Every day in politics, you feel forced to be an instant expert. Serving as a minister, sitting on government committees, voting in the Knesset, you have to make far-ranging governmental decisions on endlessly complicated issues far beyond your knowledge base. You usually rely on particular experts, staffers, and your instincts. Nevertheless, facing so many aspects of my still-new home I had never encountered before, I often played catch-up on budgetary matters or improvised on urban affairs, education, culture, or sports questions.
There was, however, one area where I felt I was an expert: how to deal with dictatorships. In the Soviet Union, every political question shrank before the biggest existential question: How can we be free from the dictatorship’s grip? In Israel, every domestic issue shrinks before the biggest international one: How do we survive amid so many hostile dictatorships and terrorist groups seeking our destruction, without controlling the lives of millions of Palestinians? Whatever political party you belong to, whatever your political philosophy, you keep returning to this mystery.
Having been a dissident in the Soviet Union, I knew why dictatorships look so strong from the outside and why they are so weak and unstable from the inside. I recognized the quiet, invisible, but irreversible process of turning the army of true believers into doublethinkers. I understood how desperate dictatorships are to keep controlling their citizens. I saw how much they need external enemies to justify their own internal power. I realized how easily democratic leaders were fooled by the dictatorship’s compulsory military parades and the people’s forced displays of solidarity, not realizing that totalitarian regimes are muscle-bound, while democracies are surprisingly resilient. I recalled how much these economically dysfunctional regimes depend on cooperation with the free world.
In the Soviet Union, we dissidents spent a lot of time debating dictatorships’ vulnerabilities and speculating how to undermine them peacefully. We then spent even more time testing our theories with our lives. We kept publicizing Andrei Sakharov’s warning: “Never trust a government more than the government trusts its own people.” We tried explaining to Western leaders why linkage provides leverage, meaning that raising human rights questions when dealing with dictatorships provides Western leaders with both a strong moral position and a clever hold on their natural enemies.
Ultimately, Soviet dissidents’ assessments and predictions of Soviet collapse—which Western experts often ridiculed—practically mapped out the history that unfolded. By contrast, the illusion of Soviet power blinded most Western Sovietologists. Feeling vindicated, we dissidents assumed democracies would rely on our experiences and expertise in navigating the post–Cold War world.
That’s where we were naive. I cannot complain that I wasn’t heard. Everybody seemed happy to keep learning about the Soviet Union’s fall from the inside. I shared my views with many national leaders, in Israel and worldwide. I gave many interviews on this topic and wrote many articles. The book I wrote with Ron Dermer, The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror, became a best seller in 2005, especially after President George W. Bush’s kind words endorsing our vision.
But most politicians treated these stories as history, irrelevant to the world’s fresh challenges. As Ariel Sharon once said, “Your theories are good for the dungeons of the KGB, not the sands of the Middle East.” Less colorfully, in different accents, and using all sorts of reasons, most Western leaders echoed him.
I have always recognized that controlling the lives of millions of Palestinians is very bad for Israel. The sooner we can let go, the better. But Israel cannot commit suicide. I regret every act of violence, every human rights violation, every day Palestinians lack full democratic rights, and every day our young people are forced as soldiers to protect us by imposing on our neighbors.
Checkpoints are heartbreaking. I don’t want soldiers searching or Palestinians being searched. But I don’t want locks on doors, burglar alarms, and police in my neighborhood either. Our job as leaders and as human rights advocates is to cope with reality, no matter how ugly, while searching for just and lasting solutions.
From my first weeks in Israel in 1986, I kept saying I wanted the Palestinians to have all the rights I had, individually and collectively, as long as they could not use those rights to destroy us. We Israelis can find security in two ways. Our army can continue guaranteeing our safety from our enemies. Or Palestinians, by developing civil society, can diminish the threat coming from their side. That’s why I believe that the real peace process, the true path to peace, requires the emergence of a democratic society, and that is why I criticized the Oslo Accords of the 1990s from the time they were first announced.
The Israeli motivation at Oslo—to give as many Palestinians as possible as much control over their daily lives as possible, as quickly as possible—was admirable. But the method that Israel chose was reckless, shortsighted, and stupid. Imposing Yasir Arafat on Palestinians meant installing a terrorist as dictator. Supplying Arafat with twenty thousand guns and more so he could be strong, and paying him tens of millions of dollars monthly so he could be our dictator, with the hope that he would bring us peace, contradicted everything I had learned about the nature of dictatorships.
My fears that Israel was trusting a corrupt, ruthless dictator to provide us with the security we needed was confirmed when Yitzhak Rabin admitted, shortly after the September 13, 1993, signing ceremony, “When the Palestinians… are responsible for taking care of their own internal problems, they’ll handle them without a Supreme Court, without [the Israeli human-rights organization] B’Tselem, and without all kinds of bleeding-heart liberals.”
Responding to Rabin’s words, I published a Jerusalem Report column that October, rejecting his main illusion. Called “The Kind of Neighbors We Need,” the article warned that we can’t have it both ways. Empowering Arafat as “our dictator” to crush Hamas and other enemies of peace would come back to haunt us. I was particularly alarmed by Foreign Minister Shimon Peres’s claim that terrorism “won’t be our problem.… The PLO [Palestine Liberation Organization] will handle it far better than we ever could.” That was as delusional as it was dangerous.
The “society which would emerge as a result will have nothing in common with the rosy picture of a Switzerland in the Middle East,” I insisted. “Arafat, after all, isn’t a mercenary who will come and then go; the society which will emerge from fighting ‘without a Supreme Court, B’Tselem, and bleeding-heart liberals’ will inevitably be based on fear, and on unlimited totalitarian authority.” As a dictator, Arafat would need us as an enemy and would guarantee that the next generation of Palestinians would hate us more.
Underlying my fears of what was emerging was a different vision of what true peace would look like. “We must try to ensure the building of real democratic institutions in the fledgling Palestinian society, no matter how tempting a ‘solution’” without such institutions might be, I wrote.
The peace-now Left was euphoric about Oslo. The security-first Right was despondent. But neither side accepted my logic. To the Oslo believers, any linkage with democracy sounded like a pretext, a delaying tactic to avoid making peace. To the Oslo deniers, making substantial ideological, political, or territorial concessions for such abstract principles seemed absurd.
That’s why, in each of the four governments in which I served, I felt alone when it came to Palestinian issues. The conflict wasn’t about political ideology or party politics. This question of what kind of society we should make peace with entered a dimension far beyond squabbles over specific clauses of any peace treaty. Nevertheless, in Israel’s political universe, I was branded a right-winger.
I admit, I had excellent credentials to fit the stereotype of a typical, even extreme, right-winger:
• I criticized the Oslo peace process as soon as it was announced in 1993, protesting that the Palestinians were put at the mercy of a corrupt dictator, Yasir Arafat.
• I resigned from Ehud Barak’s government in 2000 to oppose his sweeping concessions to the dictators Yasir Arafat and Hafez al-Assad in Syria, which included sacrificing Jerusalem for a peace that was not going to come.
• I resigned from Ariel Sharon’s government in 2005 to challenge the unilateral disengagement from Gaza, which was destined to bring rocket fire to our homes.
These seemingly right-wing positions made me unpopular with many Israeli and American opinion makers, including many of my natural allies, the liberals who had fought with me against Soviet totalitarianism.
I didn’t take the attacks personally, not the false accusations, the personal insults, or the occasional lost friendships. Nor the media hit jobs: “Betrayer of Peace!… Obstructionist… intellectually and politically dishonest.… Something happened on the way from Anatoly to Natan”—all that just in one New York Times article. As long as I followed my principles, it was easy to laugh off most attacks. After years as a dissident, I felt comfortable becoming the democracy outlaw, especially on the peace-and-freedom issue.
It sometimes seemed as if Westerners just enjoyed being duped by certain magic words: “equality,” “social justice,” and especially “peace.” The Soviet Union was particularly skilled at cynically using peace as a club to bully Western democracies into silence, despite Communist repression and aggression. “You speak of human rights,” Soviet propagandists would say. “Isn’t the right to live in peace the highest human right?” Their World Peace Councils and other Communist fronts against the supposedly warmongering West essentially said, “Don’t rock the boat, don’t you dare challenge our regime, or it will threaten the peace.”
The appeal of peace talks grew during the 1960s, despite Soviet aggression. The Vietnam War era taught baby boomers to make love not war. Chanting, “All we are saying, is give peace a chance,” they considered “peace now” the highest value, to be achieved as soon as possible, at almost any price.
We dissidents tried exposing the Soviet ploy, insisting that the free world did not value peace at any price, but a free life under peaceful conditions. That was history’s lesson from the American Revolution and World War II. By contrast, in the Middle East, dictators and terrorists were replaying the Soviet swindle. They called for peace to get concessions to help dictators wage war against democracies.
Shifts sometimes take time. I trust that, eventually, the world will realize that cultivating civil society is the necessary condition for a lasting peace. But it was upsetting to see how hard it was to cut through the slurs and engage politicians in any discussions about my vision for peace and its underlying principles.
In all my articles criticizing Oslo and in my two letters of resignation, I kept expressing my faith in liberalism and human rights for Arabs and Jews. Most of my dark warnings, which I desperately hoped would not turn out to be true, proved to be accurate. I said these steps would hurt us as well as the Palestinians, and we saw a loss of life on both sides and a loss of rights on theirs, thanks to their own leaders’ power grab. That nightmare became their reality—and our reality—sometimes within a few years, sometimes with a few months, sometimes within days.
I was trained in the world of physics to check your theories by experimentation. If your prediction proved true, your theory was confirmed, at least partially. You then identified what aspect of reality your idea captured. But if the experiment yielded results contradicting your theory, it was time to find a new theory. The true believers in peace above all never seemed ready to accept that the theory was flawed from the beginning.
Ten years after the Oslo agreement, I showed my new spokesperson, Iris Goldman, the first article I wrote objecting to the accords. “This is exactly what happened, and this is still what you’re saying now,” Iris said, surprised. A seasoned radio journalist, she had joined our staff despite her skepticism about my approach. Iris now regretted the missed opportunities for a real democratic peace. At the time, we were at the height of what the Palestinians called the Second Intifada. Cries to kill Jews were ringing in Palestinian ears daily, as Palestinian suicide bombers blew up Israeli buses and cafés regularly. With a mischievous look in her eye, Iris proposed, “Let’s send it to some journalists who were pro-Oslo then and get their reactions today.” She also had my old article republished in the Jerusalem Post.
Most of the reporters ignored her. In today’s quickly changing world, no one cares what happened ten weeks ago, let alone about something written ten years ago.
When Nahum Barnea, the veteran columnist of Israel’s popular daily, Yedioth Ahronoth, came to interview me shortly thereafter, Iris asked him about the article. “OK, OK, I get it,” Barnea said. “You want me to say you were right. But your way keeps the occupation going. I prefer to be wrong but to oppose this awful inhuman occupation committing war crimes.”
What was Barnea saying? What did his answer imply? Essentially, he was saying, “I feel good for being against ‘occupation,’ regardless of the facts.” This pie-in-the-sky approach to Oslo reflected a self-righteous surrender. Rather than testing if the moral pose fit the facts, it dismissed any evidence that might undermine the moral stand.
Barnea was right. It feels good to applaud Oslo’s noble intentions. But what about its consequences? Who pleaded guilty for imposing Arafat’s corrupt dictatorship on Palestinians, as he crushed any early stirrings of Palestinian civil society? Who took responsibility for Israel’s kicking back as much as $30 million every month of Palestinian tax funds into Arafat’s personal bank accounts, dictated by formal international agreement, as his payoff for being our dictator?
The whole scheme backfired. Palestinians hated Arafat’s repressive kleptocracy. A beleaguered majority started hoping Hamas might be better. So not only did Arafat fail to confront Hamas, his abuses strengthened it. Most Palestinians also started hating us more and more, with more incitement and more alienation between Israelis and their neighbors post-Oslo. Tragically, one thousand Israelis and three thousand Palestinians died post-Oslo.
Rereading the article I wrote when Oslo was signed, I realized I had pulled my punches because I was predicting the future. If I had been writing ten years later, I would have used harsher language.
If there is one real crime the Israeli government has committed against the Palestinians, it’s the Oslo Accords. Those agreements imposed Arafat’s terrorist dictatorship on the Palestinians, instead of cultivating the more grassroots democratic leadership that was sprouting in the 1990s—and it was done with the free world’s enthusiastic endorsement.
I first saw this unrealistic style of peacemaking during my first meeting with President Jimmy Carter, a few years after my release. I began by thanking him for speaking up so quickly after my arrest. He had broken the presidential tradition of never commenting on Soviet allegations to confirm that I was not an American spy.
Before I knew it, Carter started lecturing me about the importance of making peace in the Middle East by withdrawing from all the “occupied territories” immediately.
I replied that it was hard to trust the dictators surrounding us. I reminded him that he put human rights in the center of American foreign policy. “These dictators don’t believe in human rights,” I said.
“You know, you’re right,” the Arab world needs democracy, Carter acknowledged, “but don’t try to be too rational about these things. The moment you see people suffering, you should feel solidarity with them and try to help them without thinking too much about the reasons.”
To convince me, Carter mentioned “one of the few close personal friends” he had made among all the world leaders he had met, Syria’s Hafez al-Assad. “It’s true, Assad is a dictator,” he admitted. “But you can rely on him. He never lied to me. If you sign an agreement, he’ll keep it.”
Carter recalled visiting Syria as president and confronting Assad about violating “one of his obligations on a security-related issue.” Assad denied it. Carter complained to his aides about how “disappointed” he was, “because Assad never lied to me before. But on the way to the airport,” Carter told me with great satisfaction, “Assad called to apologize. He told me he had checked the point I raised and that he had been mistaken. He promised to correct the problem. So you see, he never lies. If he signs an agreement with Israel, he’ll keep it.”
What I saw was something different: like the good dictator he was, Assad had probably bugged Carter’s rooms. After eavesdropping on the president’s anger, Assad rushed to undo the damage. He assumed Carter would be easily manipulated. He was right.
Carter’s advice to “go with your heart, just give back the territory” backfired with me. A seemingly moral position that obviously strengthens evil only feels moral. It’s not. Similarly, when leaders go with their hearts so much that it overrides their brains, they are acting irresponsibly. Carter was saying that once you decide what the moral position should be, you’re not responsible for what happens. I call that dodging responsibility, which is an immoral position, especially for a leader.
Had Israel trusted Assad—or trusted Carter’s faith in Assad—we would now face an enemy with no qualms about using chemical weapons against his own people looming over our Sea of Galilee, our citizens in the north, from the strategic Golan Heights.
Admittedly, my constant nagging “I told you so” about the peace process’s failure doesn’t prove that my KGB dungeon experience applies to the Middle East. I understand that many people are skeptical, doubting that Palestinians need to develop civil society for Middle East peace to take root. Over the years, people keep asking three basic questions about my claim:
• Why do you think that Palestinians are interested in democracy? Who says they want a new kind of politics? Different civilizations and different cultures have differing attitudes toward human rights.
• Even if Palestinians develop civil society, how could it contribute to Israelis’ security?
• Finally, how can outsiders like Israel and the West influence this process? You cannot impose democracy from the outside.
In The Case for Democracy, Ron Dermer and I distinguished between free societies and fear societies. The dividing line was the town square test: Can you express your individual views loudly, in public, without fear of being punished in any way? If yes, you live in a free society; if not, you’re in a fear society. This is a rough distinction. There are different levels of freedom and fear. In some societies, you might be punished at work. Others might jail you. In the worst dictatorships, you could be shot.
Every fear society produces three distinct groups: true believers, doublethinkers, and dissidents. True believers embrace the official ideology. Doublethinkers lose faith in their beliefs but fear the consequences of speaking out in the town square. Dissidents reject the ideology, overcome their fear, and express their views publicly.
There is an inevitable, invisible process as natural as entropy: people drift constantly and chaotically from true belief to doublethink, from buying in to turning off. The ranks of the doublethinkers swell as the regime’s restrictions irritate, intimidate, and alienate. At the loud, colorful parades expressing solidarity with the great leader, true believers and doublethinkers are twins: they look alike but no longer think alike.
Year after year, Israelis see Palestinians celebrating one vicious terrorist attack after another. This offers dramatic proof that they are our enemies who want our destruction. At the same time, year after year, Israelis see long lines of Palestinians slowly going through checkpoints. This offers equally dramatic proof that they are victims suffering under the burdens of occupation.
Like many others, I see both realities. In addition, I see on their faces and hear in their voices something else that goes beyond enemies or victims: fear and doublethink.
During my involvement with the Moscow Helsinki Group, I met all kinds of people fighting for different national and religious causes. But, for all their differing agendas, they shared one thing in common. The first barrier facing them was overcoming fear and freeing themselves from the shackles of doublethink.
I believe everyone, including Palestinians, wants to live without that fear. If there is one law of human nature I have learned over the years, it’s this: the phenomenon of doublethink is universal, and the fear that prevents a doublethinker from crossing over into dissent, and the desire to be free of that fear, is cross-cultural. No one wants to live with the sick feeling in the doublethinker’s stomach day after day, the fear of exposure as someone who is no longer a true believer. These conclusions are not only from my experience and from my dissident friends’ experiences behind the Iron Curtain. Dozens of dissidents I have met from around the world underwent similar processes. Nearly every testimony I have ever read about life under a dictatorship describes coping with fear, doublethinking, and weighing whether to dissent.
Take any of these books off the bookshelf. It could be Nien Cheng describing the Chinese Communist Cultural Revolution of the 1960s in Life and Death in Shanghai. It could be Jacobo Timerman describing the Argentinian military dictatorship of the 1970s in Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number. It could be Azar Nafisi describing today’s Iranian mullahocracy in Reading Lolita in Tehran.
The leaders of the Arab Spring also spoke about the fear they all lived with and were fed up with. In Voices of the Arab Spring: Personal Stories from the Arab Revolutions (edited by Asaad Alsaleh), a forty-five-year-old hematologist from Benghazi, Aisha A. Nasef, writes, “It is an indescribable feeling to be free from fear, to be able to express yourself openly against Qaddafi and his regime, in daylight, and in front of everyone!” Abduljalil Yousef, a twenty-eight-year-old teacher from Sanaa, writes, “Now life is not what it used to be—there is no fear, no despair, no submission or surrender. It seems as if the people of Yemen suddenly were resurrected and saw the truth.”
Perhaps most movingly, Adel Abdel Ghafar, a thirty-two-year-old activist from Cairo, explains that “revolutions are not hatched in smoke-filled rooms or by activists armed with Twitter and Facebook accounts; rather, revolutions are made by everyday people who are no longer afraid.” Recalling a confrontation with riot police, who then turned and ran from protesters, he writes, “We all knew that something profound had just taken place. There was a raised collective consciousness among us. A realization. An epiphany. Simply that we will no longer be afraid.… In that moment, the Mubarak regime had lost its most significant weapon: fear. Eighteen days later, the tyrant stepped down.” This was the precise “moment the barrier of fear broke down.”
It’s eerie. Abdel Ghafar’s minute-by-minute description of how the gathering of Egyptian doublethinkers at Tahrir Square turned into a revolution echoes many descriptions and video clips of similar pivots in East Germany, Hungary, Romania, the Soviet Union. The freedom tsunami hit Hong Kong in 2019. “People are injured by rubber bullets, tear gas, pepper spray. It happens a lot,” Chan, a twenty-one-year-old student, told Vox. “But I would say that people are getting braver and braver.” The protesters’ boldness was making Chan and other organizers “more worried about the situation, because they’re not scared anymore.… People are doing stuff that’s actually changing the whole situation, because they’re not scared.”
The wave of fearlessness starts with individuals, then spreads to dozens, then thousands of people crossing that line from doublethinker to dissident. Once it starts cascading, it becomes a revolution. At the same time, a great transfer of dread occurs. As citizens get bolder and lose their fear, police and security officials turn timid and inherit it.
Piling up various memoirs and photographs and eyewitness testimonials from different countries and cultures reveals something profoundly human. All the differences in mentalities, traditions, and social structures cannot stop this universal process. If Leo Tolstoy in Anna Karenina said, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” we can flip it around for freedom’s sake: “Oppressive dictatorships all look different, but each dies in the same way.”
True, the Arab Spring didn’t bring democracy—yet. Democratic revolutions, whether in the Middle East or Eastern Europe or anywhere else, even if followed by elections, don’t guarantee democracy. If you don’t hold free elections in a free society, you don’t have democracy. And building a free society often takes time. Even the mother of modern liberal European revolutions, the French Revolution, was followed by decades of dictatorship and bloodshed until a free, stable France emerged.
The Arab Spring proved that Middle East dictatorships are as unpopular with their people as Latin American and Eastern European dictatorships were with theirs. History repeated itself in late 2010. The rebellions throughout the Arab world essentially proved what should have been learned from Communism’s collapse: trust the democratic dissidents, not the Western don’t-rock-the-boaters. Brave voices in Egypt and Syria—who should be listened to more carefully—declared their respective state regimes doomed, even as Western leaders continued describing dictators like Hosni Mubarak and Bashar al-Assad as stable and reliable peace partners.
The Palestinians living under the Palestinian Authority (PA) hated their oppressive regime too. When I served in Ehud Barak’s cabinet, Shimon Peres asked me to stop calling Yasir Arafat a corrupt dictator.
“Isn’t he?” I asked.
“Of course he is,” Peres replied. “But he is the Palestinians’ leader. When you try negotiating for peace, it doesn’t make sense to insult the party on the other side. And you are insulting them because they love their leader.”
“They love Arafat no more than the Russians liked Stalin at the height of the purges,” I replied. Our conversation ended abruptly.
Democratic leaders in Europe and America constantly talk about how merciless dictators are loved by their people. We all heard how Saddam Hussein of Iraq, Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, and Hafez and Bashar al-Assad of Syria were loved by their people. Most recently, President Donald Trump declared that the brutal Kim Jong Un of North Korea “loves his country very much,” and that North Koreans love him in return, supporting him with “great fervor.” When democratic leaders try making peace with dictatorships, they try to feel less guilty by convincing themselves that at least the people love their dictator.
Even if emotional scenes from Tahrir Square or Hong Kong inspire skeptics, next they say: “OK, it’s lovely. These people deserve to live in freedom. But how does it advance our security and stability? Do you really believe that we’re better off with freer regimes that hate us than with dictators who might love us?”
Dissidents usually constitute a small minority. But the authorities understand that if conditions shift, and it becomes easy for the masses to move from doublethinking to dissent, revolution follows. That’s why dictatorships are obsessed with constantly stoking an atmosphere of suppression. Autocrats must keep intimidating the doublethinkers they cannot see but know are there, to stop them from becoming dissidents.
Totalitarian regimes have two main weapons for suppressing their subjects and maintaining their grip on power. A security apparatus, unleashed against the people, hunts down independent thinking. And a well-chosen enemy, real or imagined, keeps the country permanently mobilized.
The dictator’s dual weapons of repression and aggression are like the scissors’ two blades: sharpening one another and cutting down anyone in the way. Like all bullies, dictators are aggressive because of their inner weakness. But that’s what makes it so hard for doublethinkers to cross the line to dissent. When your society is on red alert against enemies, dissenting not only jeopardizes the life you know, it forces you to defy an inflamed public opinion. You risk being called a traitor to the nation, not just the regime.
From the October Revolution onward, the Soviet Union tried making all its people completely dependent on the regime. By confiscating all property, becoming the only way for people to get paid, and liquidating the independence of all organizations and institutions from factories to trade unions, the Soviets reduced almost everyone economically to serfs. By crushing any political independence and wiping out opposition, they reduced everyone politically to pawns.
Soviet society was permanently mobilized for a never-ending ideological class war, a global Communist revolution. Whether there would be a full military conflict depended on changing interests and calculations of strengths. But in such a red-alert world, anyone could switch into total war mode immediately.
From the moment Israelis and the West propped up Arafat as the Palestinian Authority’s leader, he used whatever tools he had to control his people. He couldn’t hermetically seal Palestinian borders, as the Soviets did, but he did his best. He declared war on the Palestinian civil society that had started developing before he arrived. He closed down or harassed any independent newspapers, turning the Palestinian media into his mouthpiece and a constant source of incitement against Israel. He squeezed any businesspeople who tried operating outside his orbit. Rather than improve living conditions, he kept many Palestinians living in misery in refugee camps, stoking their resentment of Israel.
Arafat centralized control over Palestinian lives, economically, culturally, and politically. He kept his people mobilized for war, just like the Soviets. And he lied like the Soviets too. While speaking in English to Bill Clinton and the rest of the West, he talked peace. But when he spoke in Arabic to his people, he talked about total war against the Zionist enemy.
Arafat created an educational system that taught three-year-olds to kill Jews, a corrupt economic system that ran protection rackets to boost the PA’s cronies, and a military intelligence machine with a dual purpose: to quash the Palestinian people while attacking Israel whenever convenient.
As minister of industry and trade, although it wasn’t part of my job, I considered it my obligation to do whatever possible to encourage more jobs for Palestinians. But most of my proposals about joint ventures, which could create more opportunity for Palestinian businesspeople and more jobs for workers, were rejected. The Palestinian leaders blocked anything that risked making their people less dependent on the PA.
The Palestinian Authority wanted everything flowing through Arafat’s representatives, who insisted on being the ones to dole out the jobs. Like good racketeers, they demanded a kickback from every Palestinian worker. It wasn’t about delivering goods to consumers or providing quality jobs to workers. It was about making the jobs dependent on the authorities, who distributed the goodies to those they wanted to favor.
The PA’s minister of planning, Nabil Sha’ath, was my Palestinian negotiating partner. He didn’t seem interested in any initiative I championed. I only piqued his interest when I proposed some software ventures. I soon learned that his family monopolized the Palestinian software business.
A big project I inherited from the previous government was building a joint industrial zone on the Gaza border, what became the Karni Industrial Zone. We Israelis planned on creating twenty thousand jobs for Palestinians. All the businesspeople agreed that the zone should be in Israeli territory, near Nahal Oz, to guarantee investors’ and managers’ safety. Israel would provide the land and the security, and the Palestinians would provide the administration and the workers.
The Palestinian side erupted. They insisted on building the zone on their side of the Gaza border. We gave in and invested much money and expertise to develop a first-class industrial zone. Israeli business leaders were particularly enthusiastic, hoping to make money while making peace. But the PA wasn’t interested in thriving independent businesses generating well-paid jobs for Palestinians. Arafat sought to control the factories and the workers’ salaries to keep his people reliant on him and his henchmen.
When tensions erupted in 2000 and Palestinian terrorism resumed, our fears came true. Karni became an easy terrorist target. The businesses dried up. Five years later, shortly after Israel disengaged from Gaza, Palestinian mobs torched the factories. Millions of dollars from Israelis, Western investors, the World Bank, and other institutions went up in smoke, proving that the PA preferred fighting the Zionist enemy over improving Palestinians’ quality of life.
Obviously, democratically elected leaders cannot behave this way. It’s true that leaders in a democracy and a dictatorship share the same goal, to stay in power. The difference is in how they do it. In a developed civil society with free democratic elections, the leaders depend on the people’s good graces. To stay in power, they must deliver the goods. That’s why peace and prosperity are not mere slogans in democracies, but the keys to elected leaders’ political survival. Dictators don’t depend on their people; they make their people dependent on them. Peace reduces the pressure they can use to keep citizens in line, while prosperity has to come from Big Brother, not earned independently by citizens. That’s why we cannot depend on leaders who do not depend on their people.
Does this mean that democracies can never work with dictators? Of course not. Democracies have recognized dictatorships, cooperated with dictators, and even made military pacts with them. Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt allied with Joseph Stalin during World War II. Churchill and FDR understood it as a tactical alliance against the greater Nazi threat, with no illusions of true friendship. Predictably, just as Stalin had flipped from despising America and England to accepting them as allies in 1941, when Nazi Germany collapsed in 1945 he switched from ally to enemy overnight.
Today, Israel coordinates counterterrorism efforts with Egypt. But the arrangement is tactical and should come with a warning label, like cigarettes. We need each other to fight jihadist Islamism in Sinai and Hamas in Gaza. But Abdel Fattah el-Sisi is a cruel dictator who imprisons dissidents and rules through fear, like all totalitarians. Inevitably, he, too, will be more and more hated by his own people.
Israel should be prepared. True, our peace agreement with Egypt has outlived Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak. But, one day, Sisi may flip abruptly and make us the enemy. It will be particularly easy because Egypt has maintained its decades-long standing as one of the world’s leading centers of Jew-hatred. Or, the Egyptian people may overthrow Sisi, just as they deposed Mubarak. If that day comes, we don’t want to be Sisi’s defenders against the Egyptian people’s anger.
Any agreement with Palestinians has much higher stakes because we’re so much closer geographically. The more interdependent two countries are, the more each nation’s internal dynamics affect the other. The dictator’s need to mobilize against an enemy explains why, when a fear society lives next door, beware!
“Nu, OK,” my interlocutors keep arguing. “Let’s say I agree that Palestinians seek the stability of civil society. And I agree that such progress could improve our security. There’s still a problem. They don’t want Israel or the West interfering in their internal affairs. How can outsiders affect a country’s internal governance?”
Democracies enjoy more leverage over dictatorships than they think, because dictatorships always need to be propped up from without. True, dictators need external enemies to justify their tyranny. But, like true parasites, as they decay, they need to feed off the prosperity of others, which usually means relying on functioning democracies.
Three overlapping ailments deplete these regimes:
• When you reduce your workers to serfs, your economy loses its creativity and then its productivity.
• When you treat your citizens as pawns, you spend more and more money to control the ever-growing number of doublethinkers.
• When you keep your society on a constant war footing against external enemies, your military agenda trumps everything else.
As these maladies spread, dictators’ survival instincts look outward. Suddenly, the same country that is useful as an enemy is also necessary as a trade partner. That offers a pressure point clever democratic leaders can exploit to limit the repression and encourage civil society in undemocratic countries.
The Soviet Union was a huge empire with seemingly unlimited resources. It had oil, coal, the best soil for wheat in the world, a huge market, and a cheap labor force. It looked intimidating from afar, with a vast Red Army, ballistic missiles, the KGB, those impressive victory parades, and an aggressive Communist ideology that seemed to mobilize everyone. From within, we knew it was unproductive, corrupt, and teetering. We knew how much it wasted controlling its people.
By the late 1950s, the Soviet leaders were caught. They wanted to continue struggling ideologically with the imperialist world while cooperating economically with its capitalists. They started posturing, claiming that trade and good relations were keys to the new struggle for world peace. Yet, while talking peace, Soviets sent missiles to Cuba, tanks to Budapest and Prague, and soldiers to Angola and Afghanistan.
Through the policy of linkage in the 1970s, some Western visionaries exposed this hypocrisy, making all cooperation with the Soviet Union conditional. The Jackson-Vanik amendment and the Helsinki Accords proved that democracies have tools against totalitarianism that can work. The Soviet Union had to modify its rhetoric from supporting world revolution to supporting peaceful coexistence. Then, it had to find opportunities to showcase its new, more humane approach. Practically, it had to give citizens more freedom while behaving less brutally on the world stage. Spiraling downward, each reform reflected the regime’s increasing weakness, then further weakened it until it collapsed.
Logically, the free world should have had a much easier time imposing conditions on the Palestinian Authority. In accepting that the leaders of the Palestine Liberation Organization would form the PA, Israel gave the PA legitimacy, international recognition, power, and buckets of money. The United States armed and trained Arafat’s security forces. Yet the West never used the pressure points it created. Initially, the free world could have recognized Arafat’s guerilla group, the PLO, as the Palestinians’ official representative only after it recognized Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state in peace. Why didn’t the PLO have to delete its call to destroy Israel in its charter and change its rhetoric, even when Arafat spoke in Arabic? Why didn’t all the international aid go directly to initiatives improving Palestinians’ living conditions and nurturing civil society, rather than lining their leaders’ pockets? Why didn’t the education system Westerners helped develop educate toward democracy, not terrorism?
It’s beyond frustrating—it’s downright criminal—that the free world had all this leverage and never used it. Instead, from the moment Israel and the free world installed Arafat, he became untouchable, because the courtiers of public opinion orthodoxy decided the alternative was worse.
And that is why Western leaders kept silent as Arafat spoke of peace to the West but talked jihad against the Zionists to the East. On May 10, 1994, just months after signing the Oslo Accords, Arafat, speaking in a mosque in Johannesburg, admitted that holy war “will continue.” It’s not “the permanent State of Israel! No! It is the permanent State of Palestine,” he scoffed. “You have to come and to fight and to start the Jihad to liberate Jerusalem.”
Nearly two years later, on January 30, 1996, Arafat met secretly with Arab diplomats in the Grand Hotel in Stockholm. Aided by Arafat’s Palestinian Authority, Hamas had launched a series of suicide bombs. “We Palestinians will take over everything, including all of Jerusalem,” Arafat promised the diplomats. He added, “We of the PLO will now concentrate all our efforts on splitting Israel psychologically into two camps,” with the clear aim “to eliminate the State of Israel and establish a purely Palestinian State.”
A typical example illustrating how the West coddled Arafat, protecting him from constructive pressure, occurred in October 1998. I was part of the Israeli team at the three-way Wye River negotiations with the Palestinians and the Americans. On the Saturday before the negotiations began, I was sitting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when President Bill Clinton dropped by to visit. Bibi invited me to explain my vision of democracy to Clinton.
The Arkansas-born Clinton is a real southern charmer. He zooms in on you, staring into your eyes, smiling, nodding, mentioning your name, quoting part of what you said back at you word for word. He makes you feel that what you have to say is the most important thing in the world to him. But although he may be the world’s greatest listener, he doesn’t necessarily pay attention to what you said. He’s the great appeaser. He makes you feel heard, then continues doing whatever he planned on doing.
On this relaxed Shabbat afternoon, I had time to explain my theory to the president about how dictatorship works and how the free world could influence the Palestinians to build civil society as the essential precondition to peace. I emphasized how important it was to stop Arafat’s double-talk, saying that Arafat must proclaim clearly to his people in Arabic that the PA is changing its charter and recognizing Israel. It was tragic that, five years after Israel recognized Arafat and the PLO upon signing the Oslo Accords, Arafat and the PLO had not yet recognized Israel’s basic right to exist. What should have been the first Palestinian step in the peace process was still being treated as some kind of maximalist Israeli demand.
After we spoke for an hour, President Clinton agreed to push Arafat on this first step. Encouraged by Clinton’s promise, the Israeli delegation listed that demand first in the negotiations. Clinton pressured Arafat, who agreed to change the charter and recognize Israel to his own people if Clinton made a formal visit to Gaza. As I left the negotiating room, I passed the assistant to the president for national security affairs, Sandy Berger. I told him, “You see, Arafat agreed to change the charter. Now you have to make sure this happens.”
Instead of congratulating me, Berger was furious. Turning abruptly, he chased me down the corridor, frantically accusing us Israelis of having “put a gun to Arafat’s head.” Berger vowed that he would convince Arafat not to go through with it, because it would weaken him against his radical Islamist terrorist rival, Hamas. Then, Berger scurried off to convince Clinton that the United States needed to protect Arafat.
The result was a fiasco. Arafat eventually got his presidential visit. Six weeks after the frustrating Wye negotiations, in December 1998, Clinton made an official visit to Gaza. Five years too late, the Palestinian National Council voted to eliminate the clauses in its charter vowing to destroy Israel—sort of. In what the Chicago Tribune called a “masterpiece in constructive obfuscation,” Arafat spoke to the Palestinian National Council about changing the charter. When his forty-five-minute speech ended, as applause broke out and many were distracted, hands were raised to appear like the delegates were approving the change. In the confusion, Arafat found a way to deny anything significant occurred while giving the Americans something to celebrate. But we in the Israeli government were not fooled. His public statements were insultingly vague. His forked-tongue deception continued.
Sandy Berger’s hysteria confirmed my fears that the free world would not press Arafat to keep any other commitments. Arafat’s argument—“If I am forced to fulfill the obligations, that will weaken me and I will be defeated by Hamas”—always shut down the Americans.
Years later, Berger publicly confessed, “I was wrong!” So did some other Clinton administration officials. “There needed to be mutual recognition; that was not in the original Oslo,” Berger admitted. “There needed to be a renunciation of terrorism from Arafat; that wasn’t in the original.”
Critiquing the Americans’ strategy, Berger recalled in an oral history, “I’ve often said that sadly, the Palestinians did not have a Nelson Mandela at the moment in history when they needed somebody who could pivot from being a revolutionary and the leader of a movement to being a statesman and the leader of a country. Arafat was simply not capable of doing that.”
Like many others in the free world, Berger continued to believe that all we had needed was the right personality in the right place: Mandela versus Arafat. It’s easier to reduce complicated policy matters to personalities than to implement the right strategy instead of the wrong one.
I understand that no one unifying theory can navigate all of life’s complexities. The peace process is not some exercise in physics or mathematical logic. But I remain frustrated. Few politicians were willing to debate these ideas, let alone experiment with implementing them. They couldn’t bypass the big, thick wall of resistance, built by groupthink from nearly every security, intelligence, and diplomatic expert. That wall still stands.
No one should rely on outsiders, like me or any Israeli, to say what Palestinians think or want. But no one should listen to Palestinian dictators either. Those of us committed to peace and democracy should listen to our true allies, those insider-outsiders, the dissidents, the brave Palestinians who have fled from doublethink without fleeing their homeland.
The model Palestinian dissident is Bassem Eid, the human rights activist and my friend for the last twenty years. Bassem is warm and ironic and brave. He defied the Palestinian Security Services and the West’s conventional wisdom by criticizing Arafat when he was alive. Today, he criticizes Mahmoud Abbas, also known as Abu Mazen, publicly at home.
Back in 1995, shortly after the Americans and the Israelis had installed Yasir Arafat, Bassem started telling the inconvenient truth. At the time a senior researcher for the Israeli human rights monitoring group B’Tselem, Bassem could already detail the PA’s “extra-judicial punishment, abduction of residents, illegal arrests, prolonged detention without any judicial scrutiny, refusal to allow legal representation, refusal to allow regular family visits, and use of torture techniques such as beatings, painful tying-up, threats, humiliation, sleep deprivation, and withholding of medical treatment.”
Bassem noticed an interesting pattern. When he catalogued Israeli human rights violations for B’Tselem, he was popular: international organizations embraced every report. But when he started monitoring the PA’s human rights violations, many foreign friends abandoned him.
Bassem sinned by undermining the Palestinian leaders who, the experts had decided, would make peace with Israel. His testimony showed that the PA controlled through fear. Without minimizing the complex, painful clashes between the Israeli army and the Palestinians, he violated the usual storytelling in another way. In the world Oslo created—and especially following Israel’s Gaza disengagement in 2005—90 percent of Palestinians live under day-to-day Palestinian control. That limited Israeli soldiers’ interactions with Palestinians, meaning that the regime squeezing Palestinians most directly was the PA, and later the Hamas dictatorship that emerged in Gaza.
Following the Olso Accords, Israel’s army withdrew from most Palestinian cities. That move allowed the Palestinians to be as autonomous as possible. The rise of Palestinian terrorism in the early 2000s forced Israel to reimpose some restrictions, mostly city-to-city checkpoints and occasional raids within the towns. But it is the Palestinians’ own leaders who have tried controlling the Palestinian mind and soul. Palestinians who live under Israel’s full military rule have the freedom to criticize Israel harshly, even celebrating terrorists who murder Jewish children. It’s in the Palestinian public squares where Palestinians must doublethink and support a regime they detest, even if it’s deemed their own.
By 2003, after nearly three years of watching Arafat spur Palestinians to become suicide bombers, Bassem was even more distressed. “Instead of talking about peace and life, instead of supporting coexistence, instead of fulfilling the consciousness of human beings, Arafat is calling for death,” Bassem mourned. “It appears the nearly 2,500 Palestinians and more than 700 Israelis who were killed during this intifada are not enough to fulfill Arafat’s political interests.”
It’s remarkable. Bassem’s words parallel so many other dissidents’ words about the dictator’s need to lead through fear and prop up the regime by targeting the ideal enemy.
Bassem and I have become close over the years, participating in various conferences and writing some articles together. Occasionally, I have also tried to help him secure funding for some of his democracy-building initiatives. When he started a modest program teaching democracy in some Palestinian schools, the European Union governments were investing in programs building Palestinian civil society. A representative of the Italian government told me how much he respected dissidents for the role they play as reformers. I proposed that his government fund Bassem’s program.
“It’s a very good idea,” the diplomat replied. “But what is Mr. Eid’s relationship with Abu Mazen?”
“I don’t know exactly,” I answered, knowing Bassem was about to lose the funding. “But I can’t imagine that the relationship is very warm. Eid is a dissident who criticizes the PA dictatorship.”
“Well then,” he said. “It will be a problem. The EU has decided only to support projects Abu Mazen supports, in order not to weaken him.”
Asking for permission from Abu Mazen before funding democracy projects like Eid’s would have been like the West refusing to cooperate with Andrei Sakharov without Leonid Brezhnev’s approval.
More recently, Bassem has turned his sights on the brutal rule Hamas imposes in Gaza. “The people who died in Gaza were sacrificed by their own leadership: Hamas,” he proclaimed publicly in 2015. “The one who imposed three wars on Gaza was Hamas. In every country the governments use their missiles and rockets to protect its people but Hamas was doing the opposite, using its people to protect its missiles and rockets.”
Bassem says, “I don’t care if I’m called a traitor,” understanding the dictator’s faux-patriotic tricks to suppress dissent and demonize opponents. “Any Arab who stands up and criticizes his own leadership is called a traitor for Israel. I am trying to find ways to improve daily life for my people and to ensure a better future.”
Every conversation I have with Bassem reinforces my sense that a true liberal cannot worship at the shrine of the dictator. I often think about it when I find myself in the disappointment standoff. “I have to tell you how disappointed we on the Left are with you,” a leading Israeli liberal says. “When you came here, you were a liberal champion of human rights. But you betrayed us and the cause of human rights.”
“I have to tell you how disappointed I am with you and the Left,” I reply. “When I came here, I was joined at the hip with the liberal camp in the fight against dictatorship. Suddenly, I discovered that the first sign of being a good Israeli liberal was loving Arafat, bribing Arafat, defending Arafat, and giving him a free pass to do whatever he wished to his own people. You are the one who betrayed the cause of human rights.”