Oslo or Helsinki?

On October 30, 2000, I clipped an article by Natan Sharansky from the Wall Street Journal, thinking it might one day come in handy. Sharansky may not exactly be identified with the peace camp in Israeli politics (he was a minister under Ehud Barak, and he is now a minister under Ariel Sharon), but in his days as a Soviet Jewish refusenik he was trained in the school of Andrei Sakharov, and he does have a conception of the relationship between human rights and diplomacy, or perhaps I should say he has a conception of a relationship between these two things. The key paragraph is this one:

The pervasive assumption among nearly all of Oslo's proponents was that the undemocratic nature of Yasser Arafat's regime, far from being an obstacle to peace, was actually a strategic asset. Repeatedly told that Arafat was the only man who could "deliver," we were also informed that he would be even more effective than Israel in fighting terror. Yitzhak Rabin used reasoning that chillingly summed up the government's approach. Mr. Arafat would deal with terrorists, he said, "without a Supreme Court, without human rights organizations and without all kinds of bleeding-heart liberals." In light of such an understanding of our "peace partner," do we have anyone to blame but ourselves for what Mr. Arafat's authoritarianism has brought upon us?

It occurred to me to revisit this article after a recent conversation I had with a leading Palestinian human rights campaigner. This man has been imprisoned by Arafat several times for advocating an end to censorship and for criticizing the lack of democracy in "the Authority." (On one occasion, when Arafat's police could think of no other charge, they accused him of peddling hashish. The "war on drugs" in action.) He told me that the worst moment of all was when Vice President Al Gore made an official visit to the region in order to present Arafat with a tranche of money earmarked for the setting up of special courts for Palestinians--known colloquially as "midnight courts," for reasons as easily imagined as described. It would be difficult to find a more clear and contemptuous illustration of the system of "separate and unequal." And, of course, these tribunals were not used for the suppression of violence but for the suppression of dissent.

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