Life & Wisdom Quote by Natan Sharansky

Sharansky’s line lands like an accusation dressed as regret: “Unfortunately” isn’t sympathy so much as a moral audit of a whole diplomatic era. The target isn’t only Arafat; it’s the international habit of treating internal repression as a tolerable price for external stability. By pointing out that “little attention was paid” to governance, Sharansky implies a willful blindness among negotiators, journalists, and governments who preferred a single “address” for peace over the messy reality of political legitimacy.

The real bite is in the paradox he spotlights: the idea that a harsh regime could “bolster” peace. That word choice is clinical, almost bureaucratic, echoing the language of policy memos that justify ugly means for a clean endpoint. The subtext is that authoritarian control was mistaken for political capacity: if Arafat could silence rivals and centralize power, he could also “deliver” an agreement. Sharansky is warning that this is a category error. Repression can manufacture quiet, but it also breeds corruption, distrust, and succession crises - conditions that make any signed deal brittle.

Context matters: Sharansky, a former Soviet dissident, built his worldview in a system where Western analysts routinely overrated “stability” and underrated human freedom until the bill came due. He’s importing that lesson into the Israeli-Palestinian arena: peace processes that ignore how leaders rule end up rewarding coercion, weakening civic institutions, and betting the future on a strongman’s grip. The sentence is meant to shame a pragmatic consensus - and to argue that democracy isn’t a garnish to peace, but a prerequisite for it.