It took the loss of Yitzhak Rabin to remind me how little courage there is in the political world.
The ultimate measure of a leader, perhaps, is whether he's willing to be hated by his own in quest of what's right. How many such names can you think of?Israeli extremists hated Yitzhak Rabin for preaching peace - instead of malice - to the enemy. They made photos of him dressed in a Nazi uniform. They called him Hitler. How could he shake hands with Arafat? It was a betrayal of his own.
Rabin tried to explain it: You don't make peace with your friends.
But the haters preferred the bravado of vowing to never break bread with Arabs. They were not soft like Rabin, they were warrior Jews who would stay vigilant.
How easy to take such a stand. How much harder to build a bridge. And how contradictory that those warrior Jews, in claiming to be Israel's true defenders, were only sentencing their grandchildren to endless terror. Rabin saw that. So he did what was hard.
You have to go to Israel to understand how hard - how much he was asking his people to give up. If peace is at last completed, the West Bank yielded, Israel will have given up so much of itself, the nation that remains will be only 10 miles wide at its narrowest.
But for Israelis, the price of peace is more than security alone. What of memory? Of blood? What of all the Jews who died to keep the West Bank?
And what about The Dream? I once spoke to an Israeli who remembered well the country as it was before the West Bank was won in '67.
"It felt claustrophobic," he said. "You couldn't go anywhere without running into a border."
Although still small today, the difference between then and now, he said, is extraordinary.
How hard to ask such a people to go back to "then," to tell them that despite all the blood, a piece of the dream they'd waited 2,000 years to seize had to be given up - on faith - to the enemy.
But Rabin saw it was the only way. A gamble, yes, but not doing it was a guarantee the violence would never end.
What made it the rarest of peace gestures is that it was not forced by an enemy army, or by NATO planes; it came from vision alone.
And resolve. Palestinian extremists also loathed peace. They, too, preferred holding onto their hate. So Rabin's gamble at times seemed to backfire. Peace brought more terrorist deaths in Israel, not fewer. It tested Rabin. Every time another bomb killed innocents, his people blamed him. Jewish blood, the placards said, was on his hands.
The easy thing would have been for him to at last say, "Enough" - these people are monsters. Talks canceled.
But again, he did what was hard, and forged on. Traitor, they called him. Hitler. They did not understand, as he did, that continuing with peace was the ultimate defiance of the bombers.
Of course, the man who did this assassination is a nothing. Assassins are always nothing, trying to become something. Their method of killing is a coward's method: Shoot an unarmed person.
Most ironically, he is precisely what he claims to be opposing: A fanatic terrorist. A Jewish Sirhan Sirhan. An Israeli with a yarmulke on his head and Hamas in his soul. He said he did it on God's orders. Change his words to Arabic and you have a Palestinian suicide bomber, convinced he can murder his way into paradise. No difference.
But as much as he insists he acted alone, he didn't. This Jewish Sirhan may have fired the gun, but he didn't load it. That was done by all those who called Rabin a traitor, Nazi, Hitler. They planted the seeds. Those who use such slurs, demonizing a target, make it easier for the warped to pull the trigger.
And now Rabin, warrior and peacemaker, goes to his rest - one of few who pass what may be the great test of political courage. It is hard as I sit here to think of other recent figures who passed such a test, and paid at the hand of their own people.
Except one.
Anwar Sadat.
May that name and Rabin's be remembered together.
May their legacy of peace prevail.