Devastating as it was for Israelis and the international Jewish community, the assassination last November of Yitzhak Rabin was perhaps not as surprising as it was painted at the time.

Samuel Peleg of Berl College, Israel, said there was no doubt about the disastrous impact of Rabin's murder: "Israel is at boiling point. Our multicultural society has now become a multicleavaged mess". But the idea that it represented unprecedented Jew-on-Jew political violence is wide of the mark. Dr Peleg argued that the violent tendency represented by assassin Yigal Amir is in direct continuity with the Gush Emunim underground movement, which committed atrocities in support of illegal settlers in occupied territory during the 1980s.

In 1984 25 members of the underground were detained after a campaign that had led to three deaths and the maiming of three mayors and was about to include an attack on an Arab bus. "The more revelations there were about them, the more hair-raising their plans appeared," he said.

Dr Peleg said Amir was merely the most extreme expression of a group within Israeli society that felt threatened and marginalised, and retreated into religious fundamentalism as a response to that threat. Violence need not automatically occur under such circumstances, but "religion is an extremely strong stimulus".

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The core of their beliefs was messianic: "They are convinced that ultimately they will triumph. Their goal is salvation and no compromise is possible. It leaves no room for alternatives. They perceive opponents as illegitimate, devaluing and dehumanising them, meaning there is no need to justify violence against them".

Attempts to influence the Israeli government had failed, and the Oslo accords with the Palestinians reinforced the belief that Rabin - once a war hero - was now an apostate and an obstacle to a greater Israel and the coming of redemption.

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Another speaker, Sonia Alianick of the 51¹ú²úÊÓƵ of Texas, pointed to considerable similarities between Amir's outlook and those of the Muslim fundamentalists who murdered President Sadat of Egypt, signatory of the Camp David agreement with Israel, in 1981.