Jerusalem: Yigal Amir may have been behind bars for 20 years, serving life for the murder of Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, but he still continues to haunt the Jewish state.

The Jewish extremist has spent 17 of his 45 years in solitary confinement and has never expressed the slightest regret for his actions.

On 4 November 1995, Amir put three shots into the leftist premier’s back at the end of a peace rally in Tel Aviv, in an attempt to derail peace accords with the Palestinians.

According to rare statements passed on by those close to him, Amir subscribes to a religious-nationalist Zionism with a strong dose of Messianism.

He still considers the Israeli secular left, or any politician like Rabin who is willing to countenance conceding land to the Palestinians for the sake of peace, as an unacceptable obstacle to realising the divine prophecy of a “Greater Israel” in all of the biblical holy land.

That ideology is shared by a number of extremist rabbis in Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank and some radical settlers.

A committee to free Amir, dormant since 2007, includes Yehuda Glick who campaigns for the right of Jews to pray at the flashpoint Al-Aqsa mosque against the irate opposition of Muslims there.

It also includes Itamar Ben-Gvir, a lawyer specialising in the defence of Jews suspected of abuses against Palestinians, and political activist Avigdor Eskin, who said Rabin was assassinated to “save lives” threatened by the Oslo accords.

Conspiracy theory  

Far-right fans of the Beitar Jerusalem football team chanted Amir’s name during a match in Tel Aviv on Monday.

They are known for such provocations around the time of the annual commemorations for Rabin.

According to an opinion poll, 70 percent of those who describe themselves as religious and Zionist (and 18 percent of the overall Israeli population) think Amir is innocent and that Rabin was killed by the left or the intelligence services in a bid to discredit the right.

However, that conspiracy theory has been demolished by Amir’s brother Hagai, who spent 16 years in jail as an accomplice to the killing.

In a television interview aired on Friday he said his brother had “acted alone” and that he had been ready to “sacrifice his life”.

For mainstream Israeli society the killer’s name provokes bafflement, shame or anger.

“For as long as I am president of Israel, the murderer of Yitzhak Rabin will not be freed,” head of state Reuven Rivlin said at a state remembrance ceremony, referring to far-right calls for a presidential pardon.

In June, a documentary featuring Yigal Amir’s wife caused uproar in Israel. They married in prison and she bore a son to whom Amir is depicted reading a story over the phone.

Several on the left, as well as the Rabin family, expressed outrage at a film they saw as humanising a man many consider a monster.