ROSE GARDEN PROMISE:

Palestinians Do Not Need Another Tyrant (Natan Sharansky, December 8, 2004, LA Times)

The Oslo process failed because the democratic world, including Israel, believed that peace could be made with a dictator. [...]

Unfortunately, little attention was paid to how Arafat ruled. Many who had been quick to criticize Israel's treatment of Palestinians fell silent when Arafat imposed a rule of fear on his own people. In fact, some saw the harsh and repressive nature of Arafat's regime as actually bolstering the prospects for peace.

According to this logic, Arafat would be able to fight terror organizations without his hands tied by the constraints of democratic rule. As former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin chillingly put it in the earliest days of Oslo, Arafat would fight terror "without a Supreme Court, without human rights organizations and without all sorts of bleeding-heart liberals."

Only weeks after Oslo began, when nearly all the world and most of Israel was drunk with the idea of peace, I argued that a Palestinian "fear society" would always pose a grave threat to Israel and would never prove a reliable peace partner. It was Andrei Sakharov, the foremost dissident in the Soviet Union, who taught me that regimes that do not respect the rights of their own people will not respect the rights of their neighbors.

The link between the nature of a regime and its external behavior is not always understood. Democratic leaders, whose power is ultimately dependent on popular support, are held accountable for failing to improve the lives of their citizens. Therefore, they have a powerful incentive to keep their societies peaceful and prosperous.

On the other hand, the power of dictators is not dependent upon popular will. For them, staying in power is a function not of bettering the lives of their subjects but rather of controlling those lives. To justify the degree of repression necessary to sustain their illegitimate rule, dictators need to constantly mobilize their people against external enemies.

Remarkable the degree to which events in Palestine today are shaped by this Sharanskist speech.

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 8, 2004 7:46 AM