appreciate the marvel of the Israeli leftists now rallying around Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. Reviled for engineering the Lebanon war, for masterminding the settlement movement, for opposing every attempt at reconciliation with the Palestinians, and as the personification of Israeli militarism and anti-Arab racism, Sharon today is viewed by many leftists as the settlers' bete noire and Israel's foremost champion of peace.

Some two million Israeli homes recently received in the mail the 47-page text of the Geneva Accord, which claims to be the comprehensive solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Accord, a European-funded effort secretly negotiated by Palestinian officials and Israeli public figures for two years--and signed in a symbolic, lavish ceremony in Geneva this week--states that Israel will withdraw to the 1967 borders, a Palestinian state will emerge with its capital in Jerusalem, and the two peoples will recognize each other's right to statehood and resolve the refugee issue.

The 1929 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to U.S. Secretary of State Frank Kellogg. And why not? The year before, he had persuaded the great powers to outlaw war. Among those that ratified the historic Kellogg-Briand pact were the democratic countries, plus Germany, Japan, and Italy. High-minded people, deluded that signed agreements shaped history, were delirious with joy. Barely a decade later, of course, most of the world was plunged into war. Did the committee that chose the prize's recipients have any second thoughts?

More than any other Jewish thinker, Maimonides, who lived in the twelfth century, still has sway over the modern mind and not just the modern mind of Jews. He was also a physician, and wrote widely on medicine. Among his voluminous writings--on drugs, asthma, sex, poisons, almost everything but managed competition--is this short prayer: "Supreme God in Heaven: Give me the merit to regard every suffering person ... as a human being, without any distinction between rich and poor, friend and foe, good person and bad.