Natan Sharansky, Prisoner of Zion, Tells the Sun That War ‘Will Decide Whether Israel Survives as a Jewish and Democratic State in the Middle East’

The reckoning that Hamas’s attack on Israel was the “biggest pogrom of modern times” comes from, in Natan Sharansky, a man well acquainted with the enemies of the Jews and what it takes to defeat them. Natan Sharansky interviewed by A.R Hoffman for the New York Sun. October 25, 2023, at Manhattan. Mr. Sharansky, the former Soviet political prisoner and the first released by President Gorbachev, sat down with the Sun in a lower Manhattan hotel room to discuss the violence erupting from Gaza. “We have to destroy Hamas,” he says in an English still shaped by his native Donetsk. “That’s it.” Israel’s former deputy prime minister spent nine years in Soviet jails. He became the most well-known of all the refusniks. It led to a political career at the peak of Israeli — and Diaspora — politics. He spoke to the Sun days before a mob’s hunt for Jewish passengers at an airport in the Russian satrapy of Dagestan, which came after meetings comprising Hamas, Iranian, and Russian officials at Moscow. Back in 2005, Mr. Sharansky so objected to Israel withdrawing from Gaza that he quit Prime Minister Sharon’s government. He said he thinks often of how he tried to persuade the great warrior to reconsider that decision because it would mean that Israel by “its own hands” would be “building the biggest terror base in the Middle East.” Soon Sharon suffered a stroke and sank into a coma, and Gaza fell into the hands of Hamas. Mr. Sharansky, who was born into a world saturated with Soviet antisemitism, reflects that what “starts from Jews doesn’t finish with the Jews,”meaning that antisemitic sentiment — whether at Moscow, Gaza City, or Harvard Yard — is an indicator of wider societal sickness. He notes how would-be campus de-colonizers “have openly embraced violence” and “openly embraced a sort of genocidal rhetoric,” often becoming violent themselves .Bemoaning the replacement of the “fight for human rights with the fight for power,” Mr. Sharansky, who was a fixture of Israeli politics between 1996 and 2005, shares that he grew up in the world of this philosophy and they know how awful it becomes.” He observes that if the word “race” in critical race theory is replaced with “class,” the result is “Marxism-Leninism in its purest form.”Mr. Sharansky is for American-style term limits for Israeli prime ministers. He confides to the Sun that he once shared that opinion with Prime Minister Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving leader. Mr. Netanyahu did not respond favorably. Mr. Sharansky lauds the “solidarity of Jews who want to continue their way in history having their own state.” The state of the Israeli union is, he shares, “very strong now.”The question of this war against Hamas, Mr. Sharansky insists, is whether Israel “will survive as a Jewish and democratic state in the Middle East.” He links that desperate struggle to Ukraine’s battle to hold off Russia’s invasion. This son of the former Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic calls Kyiv’s fight a “struggle for the future free world.”That is true of the Jewish state’s task as well, which in Hamas is facing “another version of ISIS which is just on our border but which “can easily become a global phenomenon.” Mr. Sharansky explains that October 7 shattered an understanding Israel had with President Putin, who “holds the keys to the skies over Syria” and its host of Iranian installations that double as Israeli targets. Now, though, the refusnik, reasons, Russia and Iran are engaged in “full cooperation” as “strategic partners” against the “free world.” Predicting that “Ukraine will win,” Mr. Sharansky recalls how he and his fellow dissidents knew that, in its last days, the Soviet Union was doomed. That was when all the “sovietologists in the West” thought that the state of Lenin and Stalin could not fall. Mr. Sharansky, though, spotlights the strategic incoherence of a geo-political landscape where America is “fighting Russia and trying to appease Iran and Israel is fighting Iran and trying to appease Russia.”Mr. Sharansky recalls conversations with Sharon where the premier insisted that the withdrawal from Gaza would buy Israel “10 years” of support from the world. The Soviet Jew told the sabra that “10 days” would be a better estimate of the window of sympathy for Israel. Mr. Sharansky, an admirer of Sharon, observes that the prime minister believed that he could “change his image in the world.” To some extent he succeeded, Mr. Sharanksy allows, “but it was a big tragedy.”

Natan Sharansky, Prisoner of Zion, Tells the Sun That War ‘Will Decide Whether Israel Survives as a Jewish and Democratic State in the Middle East’

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