War & Peace Quote by Natan Sharansky

Sharansky loads this sentence like a legal brief disguised as a postmortem. “Central premise” frames Oslo not as a messy political gamble but as a clean, falsifiable hypothesis. Then he lists the inputs - legitimacy, territory, weapons, money - in a blunt, almost procurement-style inventory that turns diplomacy into a transaction. The syntax implies naivete on the part of Oslo’s architects: give the man tools and status, and he’ll behave like a responsible state-builder. Sharansky’s bite is in the conditional “if” and the quietly skeptical “enough,” a word that suggests an endless ladder of concessions with no natural stopping point.

The subtext is sharper: Arafat is cast less as a partner than as an instrument that the West tried to calibrate. The sentence insinuates that terror wasn’t an external problem to be fought but a lever Arafat could choose to pull or release. By pairing “weapons and money” with “fight terror,” Sharansky hints at a moral inversion - resources intended to civilize a movement can just as easily fortify it. It’s an argument about incentives, not just character.

Context matters: Sharansky is a former Soviet dissident turned Israeli politician who has long insisted that peace depends on democratic accountability, not diplomatic recognition. From that vantage point, Oslo becomes a cautionary tale about legitimizing leadership without demanding transparent institutions. The line isn’t simply anti-Oslo; it’s anti-theory-of-peace that treats power as self-correcting.