Imagine if last month, on the 35th anniversary of the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy, it was disclosed that an FBI agent admitted to very close and continuous ties with Lee Oswald, who had told him time after time that the president had to be killed.

Imagine if the FBI agent chose not to argue with Oswald - but on the contrary, to agree with him - and that he knew that Oswald had started saying he himself would murder Kennedy.

Imagine if he knew that Oswald had a deadly telescopic gun, and that Oswald had planned to hurt the president during a previous visit to Dallas.

Needless to say, there would be mayhem. First, the American media would leave no rock unturned in a search for information shedding light on the actions of the strange agent and the unusual work patterns of the secret service agency that employed him.

Then American public opinion and the Washington political establishment would demand that the FBI provide clear answers to piercing questions: Did the American secret service let one of its agents incite to the murder of a U.S. president? Did the secret service weigh the possible repercussions of such incitement? After the murder, did the FBI examine itself and closely inspect the nature of its agent's relations with that small human environment from which the murder sprouted? Did the service take severe punitive measures against the agent (if he did not report to his superiors about his activities)? Or, alternatively, did the FBI take punitive measures against the agent's superiors (if he did inform them of his actions)? And did the heads of the FBI in the years that the agent was employed take personal responsibility for what had happened? Were lessons learned from the colossal failure, and were clear guidelines established to prevent such foul-ups in the future?

These exact questions, in Hebrew translation and adjusted to the circumstances of Rabin's murder, must be presented today to Israel's Shin Bet security service. There is no more escaping it. Because from the report published in Ha'aretz on Friday, it is clear that Raviv admitted the following facts during his Shin Bet investigation at the Petah Tikvah police station on November 7 and 8, 1995: He heard Yigal Amir publicly proclaim four to five times that there was a halachic commandment to kill Rabin (din rodef); he several times had one-on-one conversations with Amir about the issue of din rodef and heard from Amir that the prime minister had to be killed; Raviv knew that Yigal Amir's brother, Hagai Amir, had a cartridge full of hollow-point bullets that would certainly kill whomever they hit; Raviv was aware that following Hamas attacks and after suffering a personal crisis, his young friend Amir started talking about his plan to murder Rabin; and in light of what he heard from Yigal Amir, Raviv understood that Amir planned to hurt Rabin at a ceremony in Yad Vashem in January 1995.

This and more: According to the records of Raviv's investigation, when Yigal Amir spoke with the Shin Bet agent about the fact that "din rodef applied to the prime minister and that he had to be killed," Raviv did not argue with him, and "it could be understood that he agreed with him." According to those records, when Raviv was asked in his investigation whether Yigal or Hagai Amir asked for his help in planning the prime minister's murder, he said "he did not remember," and even claimed that "they might have asked something," but he "forgot."

No 35 years have passed since Rabin's assassination: only three. The wound is still bleeding. Rabin's murder has been a destructive and ongoing trauma for Israeli society that is much worse that the Kennedy assassination for American society.

And yet, there remains a puzzling aversion in Israel to asking the clear, obvious questions raised by the affairs that accompanied the murder - first and foremost, the Raviv affair. It is time to free ourselves from this aversion. The defense and legal establishments must stop using a crazy conspiracy theory trumped up years ago by some right-wing lunatics to ward off any critical discussion of the responsibility of Raviv's superiors for his actions and failings.

In an issue so central to the existence of Israeli democracy, the security services and their attorneys must face Israeli citizens with clean hands and reveal everything the public has the right - and duty - to know.

Now there is no other choice. A free society cannot continue to ignore facts suggesting a possibility that an agent subordinate to the Prime Minister's Office held an intimate and ongoing dialogue about the assassination of the prime minister with a man who indeed murdered the prime minister. In this case, the questions are so powerful that they must break through the fortress of the previous, very popular leadership of the Shin Bet

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