"Who Will Speak the Truth?"

By Natan Sharansky
Thursday, October 12, 2000

Nearly twenty years ago, confined to an eight by ten cell in a prison on the border of Siberia, my Soviet jailers gave me the 'privilege' of reading the latest copy of Pravda, the official mouthpiece of the communist regime. Splashed across the front page was a condemnation of Ronald Reagan for having the temerity to call the Soviet Union an 'evil empire.' Tapping on walls and talking through toilets, word of Reagan's 'provocation' quickly spread throughout the prison. The dissidents were ecstatic. Finally, the leader of the free world had spoken the truth - a truth that burned inside the heart of each and every one of us.

For decades, with few exceptions, the moral authority of the Soviet Union was rarely challenged. Some, particularly those who saw in communism's egalitarian ideals the antidote to all the ills of capitalism and democracy, were simply duped by a totalitarian society that could so easily manipulate the picture that it presented to the outside world.

But sadly, most were not blinded by the truth, just frightened by it. They understood what the Soviet Union represented, but knowing the price of confrontation, preferred to close their eyes. Rationalizing their cowardice with morally comforting words such as 'peace' and 'co-existence,' they pursued the path of appeasement, just as they had once done with a rapidly militarizing German State.

Today, the nations of the free world also prefer to close their eyes to the truth in the Middle East in general and the Arab-Israeli conflict in particular. While in practice the Arab States do not pose the threat of a belligerent superpower, the West's attitude toward these authoritarian regimes is all too familiar. Some, who can only see Palestinian stone throwers as David to Israel's Goliath, are again duped by the manipulations of a brutal dictator who would send children to the front-lines to achieve through tragedy what he cannot achieve through diplomacy.

But most people, I gather, are not so easily duped. They simply choose to blindfold themselves rather than confront a discomforting truth. Instead of pressuring Arab tyrants to free their own peoples from the yolk of oppression, the West prefers to view them as a 'stabilizing' force in a region that they argue, could quickly descend into chaos.

When the peace process began, Israel and the West had a remarkable opportunity to use its influence to ensure that the emerging Palestinian society could evolve into a liberal, democratic State. Instead they did precisely the opposite and in effect spent the better part of ten years subsidizing tyranny.

The goal was to strengthen Arafat and his PLO, supposedly a force for moderation and compromise. He, with his 40,000 man armed police force, was supposed to serve as Israel's proxy in the war on terror and would do it, as the late Prime Minister Rabin said, 'without a Supreme Court, without human rights organizations and without bleeding heart liberals.' This policy, supported by the West, was not designed to solve a genuine Palestinian human rights problem, but to export it.

In the last two weeks, we have seen the consequences of this folly. 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 who armed them, while his kangaroo courts have released dozens of Hamas terrorists drenched with the blood of the his 'partner' in peace.

Needing an external enemy to justify internal repression, he continues to incite against Israel. With new textbooks depicting a Map of Palestine that stretches from the Mediterranean to the Dead Sea but does not include a Jewish State, he is educating the next generation of Palestinians that they will soon take up arms in a holy jihad, as their ancestors did against the Christian Crusaders nearly a millennium ago.

But the world can only summon the courage to condemn a democratic Israel for defending itself against enemies from within and without that seek nothing less that its destruction. It is lambasted for provoking the Palestinians by visiting our people's holiest sight, when the real provocation is not our sovereignty over a Temple Mount that is the soul of the Jewish people, but our sovereignty period.

No doubt a government that is prepared to make far reaching and what I believe are dangerous concessions will soon be pressed to make more, so that the free states can remain safely behind their blindfolds. The only free state in a tyranny that stretches from the Atlantic to the Indian Oceans will be asked to concede more in the name of 'peace' and 'coexistence' to an Arab world that wants nothing of the sort.

Thirty years ago, Democratic Senator Henry 'Scoop' Jackson courageously stood up against the bipartisan forces of appeasement and issued a moral challenge to an immoral State. By speaking the same truth a decade later, Republican President Ronald Reagan helped free hundreds of millions of people around the world, and sparked a democratic flame that continues to engulf the world. Who will speak the truth today and allow freedom to reach the one region in the world where only one nation carries its torch