HERZLIYA, Israel – The former Soviet dissident turned Israeli political leader, Natan Sharansky, won a key battle this week when a French court banned the broadcast of Hezbollah’s anti-Jewish propaganda.

Ostensibly, the reason given by the Council of State was that Al Manar had violated the country’s strict anti-hate speech code. Yesterday, the French company, Eutelstat, stopped providing bandwidth for the Lebanon-based station, which features music videos eulogizing Palestinian Arab suicide bombers and has run newscasts that claim Zionist scientists invented the AIDS virus.

But the French court may have never considered the case of Al Manar if Mr. Sharansky had not decided more than a year ago to launch a diplomatic campaign to educate Europe about the channel’s agenda.

Mr. Sharansky met last month with President Bush for nearly two hours at the request of the White House to discuss his new book, “The Case for Democracy.” Yesterday, the Israeli minister told the annual strategic conference here that the president agreed that “all of the efforts to achieve peace through strengthening dictators have failed.”

But Washington is not the only capital where Mr. Sharansky’s diplomacy has been effective. In Paris, the author of the book on the president’s bedside table managed to indirectly get President Chirac, who attended the funeral of the Palestinian dictator the Israeli minister spent years warning against, to watch a six-minute videotape of some of Al Manar’s most egregious programs. The tape included scenes from a multipart miniseries, “Al-Shatat,” which dramatizes a Rabbi slaying a young boy in order to make matzoh. In another episode, the series depicts a secret Jewish government allegedly plotting to drop an atom bomb on Hiroshima, Japan.

Mr. Sharansky’s staff made the video last December and showed it to the prime minister’s office in order to receive funding for his international effort to end European broadcasts of Al Manar, which aired “Al-Shatat” in 2002. Last year at this time, the Russian emigre showed the tape to the German foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, in meetings in Berlin. “When I showed it to him, he nearly fainted,” Mr. Sharansky told The New York Sun.

He then began airing the video to foreign ambassadors in Israel, whom he said generally agreed that Hezbollah’s satellite station “crossed many lines.” “I decided it wasn’t enough,” Mr. Sharansky said. “I needed to get this to the leaders. I told them they should make sure their citizens don’t see this.”

In America, he showed the video to members of Congress and pressed the lawmakers to take up his cause in France.

The State Department this week will place Hezbollah’s station on its list of terror organizations, a senior American official told the Associated Press yesterday.

By the spring of this year, the Israeli minister said he realized he had to press the case to France because French companies owned the satellites that beamed Al Manar into households throughout Europe. At the time, Al Manar was broadcast unofficially on lower-quality satellites that had escaped the purview of the French courts.

“France made very strong assurances, including assurances made from the French president to our president in May,” he said. “We gave them some credit on this.”

It was not necessarily an easy decision for the Chirac government which has courted the support of Arab governments with more zeal and acquiescence than Israel would like. Indeed, Lebanon’s Audiovisual Council threatened to take actions against French television stations this week in response to the court decision Monday. Iran’s Foreign Ministry has also voiced rare criticism for the French government that prior to 1979, gave the founder of the Islamic revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini, safe harbor.

But the decision to ban the unofficial broadcasts in France were reversed last month when Mr. Chirac’s government granted Al Manar an official license to broadcast in the country if it agreed not to air anti-Semitic programs.

“They could have waited one hour to take the station off the air,” Mr. Sharansky said. “From the first minute of the broadcast it was obvious what they were broadcasting.” It took two weeks for the French ministry that oversees the media in the country to refer it to the court.

But the decision to grant a license to Al Manar incensed Mr. Sharansky and the leaders of France’s Jewish community.

“There was a decision instead of simply closing it, like we had hoped, now we will watch if they keep an agreement.” Mr. Sharansky traveled to Paris last month and met with the French minister for victim’s rights, Nicole Guedj.

“You are giving them legitimacy. You are signing an official agreement with Al Manar,” Mr. Sharansky said. “This is not a station that is occasionally anti-Semitic. The idea, they make no secret, is to delegitimize Israel and Jews. Whether you take children’s programs or roundtable discussions, they delegitimize Jews.”

On December 14, the French foreign minister, Michel Barnier, described the decision to take Al Manar off the air as a legal matter. “We can’t turn a blind eye to language which incites hatred. French law is very clear, so everyone must comply with it,” he said.

Mr. Sharansky said he will not give up his campaign against Al Manar.

“On the one hand we have an important success. Today Al Manar has stopped its broadcast to Europe. In France after many ups and downs they shut it down,” he said. “On the other hand the people in Iran and out of Iran can watch this ‘Al-Shatat’ series every Sunday.”

In the interview yesterday, Mr. Sharansky said he was so concerned about Iran’s decision to run the miniseries, which purports to tell the story of the Jewish people in exile, that he wrote a letter to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan. He said he began by noting that the international community has recently become seized with Tehran’s quest for an atomic bomb. “Iran makes no secret that it intends to use the bomb to make a new Holocaust to destroy a Jewish state,” Mr. Sharansky said. “But a Holocaust needs to be prepared. An anti-Semitic campaign – that is exactly the preparation of this. If you want to see how serious they are in their intention, the Iranians are becoming the center of the most vicious anti-Semitic programs, which have been condemned by the major United Nations countries. Many others in the Middle East now are hesitating to do this because they can be penalized for this. But Iran is doing it.”

Mr. Sharansky said he did not expect much of a response from the U.N.

“The fact is the United Nations is run by countries where the leaders don’t represent their people. It is dictators who are not interested in strengthening democracy and freedom in the world,” he said. “In the end, it’s the actions of the free world and its leaders that can bring change.”