Natan Sharansky arrives at lunch precisely on time, his trademark olive-green cap perched firmly atop his head, complemented by a matching sweater. He exudes a lively energy – even after all he has been through – at age 76.
“I went straight from hell to paradise, and I am still in paradise,” he says of his transition from nine years in a Soviet prison, including 405 days in a punishing cell, to Jerusalem. That time was partly served in a gulag-like “corrective colony,” and included hunger strikes and force-feeding. Indeed, it’s surreal to be sitting down with him in the upscale Pompidou café on the German Colony’s main drag.
An international icon and a local Jerusalem celebrity, often glimpsed on streets and in stores, his presence adds to the “modern-day miracle” feel of life in the Jewish state.
Sharansky orders coffee with milk but is not patient with a digitized menu. “I just want a salad,” he says. “Lots of vegetables.”
His smile is infectious as he talks about his eight grandchildren. A son-in-law was in the reserves for 147 days, and his daughter and her five sons moved in to his home in the capital.
“One of the best parts of being a grandparent is that you enjoy the kids, then they go home to their parents,” he says with a laugh.
He admits to being busy since the war started. Sharansky, a former minister and executive chair of the Jewish Agency, is chairman of five Jewish nonprofits – including two that fight antisemitism and the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center, through which he is digitizing 200 years of archives.
He jokes that his wife, Avital, keeps asking when he will retire: “I retired five years ago.”
The conversation takes us from Russia (where he was known as Anatoly) to Israel to US college campuses. Sharansky talks animatedly and with a heavy Russian accent.
He vividly recounts the moment he stepped off the KGB airplane toward his newfound freedom. In defiance of the guards’ orders to walk in a straight line, Sharansky chose to zigzag across the tarmac. Another memorable scene is his now-legendary stride across Berlin’s Glienicke Bridge, where he took his first steps toward liberty clad in oversized civilian pants provided ahead of release. He leaped to freedom wearing a rope that served as a makeshift belt, causing the rope to snap. During the subsequent press conference, anxious to be reunited with his wife, he had to clutch his trousers to prevent them from slipping down.
Sharansky also talks about the first time he met Avital in Russia and how “it was love at first glance.” He endearingly tells of urging the young woman to join his group’s Hebrew program, promising he would help her, since he “knew 1,000 words in Hebrew.” Happily, that was the exact amount Avital knew as well. It didn’t take long to realize they both had exaggerated in their mutual eagerness to be together, each knowing “maybe 900 Hebrew words less.”
Hamas-Israel War and October 7 failures
THE DISCUSSION quickly turns to Oct. 7 and the “shocking” and “terrible” failure of Israel’s intelligence community and of the IDF that day. He says, “No one person does not want to fight back and restore peace, but our perception of our security changed that day.”
On the other hand, he says, “I think so much good has come out of our people” since the massacre. “In one day, we went from being a polarized society to the most united. Suddenly, it was clear that the whole year of these mutual accusations was not in the hearts of the people.
“I am sure there will be at least two new parties in the next elections: one to the left of Likud, and one to the right, with new faces for everyone.”
But Sharansky cannot let go of what he believes was the catalyst for the Gaza war: the Oslo Accords, meaning that the seeds of Oct. 7 were planted 30 years ago. He says the approach essentially communicated, “It’s not our business, and it’s not important for us in what kind of society the Palestinians live” but rather that Israel “find a dictator who can guarantee our stability.”
“That was the idea of Oslo,” Sharansky explains. “We are bringing [Yasser] Arafat. We know that he is a ruthless dictator. And we say to the Palestinians, ‘Whether you want it or not, he will be your leader.’ And we say to ourselves, ‘Our prime minister said that it’s good he is not restricted by democracy because that’s how he will defeat Hamas much quicker than we can do it.’”
Sharansky opposed Oslo because he believed Arafat would quickly understand that the only way he could maintain power by force was to find an external enemy. “What other external enemy would he have except us?” Sharansky asks. “A lot of public money was put into Arafat’s account so he would be loyal to us. And it failed big.”
Sharansky says that not only did Arafat not defeat Hamas, but “Hamas defeated him.”
Then came the Disengagement and the vision that Israel could separate from Gaza. Sharansky was the first minister to resign over the idea.
It’s not that Sharansky does not want peace or believe it is achievable, he stresses. Rather, he does not think Israeli and world leaders have gone about obtaining it in the right way. He calls prime minister Shimon Peres “primitive and a neo-Marxist,” having fully bought into a blissful vision of Mideast peace.
“He was so popular because of his optimism,” Sharansky says of Peres. “I am also optimistic, but I am not naive.” Prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, he opines, was more realistic but felt it worthwhile to proceed.
He says he does not believe Ariel Sharon really felt the Disengagement would achieve its goal. Sharon told Sharansky that he thought if Israel separated from Gaza and gave the Gazans complete independence, Israel would have 10 years of international approval – and be able to respond if Gazans carried out attacks against the Jewish state.
“I told him, ‘We don’t have 10 years; we don’t have 10 days,’” Sharansky says. “I was wrong. We had a couple of months.
“We are paying a very big price for our attempts,” Sharansky continues, speaking quickly. “We have no choice now. If we want to continue to exist as a state, we have to destroy Hamas. We have to take control over the security.”
THE CONVERSATION jumps to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who Sharansky believes should have had a two-term limit and needs to retire immediately after the war. But he also says Netanyahu “did great things for our people” and has played “a very important leadership role” in the country’s success.
He cites Netanyahu’s role in developing Israel’s capitalist economy, ensuring the Taglit-Birthright free trip to Israel program (of which Sharansky was an early champion), and highlighting the danger of Russian weapons sales to Iran.
“He deserves a lot of credit,” he says. “No one remembers,” noting that Netanyahu also went out of his way for Sharansky and his family on a personal level.
Anyone who claims Netanyahu is prolonging the war to stay in office is spreading a blood libel, he asserts, and the notion is “nuts.”
“I think that if [Benny] Gantz were the leader today, he would have done the same war as Bibi,” Sharansky says. “I don’t see many choices.”
He also believes there is a second front: American college campuses, which opened up to anti-Israel movements long before this war.
“In 2003, being a minister in the Israeli government, I had a kind of tour of all the universities because I was looking for the roots of antisemitism,” Sharansky recalls. “It was the time of the Second Intifada… when hundreds of our citizens were killed by suicide bombers, and we were fighting against it.
“And then I heard from one student – she was a post-graduate student in Harvard business school. She explained to me that she wanted very much to sign the letter against divestment in support of Israel. But she knew for sure there will be three professors who are very important for her career who will not like it. And that’s why she decided to be silent for a few years until her career was guaranteed.
“And I remember I thought, ‘My God, it’s not at Moscow University in my days when people were double-thinkers. Here in the free world.’”
Rather than blanket hasbara, Sharansky adds, the goal today should be to illustrate how antisemitism is the first warning to a society that it is becoming “illiberal.” He worries the Western world is betraying its liberal ideas in favor of progressive ones.
“The most important struggle in America is not between Left and Right but between liberals and progressives,” Sharansky says. “Progressives are not allies; they are enemies of liberalism. And it was very difficult for many organizations, especially Jewish liberal organizations, to accept this.”
We mention the storm of criticism against Jewish director Jonathan Glazer’s Oscar acceptance speech this past week, in which he “refute[d his] Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation…” All Jews, Sharansky points out, regardless of ideology, would be rounded up like the ethnic German Jews if it came down to it.
But he believes Oct. 7 should have enlightened these Jewish organizations, along with figures like Glazer – especially given the response to the heinous sexual crimes perpetrated by Hamas against Israeli women.
“The most awful violation of women’s rights [going back hundreds of years] … and these organizations [like UN Women] are not ready to say a word. They are silent at best,” Sharansky says, noting that some progressives even say the Israelis deserved it because they are “oppressors.”
“That’s like the best proof that progressive organizations are not liberal organizations,” Sharansky concludes.■
Pamela B. Paresky contributed to this article.
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