It is probably a coincidence that the public commemoration of the anniversary of the death of Yitzhak Rabin came out this year on the same day as the circumcision ceremony of the newborn son of Rabin’s assassin, Yigal Amir.

Married three years ago to a Russian Jewish immigrant, Larisa Trembovler, and allowed conjugal visits from her, Amir could in all likelihood not have planned things this way even had he, for symbolic reasons, wanted to.

Nor is the question of whether Amir should have been allowed to become a father of any great consequence. As a convicted murderer serving a life sentence, he should be granted or denied whatever rights are granted or denied any other convicted murderer.

As murderers go, he was in some ways better and in some ways worse than most: Better because he acted out of genuine idealism, worse because that idealism thought in its arrogance that it had the right to take, not only a human life, but the life of the freely chosen leader of millions of people. And yet, given the usual rote speeches at this year’s Rabin commemoration about how Yigal Amir also murdered the Israeli-Palestinian “peace process,” which was indeed his intent, one can’t help reflecting ironically that what he did was totally superfluous.

Looking back today it is obvious that the Israeli-Palestinian “peace process,” as initiated by the 1993 Oslo agreement between Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat, never had a chance in the first place, and that it wouldn’t have made any difference had Rabin lived to a ripe old age.

Even if one concedes to Yigal Amir (as I am perfectly ready to do) that embarking on this process was a great mistake for Israel, he wasted his life in trying to stop what wasn’t going anywhere in any case.

What, after all, would have happened had Amir had the wisdom to go to the movies on the night of November 5, 1995, instead of heading for a peace rally in Tel Aviv with a pistol in his pocket? Most probably, Yitzhak Rabin would have been defeated by Benjamin Netanyahu a year later in the next scheduled national elections and his political career would then have come to an end. Rabin, it should be recalled, was doing poorly in the polls against Mr. Netanyahu at the time of his murder and did not have most of the country behind him. And the reason for this was that even then the “peace process” was looking highly dubious. Palestinian terror was on the rise; the Palestinian Authority had turned out to be thuggish and corrupt; rather than disarm Hamas when it could have, it was letting it gain strength under the illusion that it could always control it; and impromptu remarks by Yasser Arafat and his associates made it clear that the dissolution of Israel was still their ultimate goal.

Moreover, all this was before the terrible wave of Palestinian bus bombings with their hundreds of Israeli casualties that took place in the months after the Rabin assassination but before the Netanyahu electoral victory of May 1996, when the prime minister was Shimon Peres.

These bombings almost certainly cost Mr. Peres the election. But since Mr. Peres was a far more ardent believer in the “peace process” than was Rabin himself, what reason is there to believe that the same terror offensive would not have taken place had Rabin lived, or that it would not have doomed his electoral prospects too?

Yet let us assume for the sake of argument that Rabin had lived, had been re-elected, and had had another term to carry on with the “peace process.” What peace agreement with Arafat or the Palestinians could he have achieved? Would he have made greater concessions than those made by Netanyahu’s successor, Labor prime minister Ehud Barak, at Camp David and Taba in 2000-2001?

At the end of the day, Mr. Barak agreed to return almost entirely to the 1967 borders, to swap sovereign Israeli land for what remained, and to re-divide Jerusalem. Would Yitzhak Rabin have gone further? Would he have offered, for instance, to let Palestinian refugees return to Israel, as Mr. Barak refused to do when Arafat insisted on it?

That’s hard to imagine. And because it is, there’s also no reason to doubt that the same violent intifada that broke out on Mr. Barak’s watch in September 2000 would have broken out on Rabin’s watch too — and led to his defeat by Ariel Sharon in the 2001 elections just as Mr. Barak was defeated.

Yigal Amir should spend the rest of his life in prison, without parole. He thought carefully about what he did before he did it, decided that he was ready to pay the full price, and should be made to pay it. He has repeatedly stated that he has never regretted what he did and there is no reason not to believe him.

But there is reason to believe that he will yet come to regret it, for with every year that goes by since he assassinated Yitzhak Rabin, the pointlessness of what he did, even in terms of his own politics, becomes increasingly more apparent. There are far better ways to fight the foolish policies of democratically elected leaders than by killing them.

Mr. Halkin is contributing editor of The New York Sun.