This essay is the text of a speech delivered on June 20, 2002, by Natan Sharansky, deputy prime minister of Israel, at the AEI World Forum in Beaver Creek, Colorado. The World Forum is an annual conference of government officials, legislators, business and financial leaders, and academics; it is sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute and hosted by former president Gerald R. Ford.
Mr. Sharansky's address is notable, apart from its intrinsic intellectual force and stirring eloquence, for the circumstances of its delivery and its relationship to immediate political developments. It came at a crucial moment in the U.S.-led war on terrorism--following several days of suicide bombings in Israel that had left thirty citizens dead and dozens injured, and preceding a major statement of U.S. policy regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that President George W. Bush was scheduled to deliver the following week. Mr. Sharansky took the occasion to deliver a thorough exposition of the "Sharansky Plan" for achieving peace between Israel and the Palestinians--a plan that would establish democratic institutions, accountable leadership, and civil freedoms among Palestinians as the precondition of Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation. In so doing, he made a larger and more fundamental argument: The conflict between Israel and Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority, he said, is not a tribal war between Jews and Arabs but rather one front in the global war against terrorist states and organizations. The new war--like the earlier, cold war against Soviet communism, in which Sharansky himself had played a prominent role as political dissident and prisoner--is in reality a struggle between democracy and tyranny, and must be understood as such if terrorism, like communism, is to be destroyed.
Although the Sharansky Plan had previously been neglected or scorned in Israel, the United States, and elsewhere, the plan--and the relationship between national tyrannies and international terrorism--had been receiving increasing attention in the weeks preceding Mr. Sharansky's address, as President Bush's public statements had emphasized the importance of democracy to undermining terrorism at its political roots. Then, four days after the address, President Bush made a fundamental shift in U.S. policy, calling on the Palestinian people to "build a practicing democracy" and "elect new leaders not compromised by terror"--effectively embracing central elements of the Sharansky Plan ("President Bush Calls for New Palestinian Leadership," June 24, 2002). In the following weeks, President Bush extended his call for democratic freedoms to other areas of the Middle East, notably Iran, that are sources of terrorist organization and financing ("Statement by the President," July 12, 2002). Mr. Sharansky's essay stands as a deep and compelling argument for what is now a central strategy in the war against terrorists and as an important historical document in the development of that strategy.
Christopher DeMuth is the president of AEI.
