NEWS ANALYSIS : Nation Built on Unity Faces Hateful Divisions : Israel: An agonizing search begins for an explanation of what went wrong. Some say rhetoric provoked tragedy.

The handbills of hatred have been posted on walls around the country for months: Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin wearing a Palestinian kaffiyeh on his head. Rabin with a target drawn over his face. A map of Israel and the West Bank in the shape of biblical tablets that say, “Thou shall not betray.”

The message--that traitors should be killed--came through loud and clear to a Jewish law student who aimed his 9-millimeter Beretta pistol at Rabin on Saturday night and fired three shots, fatally wounding the prime minister of the Jewish state.

Jew killing Jew. It was never supposed to be this way.

Israel was created as a haven for Jews returning from the Diaspora. Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, told Israeli citizens to follow in the footsteps of the prophets, to behave in a morally superior way.

Now, with the killing of Rabin, the country has been thrown into an agonizing search for an explanation of what went wrong. How did Israel stray from the path? How did brothers allow hate to fester to such a fever pitch, leading to the violation of the strict taboo against Jew killing Jew?

On the streets of Israeli cities, at universities, in political parties and in the line of people waiting to view the casket where Rabin’s body lay in state, this is the issue on Israelis’ minds.

“In my worst dreams, I never imagined something like this would happen,” said Donna Bocker, a teen-age student who came to pay her respects to Rabin. “It has changed our perspective of Israel as a whole nation.”

Many Israelis expressed similar feelings. Their view now is of Israel as a nation divided between those who support Rabin’s 1993 peace accord with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and those who oppose it, between secular and religious Jews, between those who see themselves as Israelis first and those who define themselves as Jews first.

They see Israel as a nation like so many others now, with schisms and hatreds bared on public walls and cut deeply enough into society to lead to political murder.

“We always believed there were clear limits on how far people would go in internal conflict, because of what Jews had been through and what the country had been through,” said Barry Rubin, a political scientist at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv’s Bar Ilan University.

But it turns out that there are no limits.

The divisions deepened as Rabin progressed along the road to peace with the Palestinians, agreeing to give up, in exchange for peace, control of much of the West Bank land first occupied during the 1967 Arab-Israeli War.

Jewish settlers living in the West Bank and some other devout Jews see the land as their biblical inheritance. They believe God wants the Jewish people to have the land they call by its biblical names, Judea and Samaria, that it was not for Rabin to negotiate.

These people have felt increasingly cornered and marginalized as Rabin continued to negotiate with Arafat. They fear a smaller Israeli state will make them vulnerable to Arab attack.

“They have lived for 50 years with the fear of annihilation of Israel, of a unified Arab assault on their borders,” Rubin said. “These people believe that Jewish history has taught that the worst can happen. That they can be destroyed. It is irrational, but there is a strong material basis for it.”

After decades of fighting Palestinians who wanted to destroy Israel, they found it difficult to make the transition to handshakes between Arafat and Rabin. They refused to believe that Arafat wanted to make peace, when he continued to talk of jihad--by one definition, a holy war--after signing an agreement with Israel.

“They fear losing everything they worked for,” said Rubin.

And so the hate campaign began. Posters. Name-calling. Portraits of Rabin as a Nazi. As settlers illegally occupied West Bank hilltops, they launched a campaign to portray the government as illegitimate and illegal. Few voices yelled back very loudly.

The ultimate consequence was assassination by a student who claimed that God had spoken to him.

David Grossman, an Israeli writer, said this is partly the consequence of Israel’s living with continuous violence since its founding, and of its treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank during the 28-year occupation.

“It was inevitable that the violence that we were part of in the occupied territories would eventually absorb into our society,” Grossman said. “Once the soul is infected with violence, it’s very difficult to cure it.”

In the aftermath of the assassination, leaders of the settlers, the religious opposition and the political right have begun to express regrets.

“The struggle against the peace agreement lost its moral standing after the murder,” said Israel Harel, chairman of the Council of Jewish Communities of Judea, Samaria and Gaza, the principal organization of the settlement movement.

Other leaders of the settler movement denounced the murder and said they regretted they had not been more conscientious in reining in the extreme right.

Elizur Butavia, a resident of the West Bank settlement Kiryat Arba and an outspoken activist of the extreme right, was in tears on Sunday as he said, “I am so regretful. I ask forgiveness if I said a harsh word. But it was always in the realm of words, of anger, of worry for the people of Israel. But to reach this point, to murder, to take the blood of another human being. . . . What is this? Israel, where are we?”

The conservative Jerusalem Post, which has been a foe of Rabin and the peace process, ran a front-page editorial on Sunday calling internal violence “the most dangerous enemy, most incurable scourge, and most irredeemable national disaster.”

While Israel has engaged in a lifetime of political violence with Palestinians and its other Arab neighbors, only twice in the nation’s history has it seen anything verging on internal political violence.

In 1957, a deranged man threw a hand grenade into the Knesset, Israel’s Parliament, slightly injuring Ben Gurion. And in 1982, another man threw a grenade into a Peace Now demonstration, killing a participant.

“Nothing, absolutely nothing, is a greater blow to the life of the Jewish nation than fraternal violence, and nothing makes such violence more threatening to the nation’s future than the assassination of the head of government,” the paper said.