There Won't Be 'Peace'
Without Democracy

By NATAN SHARANSKY and BASSEM EID

A tragic peace process turned to farce last weekend. After bloody clashes between Hamas and Fatah loyalists in the Gaza strip killed 11 Palestinians and injured 120 more, nearly 200 Palestinians associated with Fatah sought asylum in Israel. Some have been transferred to the West Bank cities of Jericho and Ramallah, where they are now under the jurisdiction of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.

Dozens more who were considered unwelcome by Mr. Abbas's office were anxiously awaiting possible deportation back to Gaza. The only thing that saved them from this fate was an appeal by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, which petitioned the Supreme Court to prevent the government from sending the Fatah refugees back to Gaza.

The irony of the present situation boggles the mind. In 1993, then Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin defended the Oslo accords he signed with Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Liberation Organization to a somewhat skeptical Israeli public by arguing that Arafat would fight Hamas much better than Israel, since he had "no Supreme Court and no Betselem" (an Israeli human-rights organization).

Oslo proponents believed a strong Arafat, unconstrained by the inherent checks of democratic rule, would be able to fight Hamas and forge a final peace with Israel. A weak Palestinian democracy, the logic went, actually served the interest of peace by creating a stronger peace partner.

Yet 15 years later, another Israeli human-rights organization successfully petitioned the Supreme Court to save the remnants of Israel's erstwhile peace partners from being deported back into the murderous hands of Hamas. In other words, a peace process that undermined Palestinian democracy created a "peace partner" so hated by its own people that the Israeli Army must now protect them.

Israel, America and the free world share much of the blame for this fiasco. As Arafat and his Fatah party were busy hollowing out Palestinian civil society and turning control of the Palestinian economy over to corrupt cronies, the world showered them with money and diplomatic support. Hundreds of millions of dollars were transferred to Arafat's private slush fund so that he could "strengthen" his standing among the Palestinians.

But the corrupt dictatorship he built would win him and his party only the lasting scorn of his people. The Hamas victory two years ago in the Palestinian legislative elections was as much about Fatah's misrule as it was about a resurgent Islamism, or Israel's short-sighted disengagement from Gaza. Rather than link this concession to a positive change on the Palestinian side -- such as, for example, dismantling refugee camps where a fourth generation of Palestinian still shamefully reside -- Israel's unilateral concession further empowered extremists.

Last November's Annapolis "peace" conference continued this misguided approach. Once again the focus is primarily on who is ruling and not on how they rule. Mr. Abbas has replaced Arafat as the recipient of international largess, but the emphasis remains on empowering a particular leader, rather than empowering Palestinian civil society and creating democratic institutions.

Palestinians have suffered greatly for this neglect of democracy. Since the beginning of the second intifada in September 2000, internecine violence has reached unprecedented heights. According to the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group, the death toll includes: 122 killed in the streets (suspected collaborators), 41 by capital punishment, 34 honor killings, 48 stabbed to death, seven beaten to death, 258 killed under mysterious circumstances and 818 cases of gunfire. So far no one has been charged let alone tried for any of these unlawful killings.

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.

If Israelis and Palestinians are to pave a path toward peace, they must pursue a radically different course. The peace process must be linked to building and strengthening Palestinian civil society. In June 2002, President Bush boldly declared a vision based on such a course and took some steps to implement it -- such as refusing to deal with corrupt leaders (Arafat), and meeting Palestinian democratic dissidents. But in the final analysis, his administration did not fundamentally change direction. It is now pursuing a course that essentially resuscitates the failed policies of the past.

It is high time that Palestinian civil society be fully recognized by the international community as a prerequisite to peace, not as an obstacle to it. If Palestinian civil society is not empowered, the Fatah-controlled West Bank may soon be ruled by Hamas, and Fatah leaders there may find themselves one day having to rely on Israel's Supreme Court to save them.

Mr. Sharansky, a former Soviet dissident and Israeli politician, is chairman of the Adelson Institute of Strategic Studies at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem. Mr. Eid is the founder of the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group, based in East Jerusalem, and has been its director since 1996.

Barack and the Buck

The underreported economic news of the week is that Barack Obama favors a stronger dollar. Even better, he thinks a stronger greenback would help to reduce oil prices.

That at least is what the Democratic Presidential candidate told a town hall forum in Parma, Ohio, on Tuesday. "If we had a strengthening of the dollar, that would help" reduce fuel costs, he said, according to a Reuters dispatch ignored by most of the media.

This ought to be a bigger story. In linking the dollar to oil prices, Mr. Obama is pointedly at odds with the Bush Administration and Federal Reserve, both of which blame high commodity prices on supply and demand, despite falling demand due to slower global growth. Fed officials -- in particular, Vice Chairman Donald Kohn -- have expressly rejected any strong link between the dollar's collapse and the oil price surge since last August.

This conveniently absolves the Fed and Bush Treasury of responsibility for the consequences of what has been their destructive and all but explicit dollar devaluation strategy. If the Illinois Senator rejects greenback debasement, that's the best news to date about Obamanomics.

Reuters also quoted Mr. Obama as saying "The way to strengthen the dollar is for us to get our economy back in shape." On that point, he has it backward: Strengthening the dollar would help the economy -- by making the U.S. a destination for capital, and especially by reducing the inflation in food and energy prices that has pounded the American middle class. Those price hikes may yet tilt the economy into a recession it could otherwise avoid.

We don't know who is whispering in Mr. Obama's ear about the dollar, but he's on to a rich political vein. Americans know instinctively that something is wrong when the Canadian loonie is worth more than the greenback. Over to you, John McCain.

Political Cycles

Peggy Noonan

You're in a plane and you're flying over the campaign at a level of about 10,000 feet, and you look down and see: Not much has changed. Battle lines fixed, topography the same, troops pretty much where they were.

But land the plane, walk around and talk to people, and you realize: This thing is moving. Things are shifting around a bit. That's what I see looking back at the past four weeks.

M.E. Cohen

For the first time the idea began to take hold that John McCain can win this thing. You saw the USA Today-Gallup poll this week, with Mr. McCain gaining six points since late June among those Gallup dubbed likely voters. Mr. McCain took the lead, 49% to 45%. Among registered voters, it's still Barack Obama, 47% to 44%. A poll came out saying people are tired of hearing about Mr. Obama. Mr. McCain took the lead in YouTube hits. Small stuff, and there will be a lot of twists and turns before this is over, but there's movement down there beneath the crust of the Earth.

Mr. Obama got tagged the past month as something new, not the candidate from Men's Vogue but arrogant, aloof and somehow ethereal. There is no there there. Everyone I know plays the game of "This election is just like 1932," or '52, or whatever. "It's 1960—the youthful charismatic JFK versus the boring and so Republican Nixon." "No, it's '92 and the youthful charismatic Clinton versus the tired old Bush." This election is, in fact, exactly like the 2008 election. But the other day a friend said something I hadn't heard before: "This is 1948, and Obama is Tom Dewey"—the sleek, well-groomed, inevitable one who lost. I pondered this and said maybe he's Dewey, but Mr. McCain's not Truman, not so far. He is still, on the trail, his scattered self, not "Give 'Em Hell Harry." But the point is, even the clichés have begun to shift.

The daring and exciting European trip was probably a wash, and possibly a mistake in the bridge-too-far sense. During the coverage, pundits were always saying the trip leveled the playing field on foreign affairs between Sens. Obama and McCain. But Mr. McCain isn't Mr. Obama's problem in foreign affairs. Mr. McCain early on positioned himself, reasonably or unreasonably, depending on your view, as the candidate of possible new wars. I don't think people want new wars. Mr. Obama's problem on foreign affairs is his own youth and inexperience. In a time of high stakes, do we want Mr. Untried and Untested?

What Mr. Obama has been doing, and this started before the European trip and continued throughout, is making people see him as president. He's doing this when he ambles back to the back of the plane and leans over the reporters, in his shirtsleeves, speaking affably into their held-up mics and recorders, at the end of the victorious tour. That's what presidents do. He speaks to rapturous crowds in foreign capitals. That's what presidents do.

He isn't doing this to show he's inevitable and invincible. He's doing it to give voters the impression that they've already seen President Obama. That he's kind of already been president, he's done and can do all the things presidents do, to the point that by the middle of October a certain portion of the country is going to think he already is president.

And he needs to give them this impression because he's a young black man from nowhere who's been well-known for less than a year. And he knows one of his biggest problems with older white voters is they just can't imagine a young black man from nowhere as president. He's helping them imagine.

It's not vanity, it's strategy.

However. Mr. Obama consistently shows that he doesn't know what he doesn't know. It's a theme with his talented, confident staff. They don't know what they don't know either. Because they're young and they've never been in power and it takes time to know what you don't know. The presidential-type seal with OBAMA on it, the sometimes over-the-top rhetoric about healing the earth and parting the seas. They pick the biggest, showiest venue for the Berlin speech, the Brandenburg Gate, just like a president, not realizing people would think: Ya gotta earn that one, kid. Going to Europe was fine, but they should have gone in modestly, with a modest venue, quietly spread word that his speech was open to the public, and then left the watching world awed by the hordes that showed up. For they would have. "We couldn't help it, they love him!" It would have looked as if Europe was coming to him, and let that sink in back home.

Anyone can carp like this in retrospect, but when you know what you don't know, you can plan like this in advance.

* * *

Two weeks ago a journalist, a moderate liberal, spoke to me of what he called Mr. Obama's arrogance. I said I didn't think it was arrogance but high self-regard. He said there's no difference. I said no, arrogance has an air about it of pushing people around, insisting on your way. Mr. Obama doesn't seem like that. He took down a machine without raising his voice. Extremely high self-regard, though, can itself be a problem.

"What's wrong with that?" my friend said. "You want a self-confident president."

I said yes, but it brings up the Churchill question. Churchill had been scored by an acquaintance for his own very high self-regard, and responded with what was for him a certain sheepishness. "We're all worms," he said, "but I do believe I am a glowworm." He believed he was great, and he was. Is Mr. Obama a glowworm? Does he have real greatness in him? Or is he, say, a product of the self-esteem campaign, that movement within the schools and homes of our country the past 25 years that says the way to get a winner is to tell the kid he's a winner every day? You can get some true people of achievement that way, because some people need a lot of reinforcement to rise. But you can also get, not to put too fine a point of it, empty suits that take on a normal shape only because they're so puffed up with ego.

Is Mr. Obama's self-conception in line with his gifts, depth, wisdom and character? That's the big question, I suspect, on a number of minds.

As for Mr. McCain, I think he had the best moment of the month this week at the big motorcycle convention in Sturgis, S.D., when he was greeted with that mighty roar. And his great line: "As you may know, not long ago a couple hundred thousand Berliners made a lot of noise for my opponent. I'll take the roar of 50,000 Harleys any day." Oh, that was good.

There's a thing that's out there and it's big, and latent, and somehow always taken into account and always ignored, and political professionals always assume they understand it. It has been called many things the past 50 years, "the silent center," "the silent majority," "the coalition," "the base." The idea of it has evolved as its composition has evolved, but the fact that it's big, and relatively silent, and somehow always latent, maintains. And watching that McCain event—vroom vroom—one got the sense it is perhaps beginning to pay attention to the campaign. I see it as the old America, and if and when it reasserts itself, the campaign will shift indeed, and in ways you can even see from 10,000 feet.

Republican Energy Fumble

Politics has its puzzling moments. John McCain and most of the GOP experienced one late last week. That was when five of their own set about dismantling the best issue Republicans have in the upcoming election.

It's taken time, but Sen. McCain and his party have finally found -- in energy -- an issue that's working for them. Riding voter discontent over high gas prices, the GOP has made antidrilling Democrats this summer's headlines.

AP

Members of the "Gang of 10" discuss their energy plan, Aug. 1.

Their enthusiasm has given conservative candidates a boost in tough races. And Mr. McCain has pressured Barack Obama into an energy debate, where the Democrat has struggled to explain shifting and confused policy proposals.

Still, it was probably too much to assume every Republican would work out that their side was winning this issue. And so, last Friday, in stumbled Sens. Lindsey Graham, John Thune, Saxby Chambliss, Bob Corker and Johnny Isakson -- alongside five Senate Democrats. This "Gang of 10" announced a "sweeping" and "bipartisan" energy plan to break Washington's energy "stalemate." What they did was throw every vulnerable Democrat, and Mr. Obama, a life preserver.

That's because the plan is a Democratic giveaway. New production on offshore federal lands is left to state legislatures, and then in only four coastal states. The regulatory hurdles are huge. And the bill bars drilling within 50 miles of the coast -- putting off limits some of the most productive areas. Alaska's oil-rich Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is still a no-go.

The highlight is instead $84 billion in tax credits, subsidies and federal handouts for alternative fuels and renewables. The Gang of 10 intends to pay for all this in part by raising taxes on . . . oil companies! The Sierra Club couldn't have penned it better. And so the Republican Five has potentially given antidrilling Democrats the political cover they need to neutralize energy through November.

Sen. Obama was thrilled. He quickly praised the Gang's bipartisan spirit, and warmed up to a possible compromise. Of course, he means removing even the token drilling provisions now in the bill. But he's only too happy for the focus to remain on the Gang's efforts, and in particular on the five Republicans providing his party its fig leaf.

Equally gleeful was Louisiana's Mary Landrieu, the Senate's most vulnerable Democrat. She had been sweating the energy debate, especially after her vote against more oil-shale production -- a position her Republican opponent, John Kennedy, had used against her to great effect. Yet there she was, chummily standing with the Gang of 10 and boasting that she is working with "five Republicans" to "lower prices at the pump by increasing offshore drilling here at home."

Mr. McCain, who had been commanding the energy debate, was left to explain why he, of all people, wasn't more enthusiastic about a "bipartisan" effort on energy, especially one that includes "drilling." His camp was forced to take refuge in taxes, explaining that their boss couldn't sign up for a bill that included more. If this is what Mr. McCain's good friend Lindsey Graham considers "helping," somebody might want to ask him to stop.

And pity poor Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who has been working overtime to stanch GOP losses this fall and head off a filibuster-proof Democratic Senate. His dogged efforts to highlight Democratic opposition to drilling has kept energy in the news and laid the groundwork for GOP candidates to use the issue to their advantage.

In the Colorado Senate race, Democrats had christened former GOP Rep. Bob Schaffer "Big Oil Bob" -- hoping to smear his oil industry career. "Big Oil Bob" has instead embraced his pro-drilling positions and is pummeling opponent Mark Udall for his antidrilling stance. In recent weeks, Mr. Schaffer has erased Mr. Udall's lead. Polls show Republican Sens. Norm Coleman (Minnesota) and John Sununu (New Hampshire) both climbing in the polls on the back of strong energy arguments. As two of the GOP's most vulnerable senators, both might well have run for cover with the Gang of 10. Instead they're fighting on the merits.

The "bipartisan" Republican senators have undercut these efforts, and boosted Ms. Landrieu. They've even put a smile on Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's face. He'd been struggling to tamp down the energy debate through November, where he hopes to increase his majority and permanently shelve drilling. He's now counting on the Gang to fruitlessly continue "negotiations" straight through the Senate's short September session and solve his problem for him.

Not one of the five Republicans in the Gang is facing a tough election this year. That's the sort of security that leads to bad decisions. And theirs is the sort of thinking that could leave Republicans in a permanent minority.