Friday, August 8, 2008
Natan Sharansky, no introduction necessary, and Bassem Eid, founder of the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group, basically describe the fact that there are no shortcuts toward building a Palestinian Arab polity capable of being a peaceful neighbor: There Won't Be 'Peace' Without Democracy. The most revealing section, though, is this:
...Where is the money that was supposedly spent on reforming the judicial system? Where is the international outrage as Palestinian leaders drag their own society further into the abyss?
When one of us [Bassem Eid] worked for Israel's Betselem cataloging Israel's human-rights violations, the international community embraced every report. But when intellectual honesty demanded that he monitor Palestinian human-rights violations according to the same standards, no one was interested. Those reports were dismissed as undermining the Palestinian leaders -- first Arafat and now Mr. Abbas -- who would make peace with Israel...
