Rabin Is Still Dead.

So is the 90's World Order

The murderers Yigal Amir and Baruch Goldstein succeeded. They killed Yitzhak Rabin and with him the political logic that once anchored Israel’s secular and rational order. The serial killer from Hebron and the assassin from Tel Aviv carried out two of the most successful political assassinations in modern history. Not because of who fell, but because of what was buried with him: the belief that a society can resolve its disagreements through reason, institutions, and civic language.

Since November 1995, Israel has never been the same. It has drifted from restrained power toward unbridled brutality, from stateliness toward messianism. It has retreated from civic rationality and surrendered to a distorted religious identity. In November 1995, the “Jewish” killed the “democratic.” The democracy of that era was far from perfect, but the Judaism that replaced it is infinitely more grotesque. Delirious rabbis of redemption, narrow-minded followers, and ignorant public representatives now hold power. What was once the fanatic fringe has become the government of Israel.

But this is not only an Israeli story. The 1990s appeared to herald a new age of optimism, a true end to the horrors of the twentieth century and the dawn of a new historical era. Walls fell, agreements were signed, and the West believed that history was aligning with a single rational political and economic model, its own. Francis Fukuyama captured the spirit of the time when he wrote of the “end of history.” It seemed that the ideological struggle was over, that liberal democracy was the ultimate expression of human reason.

It was an illusion. The West read the collapse of communism as a victory for rationality and individual freedom, ignoring the many heads of the hydra still lurking in the dark. Fundamentalism, fanaticism, separatism, ignorance, and populism were waiting for their hour.

It came quickly. Not in the great centers of power but in the peripheries, where the global order was most fragile. In February 1994, Baruch Goldstein opened fire on Muslim worshippers in Hebron’s Cave of the Patriarchs. The massacre was not only an atrocity but also an assassination attempt against the Oslo process itself. Hamas responded with attacks aimed at the same goal: to destroy the process from within. The first front of the new world order cracked in Israel. The idea that rational compromise could triumph over fanaticism collapsed.

In November 1995, Yigal Amir continued the mission and killed Yitzhak Rabin in Tel Aviv. It was not merely the assassination of a prime minister; it was a declaration of war on rationalism itself. Amir acted out of a sense of divine mission against the secular liberal order. He proved that one could kill not only a person but also an idea, that one could halt history with three bullets. From the perspective of time, it is clear that Goldstein, Amir, and Hamas were the same phenomenon. Each, in his own way, helped destroy what was once called “Israeli democracy.”

Within a few years, it became clear that the Israeli process was only a microcosm of a much larger one. September 2001 demonstrated this in the most brutal way. Osama bin Laden, like Amir and Goldstein, acted from a sense of holy mission against the secular liberal order. His real success was not the destruction of the Twin Towers but the transformation of the West itself. The West adopted his logic of fear, brutality, xenophobia, and the abandonment of the very liberties it once held sacred.

The American invasion of Iraq in March 2003 deepened this trend. It was carried out in the name of democracy but marked the end of America’s moral supremacy. The liberal faith was exposed as an edifice resting on cynicism. The turning point was not the terror but the reaction to it. The West, which had believed itself the guardian of reason, succumbed to the same irrational forces of power and fear it sought to repel.

Between 1995 and 2025, the world turned upside down. The collapse of the Twin Towers ended the brief unipolar American century. Russia returned to nationalist authoritarianism, China built a model of efficiency without freedom, Europe began to flirt again with its darker impulses, and the global South sought its own independent identity. The liberal order meant to be universal became a short local chapter in the history of the West.

The emerging multipolar world rests on a simple premise: there are no shared values, only competing interests. The United States remains a military and economic superpower but has lost its moral center. Christian fundamentalism and aggressive conservatism have become integral parts of its governance. Donald Trump is not an aberration; he is its embodiment. China offers an alternative order of social efficiency without freedom. Russia incarnates the new political violence, nationalism, fear, and unrestrained military power. Vladimir Putin makes cynicism his brand. India presents the model of ethnic democracy: a free market and regular elections, all in the service of one dominant identity. Narendra Modi, like Viktor Orbán in Hungary, demonstrates that democratic institutions can remain while their content is hollowed out. The global South, rejecting Western superiority, seeks to redefine global authority. It does not offer a moral alternative, only respect for its own local models, however tyrannical or deadly.

What unites all these regimes is their loss of faith in the universal idea of human equality. The language of human rights has been replaced by the language of tribalism and closed identities. Global consensus has given way to systems of power and arrogance. The astonishing fact is the reach of this transformation. Fundamentalism, fanaticism, and populism now rule Russia, the United States, Hungary, Turkey, a wavering France, a bewildered Britain, and a Germany closer than ever to its own dark past.

And back to Israel. Israel has absorbed the worst of all these phenomena. It belongs technologically to the West, but culturally and politically it resembles the non-Western autocracies. It still maintains democratic institutions, but its democracy is now conditional at best. What once seemed a society guided by common sense has become one governed by fear, blindness, and a damaged collective personality.

In the unipolar era Israel sought to join the liberal order. In the multipolar age it looks for shelter among the powers: partnerships with India and Hungary, dependence on a capricious United States, economic ties with China, and growing estrangement from classical Europe. It is no longer a unique case but part of the global pattern of hollow democracies where elections take place but liberal discourse has died.

What began in Israel has become a worldwide pattern. Goldstein and Amir were harbingers of this age. They did not know that others would follow their path, that their fanaticism would become the norm, or that the political murder they carried out would evolve into a model not necessarily of physical killing but of killing public discourse itself.

The end of Netanyahu is near, whether through removal, imprisonment, or natural conclusion. When it comes, the real test will begin: will it be merely the replacement of one leader or the beginning of a deeper repair? Can the rational legacy of Rabin be restored to the center, or has the post-liberal, Bibist era taken irreversible root? This question is not only Israeli. It confronts every society now ruled by populism and zealotry. Will France recover after Le Pen? America after Trump? Will Britain find its way back to Europe? The same struggle plays out everywhere at once.

Thirty years after the assassination, it is clear that the 1990s did not mark the end of history but the end of reason. What Amir and Goldstein began, bin Laden continued, and Putin, Trump, Netanyahu, Modi, and Erdogan completed. Yet perhaps from this recognition of failure a new beginning can be found. Not another universal illusion, for we know it does not work. Not an end to history, for history never ends. But a modest rationality, sober and self-aware, that accepts its limits yet still serves its purpose: to protect humanity from itself. It is not a return to the innocence of the 1990s. But it may be the only way to avoid falling completely into the age of savagery, where man-to-man becomes a truly bad man.