The assassination of Yitzhak Rabin will prove to be every bit as pivotal in the Middle East as that of Chris Hani in our own land...
WE were the unlikeliest of companions. Dror Ofer was a self-described right-wing Israeli from Tel Aviv working on a Ph.D in computational fluid dynamics. I was a South African black journalist turned political science student who supported the Palestine Liberation Organisation.
It was about 2am on a very cold New Jersey morning in December 1990. We were sharing beer and pizza after spending the past 12 hours learning from each other as we attempted to teach a then state-of-the-art IBM RS/6000 computer how to design more efficient aircraft wings.
Now we were talking politics. Did the state of Israel have a right to exist? Did the PLO have a right to exist? Was there ever going to be peace in the Middle East?
We parted the next morning as friends, because we had too much in common to do otherwise.
South Africa is a lot like Israel. We both spent years as polecats of the world; covert nuclear powers; sanction-busters and so on, because both countries tried to impose a particular notion of statehood based on repression.
A necessary part of maintaining a repressive society is the continued nurturing of fear. Fear among the have-nots of the means of repression, and fear among the haves of the have-nots.
So Israelis are a lot like white South Africans. They have been led to believe that the have-nots will stop at nothing to deprive others of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness ...
But repression is successful only up to the point when the repressed person has nothing to lose by taking on the source of repression. When life itself is valueless, civil war has a lot to offer.
We reached that point in our townships at roughly the same time as did the Palestinians, when stones of defiance were met with bullets. The have-nots — black South Africans and Palestinians — having nothing to lose in the face of a ruthless military machine, proceeded to opt for civil war.
And both South Africa and Israel came to realise that repression alone could never guarantee their survival.
They were not alone in arriving at this conclusion. China, Chile and others were heading down the same path. They were not doing this out of the goodness of their hearts. Military regimes have repression as their primary business, and so are acutely aware of its limits.
In order to break the cycle of repression and revolution, the majority of the populace have to be co-opted as willing participants. They have to be given a stake in society that they are willing to defend.
That's the easy part. More difficult is to persuade the haves — Israelis and white South Africans — that everything they have been taught over generations is a lie, that there is no swart gevaar or jihad ... decades of indoctrination in the ways of fear and hatred cannot be removed overnight.
It was that fear and hatred that killed both Chris Hani and Yitzhak Rabin.
The world shuddered when Chris Hani was assassinated. The world shuddered when Yitzhak Rabin was murdered. In both cases, a fragile hope of peace was suddenly pushed to the brink of civil war.
But we are more alike — black and white, Israeli and Palestinian — than we may think. Most of us do not want war. Most of us wish for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Far from dividing society, both Rabin and Hani — by their deaths — served to highlight the underlying fragile nature of the peace process, and the fact that the process itself is more important than any man or woman.
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, King Hussein of Jordan, Omani Qatari of Morocco, and Mauritanian leaders realised this. They threw aside decades of Arab unity in hatred of Israel to cross the floor and make the trip to Jerusalem for Rabin's funeral.
PLO leader Yassar Arafat has permanently exiled himself from a large part of the Arab world by expressing his sorrow at Rabin's murder.
The "who's who" of world leaders were present at Rabin's funeral. There are no longer political sensitivities.
This was the greatest tribute to Rabin, the peacemaker. By his death, he has brought Israel at last into the world community — something Rabin the general would never have been able to do.
I had never before considered Dror's invitation to visit Tel Aviv. I will now.