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Politics : War -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ajs who wrote (6527)	10/11/2001 10:58:17 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Respond to of 23908

Yes, I think Sharansky has a very good point. He has a longer article which I've posted below on the failure of the Oslo accords to insist on democratization. I agree with his main point -- you need the Palestinians to have a democracy so their state won't need the enemy Israel to survive politically. But how to achieve it, either in 1993 or now? Arafat is no democrat, and is dysfunctional even as a dictator. As someone recently said, his talent is survival in the ruins he creates. From Helsinki to Oslo By Natan Sharansky October 11, 2001 The following is excerpted from an article written by Minister of Construction and Housing and former Soviet prisoner of Zion Natan Sharansky, which was published in the "Journal of International Security Affairs", No. 1, Summer 2001, and is published here with permission. Though the capitals of Finland and Norway lie only a few hundred miles apart, the accords reached at Helsinki and Oslo represent decidedly different approaches to international relations. In both places, parties ostensibly seeking an end to a decades old conflict entered into negotiations that culminated in an historic agreement. But while the Helsinki agreements reached during the Cold War forged a direct link between human rights and East-West relations, the Oslo accords failed to establish any connection between human rights and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Worse, Oslo's architects actually believed that such a link would be detrimental to the interests of both parties. Considering the Arab regimes' abysmal record of respecting the rights of their own people, the representatives of the PLO obviously wanted to avoid any mention of human rights. But that Israeli negotiators would delude themselves into believing that such an omission actually served our own interests is a sad testament to how little we learn from history. continued on israelinsider.com