Life & Wisdom Quote by Natan Sharansky

Sharansky’s line is built like an indictment: it doesn’t argue about borders or refugees, it prosecutes a political psychology. By calling Arafat a “dictator” who “directed all his energies” toward “strengthening…hatred,” Sharansky shifts the conversation from failed diplomacy to an incentive structure: the leader who manufactures permanent grievance can’t survive the arrival of normal politics. Peace isn’t rejected because the terms are imperfect; it’s rejected because it collapses the regime’s reason for being.

The subtext is classic Sharansky, shaped by his Cold War biography and his signature claim that authoritarian systems require enemies. Hatred functions here as a kind of domestic currency: it buys unity, silences rivals, and justifies coercion. “Could not afford” is the sentence’s sharpest turn of the knife, framing peace not as a moral choice but as a material risk. The implication is that negotiations fail when the other side needs conflict the way democracies need consent.

Context matters: Sharansky writes from an Israeli dissident-turned-politician worldview that treats the democracy/dictatorship divide as the master key to Middle East stalemates. That frame has rhetorical power because it offers a clean villain and a clean diagnostic. It also compresses messy realities. It downplays Israeli politics, internal Palestinian pluralism, and the possibility that rejection can be strategic without being purely cynical. The quote works, persuasively, by refusing policy minutiae and aiming at something harder to refute in a soundbite: the idea that some leaders are structurally incompatible with peace because peace would put them out of a job.