Never Alone by Natan Sharansky

Author:Natan Sharansky [Sharansky, Natan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2020-09-02T00:00:00+00:00

LINKING HUMAN RIGHTS AND PEACE WITH SYRIA

With President Bill Clinton set to leave office in January 2001, Barak kept his eye on the political calendar. He set the Democratic convention in the summer of 2000 as his deadline for peacemaking, before Clinton became a lame duck. Trying to fix the Middle East in a technical way—in a too-brainy, not-soulful way, just like he fixed his clocks—Barak was anxious to reach quick, sweeping peace deals with Hafez al-Assad and Yasir Arafat.

Understanding Barak’s aspirations, during the coalition negotiations I insisted that a special letter be attached to the coalition agreement. The letter specified Yisrael B’Aliyah’s position that Israeli concessions to Syria required openness, transparency, and democracy in the country. I believe it is the only formal document in Israeli governmental history making any kind of territorial withdrawals or other diplomatic progress contingent on our opponent achieving substantive human rights progress.

Everybody, from left to right, mocked my party’s naivete. But Barak knew that if a peace treaty came to a vote, he would have a problem with me and my party. I watched him trying to figure out how to get us on board.

Early in my tenure as Barak’s interior minister, Shimon Peres’s confidante S. Daniel Abraham approached me. Abraham—a self-made and generous billionaire who founded SlimFast—was an Oslo enthusiast. I had heard that he had often lent his private plane to ferry Peres’s team secretly to Norway for the negotiations that produced the accords.

“I want you to meet Syria’s future leader, who will help modernize the Arab world,” Abraham said. “He thinks exactly like you. He wants to bring democracy to the Arab world, quickly. He believes in human rights. He’s modern, sophisticated. He studied in London. He surfs on the Internet.” Abraham wanted to fly me to Paris secretly to meet this wunderkind and glimpse the new Middle East he, Peres, and now Ehud Barak were midwifing.

“How do you know this guy is Syria’s next leader?” I asked mischievously.

“Well, he’s going to inherit it from his father,” Abraham replied.

I winced. So much for democracy. After his father died, Bashar al-Assad “won” the election in July 2000 with 99.7 percent of the vote. Today, he is known as the butcher of Syria, who mass murdered and even gassed his own people.

I chose to skip Paris.

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