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Prominent Soviet dissidents Vladimir Bukovsky and Natan Sharansky were released in these exchanges.

In a speech at the American Enterprise Institute’s World Forum in June 2002, Sharansky said that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was “not a tribal war between Jews and Arabs in the Middle East,” but rather a key battle in “the first world war of the 21st century, waged between the world of terror and the world of democracy.”

He brought Sharansky into the White House and introduced him to Bush, who came gradually to adopt his views.

Elections, as Sharansky wrote in his 2004 book The Case for Democracy, “are not a true test of a democracy.”

Sharansky made this point to Bush in person in May 2005 after resigning from the Israeli government in protest of its withdrawal from Gaza.