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Human Rights and the Palestinians

(Daily Beast) Natan Sharansky - Hussein Ibish, a Senior Fellow at the American Task Force on Palestine, accused me of deploying the "rhetoric" of human rights in order to "rationalize Israel's occupation and denial of Palestinian human rights." After the signing of the 1993 Oslo agreements with Yasir Arafat, I wrote in the Jerusalem Report (October 21, 1993): "The Palestinian society that will emerge...will inevitably be based on fear and on unlimited totalitarian authority. Totalitarian regimes cannot maintain stability without an enemy." Over the next seven years, Western democracies were united as one in helping Arafat to construct one of the world's most corrupt and primitive dictatorships - all in the name of bringing peace and preventing the emergence of Hamas. In the end, inevitably, Hamas prevailed. Throughout the years, my position vis-a-vis the Palestinians has been simple. I do not want to control their lives. I want them to have all the rights in the world, except for the right to destroy me. And that is precisely why I believe that the road to peace lies not through agreements imposed from the top down but through the creation and nurturing of the institutions of a free society. The writer, chairman of the Jewish Agency for Israel, spent nine years as a political prisoner in the Soviet Gulag.
2012-11-16 00:00:00
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