Yasser Arafat is dead. A so-called moderate is now chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Elections to choose a Palestinian Authority president are scheduled in the West Bank and Gaza for early January. Optimists see an opportunity for restarting the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and the possibility of a meaningful and comprehensive settlement of the conflict.
But whether this will really prove to be a positive turning point in the search for peace in the Middle East depends on whether we have learned from the failures of the past.
The Oslo process failed because the democratic world, including Israel, believed that peace could be made with a dictator. The central premise behind the negotiations was that if Arafat were given enough legitimacy, territory, weapons and money, he would use his power to fight terror and make peace with Israel.
That is why in the Oslo years the focus of the peace process was on strengthening Arafat in the hopes that a "strong leader could make a strong peace."
Time and again, the PLO leader cleverly turned this attitude into a means of reneging on his commitments. After all, neither the United States nor Israel nor Europe would do anything to "weaken" him, or more extreme elements would come to power.
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.
