Washington's Prophet Finds Few Believers Back Home

Sydney Morning Herald

Monday May 30, 2005

Ed O'Loughlin

He influenced Bush but Natan Sharansky is now jobless, writes Ed O'Loughlin in Jerusalem.

A famous Jew once remarked that no man is a prophet in his own town. Natan Sharansky may be a guru in Washington, but back home in Jerusalem he is out of a job.

This week the 57 year-old former Soviet dissident suffered a crushing disappointment when the Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, swooped at the last minute to block his long campaign for the chair of the Jewish Agency, a venerable Zionist organisation that promotes Jewish immigration to Israel.

The blow to his long-cherished ambition came only three weeks after Mr Sharansky resigned his post as minister for diaspora and Jerusalem affairs, citing his opposition to Mr Sharon's plans to withdraw Israeli troops and settlers from Gaza and parts of the West Bank.

This "disengagement" plan was, he wrote, a "tragic mistake" that would encourage terrorism.

Yet news of Mr Sharansky's decline has failed to rock Israeli politics: despite his international reputation - he was freed from a Soviet prison in 1986 after a campaign by international rights groups and Jewish bodies - Mr Sharansky remains a minor political figure in Israel. The left had tended to regard him as a hypocrite while the right increasingly sees him as an eccentric ideologue.

Instead, Mr Sharansky owes his present international prominence to attitudes in Washington, where his writings dividing the world into "free societies" and "fear societies" have been hailed as a major intellectual influence by the US President, George Bush.

But even before his resignation it seemed that Mr Sharansky's star was on the wane in the US. The Bush circle risks being embarrassed by his outspoken opposition to Gaza disengagement, a policy that the President has strongly endorsed. There were also signs of a broader backlash against him, both from the Israel-sceptic conservative right and from liberal American Jews worried about his outspoken support for the war in Iraq and for continuing Jewish settlement in the West Bank.

"Not once in all his years in Israel has [Mr Sharansky] ever stood up for the rights of the Palestinians of the occupied territories," wrote the columnist Hillel Halkin in the normally pro-Israel New York Sun.

In early February it emerged that a committee headed by Mr Sharansky had quietly decided to apply to East Jerusalem controversial Israeli property laws that allow the Jewish state to seize property from people (in practice non-Jews) who no longer live within its self-defined boundaries.

The effect of Mr Sharansky's decision was to strip a potentially vast amount of East Jerusalem property from Palestinians who live outside Israel's definition of Jerusalem. The scandal only emerged when the Israeli army bluntly told some Christian farmers from Bethlehem that their ancestral land now belonged to the Government.

Faced with an international outcry, the Israeli press condemned Mr Sharansky.

But Mr Sharansky is not easily dismayed. When interviewed by the Herald recently he was buoyed by the recent mass demonstrations against the Syrian-backed Government in Lebanon and against President Hosni Mubarak's attempts to cling to power in Egypt.

These were, he said, confirmation of the central thrust of his philosophy, that all people living in "fear societies" want and deserve to be free.

Derived from this is his argument that Western states should not prop up undemocratic regimes - such as Saudi Arabia and the Palestinian Authority - in the interests of stability. Undemocratic regimes actually create instability by provoking or sponsoring terrorism, he says.

Finally - and it was this that led to his resignation - he believes that Israel, as a "free society", should not negotiate a settlement with the Palestinians because they are not democratic and are not fighting terrorism.

"The critical question is whether the [Palestinian] state that will emerge will be a democratic state or a terrorist state. If our disengagement, our leaving Gaza, is connected with [ending terrorism and incitement] then I will not be against."

He rejects the allegations that his hardline policies on Palestinians and the settlements belie his professed belief in human rights. "I think that all those people who do not like me, who are supporting Arafat's dictatorship, Arab dictatorships, in order to bring peace, they are the major violators of human rights of Palestinians," he says.