Profile
Anatoly (Natan) Sharansky
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redress.btinternet.co.uk
Israel's great dissembler
12 March 2001
We have chosen to profile Anatoly Sharansky, the Israeli deputy prime minister and leader of Yisra'el Ba'aliyah, the Russian immigrants' party in Israel, because he encapsulates the paradox of the Jewish inhabitants of Israel, a paradox that is the hallmark of Zionists throughout the world. That is, how can a people that has suffered so much over the ages, from pogroms in Europe to Nazi genocide, emulate their historical oppressors and be so lacking in empathy with their victims, the Palestinian Arabs? (We salute the tiny minority of Jews in Israel and elsewhere who have risked opprobrium by consistently speaking out for Palestinian rights.) Anatoly Sharansky (we shall call him by his birth name, Anatoly, rather than Natan, the name given to him by the Israeli ambassador to West Germany upon his release from prison) was born in Ukraine and educated in Russia as a mathematician. In 1973 he applied for an exit visa to Israel, but, like all Soviet citizens who had worked in the military-industrial complex, he was refused on security grounds. He then became involved in an Israeli-sponsored worldwide campaign to put pressure on the Kremlin to give special treatment to Soviet Jewish citizens by allowing them to emigrate to Israel, irrespective of whether or not they had worked in the defence sector. In 1977 he was arrested on suspicion of spying for the US, and in the following year he was found guilty as charged and sentenced to 13 years imprisonment. He was released in 1986 in a US-Soviet spy exchange. Prior to his emigration to Israel, Sharansky liked to portray himself as a symbol of the struggle for human rights, and since then he has made much of his status as a former "victim of totalitarian oppression". However, his belief in human rights, nurtured at the height of the Cold War, appears to have been heavily tainted with the culture of the Soviet-American power struggle, which justified the cynical use of practically anything as ammunition in the superpower rivalry for global dominance. Unlike most of us, Sharansky apparently does not believe that human rights are universal and indivisible, that is, applicable to all human beings everywhere and irrespective of their race, colour or creed. Not only does he oppose any Israeli concessions that may eventually lead to the realization of the Palestinians' right to self determination, but he advocates policies that could only mean the dispossession of more Palestinians living in Israel, and the illegally occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. No wonder that he was one of the very few people to have amicable relations with the former ultra right-wing prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu. Sharansky began his political career in Israel by becoming head of the Zionist Forum, an organization dedicated to lobbying on behalf of Soviet immigrants. However, not content with being a mere "welfare worker", in 1995 he founded the Yisra'el Ba'aliyah party, with the immediate aim of bringing in another million Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union and of encouraging a further million Jewish citizens of the United States and the European countries to immigrate to Israel. For him, the value of peace with the Palestinians is measured solely by the extent to which it would work towards achieving the overriding goal of encouraging Jewish citizens of other states to immigrate to Israel. Thus, addressing the founding congress of Yisra'el Ba'aliyah in June 1995, he said: "Without the hope for peace, you cannot convince people to come here." That the "ingathering of the Jews", that is, the bringing into Israel and the occupied territories of millions of foreign Jews who, like Sharansky himself, had no link whatsoever to those lands, could only mean the dispossession of more Palestinians from the land of their ancestors is a fact that could hardly have escaped our human rights hero. Or perhaps, having been brought up in a society where ideology and the class struggle dictated one's view of life and where all conflicts were seen as a zero-sum game, with victors and vanquished, be they a class or a superpower, he was blinded by his own ideology, Zionism. For almost in the same breath as reiterating his commitment to the "ingathering" of millions of foreign Jews, Sharansky is perfectly at ease with publicly objecting to any hint of allowing Palestinians to take up residence in the territories administered by the Palestinian National Authority or to the right of refugees to return to those territories, even if they had families living there. Indeed, the impact of the Soviet system on Sharansky's mind appears to have gone much deeper. Thus, like the Soviet habit of remoulding the history books to suit themselves, our human rights hero insists that any Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories should be made contingent on, among other things, the Palestinians rewriting their school books "to remove all language that denies the legitimacy of Israel and Zionism". In other words, Palestinian children should be taught that their uprooting from the land of their forefathers by foreigners from the former Soviet Union, Europe and the United States was perfectly legitimate. Sharansky resigned as Israeli interior minister in former Prime Minister Ehud Barak's government over rumours that Barak was contemplating some trivial "concessions" over Jerusalem, territory and the refugees at the Camp David talks with Palestinian leaders in July 2000. But, judging by the unpopularity among Israelis of making any concessions to the people they had uprooted, and given his solid support among the Russian immigrants, Sharansky must now have his vision firmly fixed on the position of Israeli prime minister. In the meantime, it would do him well to learn from the history of his Slav cousins in the Balkans. For while the Zionists have the dubious honour of being the twentieth century's first ethnic cleansers, Sharansky's kith and kin in the Balkans (let us not forget that our human rights hero is a Russian, albeit of the Jewish religion), have taken that tradition to its logical conclusion, with tragic consequences for themselves and their victims. His blind ambition aside, Sharansky has a responsibility to his compatriots and co-religionists in Israel because, as in the Balkans, the burden of history weighs heavily on the shoulders of the indigenous people of Palestine whose continuing misfortunes are unlikely to let them forget the architects of their plight. As a Russian, Sharansky should know more than anyone else that great powers, even nuclear ones, come and go and that the fall can be sudden and cruel. But, with his contradictions and double standards, our human rights hero is unlikely to learn anything. Rather, when the time comes to write his obituary Anatoly Sharansky will most probably be remembered as Israel's great Russian dissembler, with his years as a so-called "human rights campaigner" not warranting even a footnote.
NOTE: This is the man behind the nonsense of Bush's promotion campaign for "democracy" in the Arab world. Is it little wonder that "the Arab street" and some Arab leaders suspect that the real goal is the expansion of Greater Israel? |
