Justus For All

Natan Sharansky and Bassem Eid write about Palestine peace in the Wall Street Journal

Oslo proponents believed a strong Arafat, unconstrained by the inherent checks of democratic rule, would be able to fight Hamas and forge a final peace with Israel. A weak Palestinian democracy, the logic went, actually served the interest of peace by creating a stronger peace partner.
…
If Israelis and Palestinians are to pave a path toward peace, they must pursue a radically different course. The peace process must be linked to building and strengthening Palestinian civil society. In June 2002, President Bush boldly declared a vision based on such a course and took some steps to implement it — such as refusing to deal with corrupt leaders (Arafat), and meeting Palestinian democratic dissidents. But in the final analysis, his administration did not fundamentally change direction. It is now pursuing a course that essentially resuscitates the failed policies of the past.

It is high time that Palestinian civil society be fully recognized by the international community as a prerequisite to peace, not as an obstacle to it. If Palestinian civil society is not empowered, the Fatah-controlled West Bank may soon be ruled by Hamas, and Fatah leaders there may find themselves one day having to rely on Israel’s Supreme Court to save them.

I agree with this, the best guarantee, perhaps the only guarantee, of peace between Israel and Palestine, is a democratic palestine. The real question though, is how do we get there from here.

The first thing to remember is that democracy doesn’t mean that the most popular totalitarian gets to be in charge. It means rule of law and guarantees of individual rights and freedoms just as much as it means using elections to determine leadership and policy. Focusing on the latter, in the hopes that it will bring us the former has had some pretty mixed results, the current problems in Palestine being a prime example.

We seem to have better success when we focus as much, or even more, on developing the civil institutions such as courts and police along with basic constitutional guarantees then when we just think about getting people to a voting booth. I don’t think we really know how to ‘make’ a democracy yet, or even how one naturally occurs. There are a whole lot of varibles involved.

I have become increasingly convinced over the years though that learning how to establish strong democracies is a critical skill that already established democratic nations need to learn.