From Gulag to Governing, Sharansky Hones His Game

To Natan Sharansky, the Soviet prisoner turned Israeli minister of trade, it seems that life in the gulag was simpler than life in the government.

At the beginning of his nine-year imprisonment, he took the uncompromising stand that he could not cooperate with his KGB keepers. Instead, he played a kind of mental chess game with them, trying to elicit information without giving up anything of his own.

This is a luxury Sharansky cannot afford as a member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s fractious coalition government, where compromise is the name of the game and Sharansky is a novice.

“It was much easier with the KGB. You had enemies and you had friends then, and having said ‘no’ to the KGB, you had fulfilled all 613 commandments a religious Jew has to fulfill,” Sharansky said. “But here, you are playing chess with your partners, allies, friends--people without whom you cannot succeed. It is a much more complicated game. And there is the government, the opposition, the electorate. For this, you need Deep Blue.”

Sharansky--who recently lost to one of IBM’s chess-playing supercomputers--abandoned the familiar role of dissident and perennial outsider a year and a half ago to form his own party of Russian immigrants in a bid to enter Israel’s political mainstream. Now, after a successful election and a year as minister of industry and trade, he is still trying to get used to membership in Israel’s establishment, with mixed feelings and a mixed record of achievement.

His role in the government has given Russian immigrants a new sense of pride and self-respect, if few additional goodies from the system. They feel they have an honest and intelligent representative in Sharansky who is looking out for their interests.

But he has alienated many liberal friends by aligning the Russians with far-right and ultra-Orthodox political parties in the coalition and by hesitating on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. His vote for a conversion law that would effectively relegate Reform and Conservative Jews to second-class status in Israel has disappointed many who saw him as a voice for religious pluralism and who fought for his release from Soviet jails.

And he has risked his friendship with Netanyahu, tangling in public with the prime minister.

His Own Worst Critic

At this point, Sharansky still may be his own worst critic. Accustomed to making decisions on his own, he admits to feeling hamstrung at having to weigh voters’ wishes before acting. He is frustrated by the constant wrangling in this government of eight political parties with divergent agendas and by the slow pace of change: He wants to modernize Israel into a fully free-market, high-tech economy, not just to make life better for a few industrialists and a handful of immigrants.

“It is a strange feeling. I ask myself all the time why I am doing this, and I have to remind myself why,” Sharansky said. “I criticize the government and then I remember, ‘My God, I am the government.’ ”

The main reason he entered electoral politics was to give voice to Israel’s 800,000 or so immigrants from the old Soviet Union. Here they are called “Russians,” regardless of the former Soviet republic from which they came. He wanted to accelerate their integration into Israeli society and, by doing so, to encourage 1 million more Russian Jews to move to Israel.

His Israel With Immigration party campaigned on the slogan of “no integration without representation” in May 1996, Israel’s first vote with separate balloting for members of parliament and the prime minister. His victory was astounding for a new party of immigrants--seven seats in the 120-member Knesset, or parliament, and, consequently, two seats in Netanyahu’s Cabinet. (His second in command, Yuli Edelstein, is the immigration minister.)

The election itself represents an accelerated integration for Russians, a group often stereotyped here as gangsters and prostitutes and generally maligned in the way that new immigrants are all over the world. The highly educated Russians have trouble finding work in their professions. They feel unappreciated by the Israelis, whom they regard as less cultured; Israelis resent the resources that complaining Russians take from the state in resettlement benefits.

“The fact that we won the election, and no one expected it, has made Israelis respect us,” said a retired Russian engineer working as a janitor.

“Maybe they don’t like us any more than they did before the election, but now they are more afraid of us,” added a trilingual Russian translator.

Backlash Against Russian Immigrants

Sharansky’s critics disagree. They say he was wrong to form an immigrant party instead of working through one of the larger, established parties. They point to a Israel Radio poll conducted this month as evidence of a backlash: A third of Israelis questioned said they were “frightened” by Russian immigrants, more than 40% thought immigrants get too much government aid, and a stunning 63% opposed further mass immigration from the former Soviet Union--even though the Law of Return giving Jews the right to citizenship is a central tenet of Israel.

“This is one of the shocking results of the political breakthrough,” said Yuli Kosharovsky, another former Soviet prisoner and member of Netanyahu’s Likud Party. “The political elites feel endangered. . . . The local population feels endangered in their jobs, socially and now politically.”

Sharansky responded: “No doubt there is a backlash. But I don’t see the party as the problem. The backlash is due to the fact that this wave of new immigrants has broken the rules and already begun to compete. But I am not afraid of this, because the real way to become integrated is to become part of the process of decision-making.”

In that sense, Sharansky’s integration has taken 11 years. He immigrated here in 1986 after being freed in a prisoner exchange by the Soviets, who had accused him of treason for fighting for Soviet Jews’ right to immigrate to Israel.

During his first years in Israel, Sharansky resumed life with his wife, Avital, who had campaigned tirelessly for his release. The couple had two daughters. He wrote a magazine column, penned “Fear No Evil,” a memoir of his prison years, and recovered his health, which had deteriorated from hunger strikes, a prison diet and a lack of sunlight. He resisted efforts by both major political parties to draw him into their ranks, instead founding the Zionist Forum, a group to help Russian immigrants.

Sharansky turned down supporters who wanted him to form a Russian party in 1992. But four years and hundreds of thousands of immigrants later, he calculated that the time was right. There was a critical mass of Russian voters, and Sharansky felt he had accomplished all he could on his own. He hit the stump in his trademark olive green cap to become the outsider inside a government.

Just how deeply integrated the 49-year-old Sharansky is became apparent to him recently when he picked up a newspaper and read it was the anniversary of his conviction in a Soviet court and his sentencing to 13 years in jail. He was so busy in his new job he had forgotten.

At the same time, Sharansky’s Hebrew is heavily accented, and he clearly still prefers speaking Russian. His feeling of being Russian or an immigrant fluctuates with his surroundings. “When I am with new immigrants, I feel like a veteran Israeli, but when I am with Israelis, I feel as angry as a young immigrant with their paternalism,” he said.

Sharansky refuses to be pigeon-holed in other ways. He rejects labels like left or right, religious or secular. In a country as politically polarized as Israel, he is unusual in his willingness to offend both sides of rival camps.

Last March, he voted against Netanyahu’s proposal to pull back Israeli troops from an increased percentage of the West Bank under the Israeli-Palestinian peace accords. In breaking rank, he angered members of the right-wing coalition who felt he was being disloyal to the prime minister. He offended left-of-center friends who felt he was contributing to the collapse of the peace process.

“I voted against the further redeployment not because I thought it was too big. . . . It was that I felt we cannot afford to do this without knowing where we are going, what our aims are,” Sharansky said.

Fundamentally Conservative

It should come as no surprise that the onetime refusenik is fundamentally conservative. Sharansky has never made a secret of his dislike for the 1993 peace agreement between Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat and then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin; he opposed the creation of a Palestinian state in his campaign platform.

And yet liberals still express disappointment that Sharansky has not become an advocate of human rights for all, including Palestinians, and that he has not been more of an activist for peace.

Recently, he agreed to meet with Palestinian peace negotiator Mahmoud Abbas, but the session was postponed by Sharansky’s first public falling-out with Netanyahu. “I didn’t think I should talk to the Palestinians when I wasn’t speaking with the prime minister,” Sharansky said.

The flap between Sharansky and Netanyahu may be the best example of the trade minister’s assimilation into Israeli politics. Ostensibly, the dispute last month was over the government’s selection of a new ambassador to Russia without consulting Russian Cabinet members.

It was a case of Sharansky flexing his muscles, as other coalition members have done. Unhappy that the prime minister had not fulfilled commitments to provide more jobs, housing and other benefits to Russian immigrants, Sharansky boycotted some Cabinet meetings. Miffed that Netanyahu had reneged on an agreement to consult his Cabinet on key appointments, Sharansky threatened to pull out of the coalition. With his party’s number of seats in the Knesset, Sharansky is one of a handful of coalition members who could topple the government in a no-confidence vote.

“I came to the government with political interests, and I have to represent them,” Sharansky said. “Bibi said, ‘You’re my friend.’ I said: ‘You want me as a friend? OK, but then I will not be in your government and you will not be prime minister.’ ”

Netanyahu gave in.

The down-and-dirty maneuvering of Israeli politics has taken some of the shine off Sharansky’s image as an uncompromising hero. Some Israelis find this disappointing, while others see it as inevitable.

“I don’t think he’s just another cheap politician,” said author Zeev Chafets, who befriended Sharansky when he worked with him at the Jerusalem Report, an English-language magazine.

But Chafets criticizes Sharansky for putting Russian immigrants in with the ultra-Orthodox parties in Netanyahu’s government, saying: “It is not a natural alignment. The Russians are secular and democratic. The religious are theocrats. The Russians are capitalists. The religious are welfare cases. I don’t think they have anything in common.”

Another issue that has riled religious moderates here and abroad is Sharansky’s stand on the conversion law, which would formalize an unofficial status quo giving ultra-Orthodox rabbis a monopoly over conversions carried out in Israel. Only “bona fide” Jews, those recognized as Jewish by the Orthodox rabbinate, may be married and buried in Israel; only Orthodox rabbis are permitted to conduct those ceremonies. Reform and Conservative Jews--a tiny minority in Israel but the majority of American Jews--feel the Jewish state should not take steps that demean their form of Judaism.

While Russians take little active interest in the issue, theoretically it could affect them. Many Russian immigrants were granted Israeli citizenship because one of their grandparents was Jewish. But they are not considered Jews unless born to a Jewish mother. To marry, or, in the case of women, for their children to be considered Jewish, they must undergo a strict Orthodox conversion in Israel or leave the country for a more liberal conversion.

“As much as a third of Sharansky’s Israeli constituency, accepted as immigrants but not as Jews, would lose their best opportunity to join Judaism formally under the bill Sharansky helped through its first reading,” wrote Hirsh Goodman, the editor of Jerusalem Report.

Sharansky is seeking a compromise on this issue.

Sharansky has long been concerned with the divisions between Jewish groups in Israel and the diaspora, or between secular and religious Jews in Israel. And he has experience bridging these chasms.

While jailed as a Jew with only a rudimentary knowledge of his religion, his wife became Orthodox in Israel. Meeting after their nine-year separation, Sharansky found his devout wife wearing head cover, keeping kosher and honoring the Sabbath. This was all new to Sharansky, and the Israeli media soon rumored that the famous couple would split.

But their marriage has survived, and Sharansky says this is because of mutual respect. He sees it as a lesson for other Israelis. “Israelis are so passionate, so extreme; everything seems so intolerable, and they fight to the end. I guess all revolutionaries are extremist, whether they’re Bolsheviks or Zionists. But I know the Jewish people can only survive as one people, as religious and nonreligious together,” he said.