Former Soviet prisoner of Zion Natan Sharansky serves as Minister of Construction and Housing and chairman of the Yisrael Ba'aliya party.

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.

The folly of Oslo
In 1993, the world, the people of Israel - indeed the Israeli parliament and virtually its entire government were shocked to discover that secret contacts in Oslo between Israel and the PLO had led to a Declaration of Principles between the two sides. As an equally surprised American administration quickly arranged a signing ceremony at the White House, Israelis immediately began splitting into pro-Oslo and anti-Oslo camps. As a nonpolitical observer in 1993, I surmised that many Israelis made up their minds about the accords not after carefully reviewing their contents but based on a priori assumptions. On the "Left" were those who were ready to support any agreement so long as the "process" was moving forward. On the "Right" stood those who opposed any territorial compromise with the Palestinians, regardless of where, when or how. Regrettably, Oslo eventually became synonymous with peace, and expressing reservations about the Oslo process became tantamount to rejecting peace itself. For me, this pigeonhole proved particularly confining. Believing that our Jewish, democratic state should try to guarantee its security without controlling the lives of another people, I counted myself among those who were prepared for territorial compromise with the Palestinians. At the same time, however, I was gravely concerned that the flawed assumptions underlying the Oslo process would not yield an historic reconciliation.

First, as Shimon Peres had asserted on numerous occasions, the premise of Oslo was that the abyss we faced with the Palestinians would have to be traversed in one giant leap of faith. According to this view, the mutual recognition called for in the accord would trigger an irreversible political and economic chain reaction that would rapidly transform our relationship with the Palestinians and quickly usher in a "New Middle East." While any agreement with the Palestinians would have required crossing a psychological Rubicon, I believed that the way to overcome our mutual distrust was by seeing concrete changes in the present, not by being told simply to forget the past.

Second, the Rabin-Peres administration blatantly ignored the issue of Palestinian compliance. In a sense, this logically flowed from the first assumption: If a leap of faith was all that was needed to bridge the gap between our people, then compliance with the minutiae of detailed agreements was in fact irrelevant. Holding the Palestinians accountable to the numerous commitments they had made, from extraditing terrorists to reducing the size of their police force to disarming militants became insignificant when placed in the context of the greater cause of "peace."

Third, the architects of the Oslo process seemed to completely discount the importance of reaching a broad national consensus within Israel. No matter how large or how vocal the opposition, its concerns were disdainfully ignored by both the Rabin-Peres and Barak administrations. As terrorism reached unprecedented levels, these administrations decided to continue the peace process, blindly pressing forward while the nation was splitting at the seams. This blatant disregard for forging a broad internal consensus reached absurd levels during Ehud Barak's final months in office when, supported by less than one-quarter of his parliament, he continued to try to negotiate an agreement that would determine the permanent borders of Israel and influence the identity of the Jewish people for many generations to come.

But by far, the assumption underlying the Oslo process that troubled me the most was the pervasive belief that the undemocratic nature of Arafat's regime would serve Israel's interests. That an Israeli government thought it could enlist Arafat as its proxy in the war on terrorism was bad enough; that we believed that the fewer constraints Israel placed on his rule, the better off we would be, was to me the height of madness. Not only would he do our job for us, the reasoning went, but he would do it better.

Prime Minister Rabin coined the phrase that chillingly summed up the government's entire approach: Arafat would deal with terrorists, he said, "without a Supreme Court, without B'Tselem [a human rights organization] and without all kinds of bleeding heart liberals." In short, the undemocratic nature of Arafat's regime, far from being an obstacle to furthering peace, was considered a crucial asset in the fight against terror. Knowing full well the implications of these words on Israel's future security, I warned then Prime Minister Rabin that "the society that would be created as a result - a society with no Supreme Court, no human rights organizations and no bleeding heart liberals - would be based on fear and unlimited authority." Such a regime, I wrote in numerous articles critical of this approach to peace, would inevitably need external enemies to justify internal repression and maintain its power. Though nothing would have enhanced Israel's security more than promoting a Palestinian society founded on democratic principles and institutions, Israel ushered in a "peace" process that subsidized tyranny.

Despite Rabin's promises to abort the peace process if the guns supplied the Palestinians were ever turned against Israel, and despite mounting evidence that the Palestinian Authority (PA) was complicit in attacks against us - or at the very least was giving a green light to terror - the Oslo process continued. Israel had trapped itself into believing that there was no alternative to Arafat's authoritarian rule. Repeated warnings that such a regime by its very nature inevitably threatened Israel fell on deaf ears.

Nothing would derail the Oslo peace train. Significantly, this onward march was not mandated by the accords themselves. Israel could have stood firm in the face of Palestinian non-compliance and refused to continue the peace process. After all, the theory of Oslo was reciprocity - you do this and we do that. But instead, Israel blithely brushed aside Arafat's disdain for Oslo's provisions. Demanding that Arafat actively promote peace to the next generation of Palestinians, the administrations argued, was too much to ask if he was to remain the "strong leader" we so badly needed. The result was predictable. A dictator incites his people against Israel, sponsors terrorism and violence and inculcates a deep hatred of Jews and the Jewish State among the next generation of Palestinians.

The recent violence
When the latest round of violence broke out last September, many Israelis were shocked by the depth of hatred the Palestinians displayed towards them. Nearly everything which the Palestinians were thought to be demanding of Israel -- a Palestinian State on virtually all of the West Bank and Gaza with a capital in Jerusalem -- was offered to them by Ehud Barak at Camp David. Yet their counteroffer was not an alternative peace proposal, but a hail of rocks, bullets and bombs. The animalistic lynching of our soldiers and the calls of "Death to the Jews" that echoed through the Arab world shocked even the most ardent supporters of peaceful compromise. But most of those taken aback by the violence have focused their attention on the symptoms rather than the disease. That disease is not found in the Palestinians themselves, but in the non-democratic regime that represents the greatest threat to peace and security between our peoples. Such a regime, like any other dictatorship, needs an external enemy to maintain its authority, and Israel is perfectly cast for this familiar role.

The man who promised at Oslo to renounce the violent struggle against the Jewish State once again uses violence as an instrument of negotiation. His police have turned their guns against the state that provided them, while his kangaroo courts have released dozens of Hamas terrorists drenched with the blood of his "partner" in peace. With new textbooks depicting a Map of Palestine that stretches over all the land from the Mediterranean to the Dead Sea, Arafat calls upon the next generation of Palestinians to make war and take up arms in a "holy jihad" as their ancestors did against the Christian Crusaders a thousand years ago. In fact, in the seven years since Oslo, Palestinian despotic rule has increased the level of hatred towards Israel to unprecedented levels. Even the peace team in Washington was shocked by the ubiquitous violence. They had deluded themselves into thinking that the resources provided to Arafat would be used to better the lives of his own people, rather than to maintain his corrupt, despotic rule.

As Arafat beats the drums of war, I am comforted by the fact that now - unlike 60 years ago - we have the power to defend ourselves against a despot who uses every means at his disposal to demonize the Jewish people and blame them for all his nation's woes. I also am hopeful that the latest violence may usher in a new approach to the peace process - an approach that will help the forces of liberalization and democratization that are sweeping the globe to penetrate the Arab world. While opening up Palestinian society would not end the conflict between our nations entirely, the continuation of a despotic, corrupt tyranny makes forging any viable compromise impossible.

In short, Oslo has turned Helsinki on its head. In granting the Soviets legitimacy as a superpower, the West obtained a commitment from the Soviets to uphold basic human rights. The pressure that resulted from this commitment, both internally and externally, ushered in the democratic reforms that led to the collapse of the Soviet empire and the end of the Cold War. Conversely, the Oslo process recognized the PLO and transferred land to its authority without demanding the one concession that might lead to the genuine reconciliation of our peoples and an end to our conflict the liberalization of the newly emerging Palestinian state.

The road ahead
The first thing Israel must do is restore its weakened deterrent power and so prevent the current violence from escalating into a regional war. To do so, the Israeli government must prove to the Palestinians in general and the PA in particular that it will not reward aggression. On the contrary, we must show the Palestinian leadership that it will pay a steep price for sponsoring terror. If Arafat believes that we are afraid to challenge his rule, he will continue to act with impunity. Thus, we must be prepared to weaken him and at the same time directly strengthen the Palestinian people by supporting measures that will free their closed society. Israel must once and for all free itself from the notion that a "strong dictator" serves our interests. The time has come for the democratic world, including the one state that shares its values in the Middle East, to stop placing its faith in corrupt, authoritarian leaders and start helping the Palestinian people directly. It must recognize that Yasser Arafat, like Saddam Hussein, Fidel Castro and countless other "revolutionary" leaders, has no concern for the well being of his own people. He, like them, will use whatever resources he obtains to consolidate his power.

The Palestinian leadership must understand that as long as they remain a regime without free and fair elections, without meaningful opposition parties, without a free press, without independent courts and without human rights organizations, we will consider them a threat to our security. Moreover, the West will consider them a threat to peace and stability in the region. Accordingly, we must convince them that time is not on their side by showing them our determination to use the advantage of our free society to grow and prosper. I have no doubt that the forces rapidly spreading across the globe will eventually penetrate the Arab world and sweep away the dictatorships that rule their people. But if the democracies adopt the right policies, a process that otherwise might take two or three generations could occur in less than a decade. The more Israel weakens its determination, the more hope we give authoritarian regimes that we will surrender to violence and terror and the longer those regimes will stay in power. We must show the Palestinians that if they liberalize their society and embrace peace, both our peoples will benefit. Equally, we must also prove that if they continue their violent struggle against us, we will get stronger, and they will only get weaker.

Since the founding of the State of Israel, the message that best conveyed this idea to Arab peoples in general and to the Palestinian people in particular was the in-gathering of the Jewish people, the settling of the land of Israel, and the development of Israeli society: Israel's leaders understood that the best way to get the Arab world to eventually accept the State of Israel was to convince it that the Jewish State was here to stay. They knew that bringing millions of Jews to Israel, settling them throughout their emerging state and advancing the country's economic and social development was the key to our survival.

That is why in the face of war and terror, the Jews responded with Aliyah, settlement and development, and not with accommodation and appeasement. We must return to that simple formula today. The return of the Jews to Zion must again become a national priority. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, nearly one million new immigrants have come to live in Israel. The days when masses of Jews were unable to return to their ancient homeland are over. Today's challenge is to attract those Diaspora Jews that are fully capable of moving to Israel but are simply unwilling to do so. To attract them, we must transform the traditional idea of Aliyah. Rather than seeing Israel as a refuge for oppressed Jews, we must work to create a society that provides the opportunity for Jews across the world to live in a state that forges a profound connection with our people's collective past, while offering each individual the freedom to fulfill his or her own aspirations. Settling the land of Israel must also become a national priority again.

Conclusion
A genuine 'New Middle East' need not be a fantasy, but it will not be brought about by ceding lands to Arab dictators or subsidizing regimes that undermine the rights of their own people. The belief that "strong leaders" will deliver a "strong peace" has been shown to be a dangerous illusion. The only way to create real Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation is to help the Palestinians create a liberal, democratic state that will uphold human rights at home and concomitantly live in peace with her neighbors. Accordingly, Israel must link her own concessions to the degree of openness, transparency and liberalization of the emerging Palestinian state and convince the Palestinians that time is not on their side in their struggle to destroy the Jewish State. For their part, Western leaders must realize, as Sakharov, Jackson and Reagan did a generation ago, that countries, which do not respect the rights of their own people, will always be a threat to international security. By not thinking any people, whether they are Germans, Italians, Japanese, Russians or Arabs incapable of establishing a free society, the democratic nations of the world, including the only state that bears freedom's torch in the Middle East, can help create the real peace that we have dreamed about for so long.

Views expressed by the author do not necessarily reflect those of israelinsider.

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