Early in the morning of June 18, 1996, I entered a hulking, decaying building in the heart of Jerusalem. It had been built in 1928 as the grand mufti’s Palace Hotel. Now, it housed the offices of Israel’s Ministry of Industry and Trade. I arrived by bus as a private citizen. I returned home that evening in a chauffeur-driven Volvo, as minister of industry and trade, already overprogrammed with a long list of leading industrialists, bankers, mayors, and ambassadors from Israel’s top trading partners asking to meet me.
For three weeks, since the elections on May 29, Israel had been stuck in yet another unprecedented political crisis. Benjamin Netanyahu of Likud had beaten Prime Minister Shimon Peres of Labor by 29,457 votes of the over three million cast. That election began a three-time, quickly ended experiment of Israelis directly electing the prime minister, then voting for a party to represent them in parliament, the Knesset.
Everyone had assumed Peres would win. They remembered how the nation had united in mourning Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination in November 1995, and Peres was Rabin’s successor. The polls kept showing Peres ahead—and polls are never wrong, of course. The experts were so fooled that the American embassy didn’t prepare briefing materials about Netanyahu, who kept telling me that his nearly hourly polling showed him inching up day by day.
Election Day was thrilling. I traveled the country by car and helicopter—from the center to the north, from north to south, and from the south back to the center—to reach as many polling places as possible. Everywhere, immigrants voted in droves and greeted me enthusiastically. We started the morning assuming that if we won three or four Knesset seats (of 120) we would have pulled off a miracle. When reporters announced the first results on TV at 10 p.m., we had seven seats, nearly 6 percent of the vote. We celebrated until one o’clock in the morning.
Throughout the night, Shimon Peres had the lead, as did his Labor Party. I went to sleep assuming Labor would court our party to join its coalition. The finance minister and Labor Party fixer Avraham Shochat had invited us to meet him the next morning at seven o’clock to start the preliminary bargaining about joining his coalition.
We met. But the tone was less celebratory than Shochat expected. By morning, Bibi had won. Shochat kindly offered some useful bargaining tips.
Netanyahu’s Likud Party and its allies ended up with thirty-two Knesset seats, two fewer than their Labor rivals. Netanyahu formed a governing coalition in the 120-seat Knesset, with three religious parties, the National Religious Party (NRP), Shas, and United Torah Judaism; a new, centrist, ultimately one-term party, the Third Way; and our party, Yisrael B’Aliyah. The other parties together added up to fifty-nine seats. Our seven gave Netanyahu and Likud the majority of sixty-six.
The Israeli political Establishment was stunned—and furious. Many reporters were particularly annoyed because their predictions were so wrong. They couldn’t accept Netanyahu as a legitimate winner. Given the harsh right-wing demagoguery before Rabin’s assassination, many Bibi critics treated him as if he had killed the prime minister then stolen the election, in an evil attempt to deprive Israel of peace. When I joined Bibi’s government, that anger often made it difficult to govern—and for rivals and reporters to maintain civil relationships with the new ministers.
It was as if we were back in the world of opposing totalitarian regimes, where good genuinely fights evil. Having suffered under a dictatorship, I still find it hard to see how easily citizens living in a democracy forget that most of their political rivals have legitimate demands, expectations, and reservations.
After intensive negotiations, our party received two ministries in the eighteen-person cabinet and some key Knesset posts. As newcomers, we couldn’t believe our luck. In retrospect, we could have demanded more.
Before the campaign, when friends asked me which ministry I wanted, I gave what they thought was a cagey answer. “I am not sure I want to be a minister. I would like to be the prime minister’s chief adviser on aliyah, absorption, and world Jewry,” I said. Conscious of my thin résumé as an administrator or policy expert, I believed professionals should run complicated ministries like defense, treasury, and trade.
Eventually, insiders explained to me the basic laws of Israeli political gravity. “Your power comes from two main sources,” they told me. “Having a seat at the cabinet table with a vote. And having a ministry with actual budgets and real appointments. Otherwise you’re irrelevant.”
So advised, I became the minister of industry and trade, with membership in the security cabinet, the inner cabinet committee that made Israel’s most pressing life-and-death decisions. I would also head the Interministerial Committee on Aliyah and Absorption. Foreshadowing future battles, and approaching my initial vision, Netanyahu agreed to rename it the Interministerial Committee on Aliyah, Absorption, and Diaspora Affairs. Such committees functioned independently. Their decisions automatically became government policy unless other ministers objected within a short window of opportunity. Yuli Edelstein, my fellow Prisoner of Zion and the former vice president of the Zionist Forum, became minister of absorption.
The Volvo was nice, but the job was daunting. I walked into the depressing but intimidating offices with a small team of assistants who had worked with me in the Zionist Forum or during the campaign. All had been born in Russia, except for one Israeli-born Sabra. Avi Maoz was a young, Yeshiva-trained, sandal-wearing Israeli with long, swaying tzitzit, ritual garment fringes. He had traveled around the world with Avital for the last two years of her campaign. Although many in the Establishment usually disdained such a type, he would become a highly respected director general in various ministries during the next decade. Eli Kazhdan, born in Moscow, made aliyah from Boston at twenty-one. He had had only one job during his time in Israel, working for me in the Zionist Forum. He would become my chief of staff. Roman Polonsky, a musician and theater director in the Soviet Union and a Hebrew teacher in Russia and later in Israel, had become a journalist for the Russian Israeli press. He was my campaign spokesperson and media relations expert. Luiza Walitsky had only been in Israel for a few years. Her first Israeli job was working for the campaign. She would coordinate our relations with other ministers and Knesset members. Sonja Shebalan, a veteran Refusenik, counseled new immigrants in the Zionist Forum. She would be our liaison with the Russian immigrants and the broader Israeli public. Cumulatively, the number of days all of us had worked in Israeli government, or any government, added up to zero.
I was briefed by the now ex–minister of industry and trade, Micha Harish. Years ago, as general secretary of the Labor Party, he had offered the party’s help to the Zionist Forum as long as we sent the Russian immigrants to their health services, Kupat Holim Clalit, and other institutions. We said, “No, thank you.” Now, he was showing me the diagram of the ministry, with the names of the key departments and central functions. Acronyms like BaSaSaCh and RaShPaT and new phrases like chok idud hashkaot hahon, jumped off the page at me.
I was overwhelmed by all these incomprehensible Hebrew terms: the insurance for Israeli businesses abroad (BaSaSaCh), the industrial development authority (RaShPaT), the laws for supporting business in Israel. Eventually, I broke. Each bit of jargon made me imagine one dangerous long-tailed monster after another, all chasing me. Once that started, I couldn’t stop. BaSaSaCh sounds like Babai, the demon who starred in many of my mother’s favorite ghost stories, which terrified us as kids.
Trying to concentrate, I glanced at Eli and Roman. Both looked as shell-shocked as I was. “I feel like that gypsy from the anecdote, who became king,” I joked when the meeting finally ended. Roman laughed. Having grown up in a Russian-speaking household in America, Eli didn’t get the old-country cultural reference.
We explained that it was a bigoted Soviet joke. When the gypsy is asked, “What will you do if you become a king?” He answers, “I will steal a horse and run away.”
I looked around dramatically at our cavernous office in this once-majestic building and asked, “What will be our horse?”
At that moment, Avi Maoz entered and informed us that hundreds of employees were in the ministry’s auditorium, waiting for direction from their new leader. My calendar was filling up. My call list was already too long for any one person to manage. Avi suggested, however, that before going downstairs I speak to a woman who had been begging to see me and was near tears.
“Kvod hasar,” she began. This was the first time I had been called “the honorable minister.” I squelched my instinct to say, “Just call me Natan,” although I spent much of the next nine years saying that. She introduced herself as a custodian in the building. “I need this job,” she said. “I am a single mother, and I must feed my children.”
Confused, I looked at her silently. “Please don’t fire me,” she pleaded. “I already started learning Russian.”
My God, I realized, she was scared to death of me because she expected some Russian purge. At first, I was indignant. “Who told her such nonsense?” I asked.
Watching her tremble, I recalled a fellow prisoner telling me, “To be a good KGB interrogator, you have to enjoy watching people be scared of you.” That’s how I knew I couldn’t be a good interrogator. Now, in my first minutes as a minister, I felt terrible. Without saying a word, I had terrified this poor woman.
When I greeted the department heads, I tried defusing the tension by emphasizing my own linguistic shortcomings. Admitting I had a lot to learn about the ministry, I added with a smile, “I will work on improving my Hebrew too. I hope it will be good enough, so you won’t have to learn Russian.” Their laughter was forced. My joke had backfired. They were so nervous, the new boss’s wisecrack sounded threatening.
These mutual fears didn’t last. My new colleagues soon saw that we planned no big shake-ups and that we hired based on merit, not ethnicity or connections. And though my personal aides lacked professional experience, they made up for it with intelligence, curiosity, and goodwill.
Through my years in the government, many colleagues appreciated the friendly, even lighthearted atmosphere in our central office suite. These good feelings usually radiated throughout the ministry, unlike the tension that usually resounds through the corridors of power.
Overcoming the fears of imaginary purges was easy. Getting along with other politicians was also easier than I expected. But getting used to being a politician was really hard.
In the beginning, I found myself oddly nostalgic for the simplicity and clarity of prison life. In prison, you remind yourself every day why you are there, and convince yourself that you’ve made the right decision. You have a lot of time to do that. In the end, you have few choices to make. All of them connect logically to your central aim: to stay free and keep to your strategic goals—to resist, to learn, to unmask. You control your life and your decisions. That which you cannot control, including your physical survival, you put aside. With everything so clear, every move you make becomes meaningful and understandable.
Governing sometimes makes you feel surprisingly helpless: the more power you have, the less control you have over your time and even over your decisions. Serving in the government and the Knesset, in the heart of the political struggle, you are a prisoner to everyone else’s agendas, demands, and timetables. Long before the Internet, Instagram, and Twitter, a politician’s life was dictated by demands, hour by hour, sometimes minute by minute.
As a minister, as head of a party, as a Knesset member, as a committee member, I had to respond to accusations, make my own declarations, decide where I stood on hundreds of issues simultaneously, and figure out what I was going to say and whom I was going to see and not see.
To succeed, I had to be responsive to others’ needs and concerns. My old life had few tactical decisions, all easily in line with the overall goal. Now, my whole life had become tactical: how to respond to this, how to solve that. I was always reacting, often automatically, with minimal time to think about strategy—or why I was doing whatever I was doing.
I joined the governing coalition. That made it easier to triage. I chose which questions to delve into in-depth, which to assess more superficially, and which I’d rely on other colleagues to decide. But I knew I would share responsibility for each decision. It meant I needed a crackerjack team of experts, advisers, and assistants. But even with them, I could rarely take a breath—and even more rarely think big. I often felt like I was in the middle of the flood, being swept away, having to double-check that I was at least being swept in the right direction.
I was fortunate. I could avoid many party-related headaches. Yuli Edelstein, who was so central in implementing our immigrant-oriented agenda as minister of absorption, also ran the party’s operations, before and during elections. I often teased him that he could not be number one in our party, as he had only spent three years in prison. He continued his life in politics, becoming Speaker of the Knesset and a powerful force demanding civility in the parliament while protecting its independence.
In adjusting to this frenetic activity, with everyone treating you as if you are so powerful, you also sometimes feel your freedom is under attack—your freedom to speak your mind, to move at your whim, and to act as you wish.
With power, you can do a world of good, but the world around you also assumes it can decide what’s good for you. You have to control your language, your gestures, your reactions, and especially your jokes.
During the Soviet Jewry struggle, we were very good at emphasizing the big picture that united the movement. We laughed off the differences among friends while dismissing the enemy with irony and sarcasm. In politics, that once-useful sense of humor kept getting me in trouble.
One day, I took my two daughters to Tel Aviv to see the visiting Moscow circus. It was fun sharing a cherished piece of my childhood with them, thanks to the improvement in Russian-Israeli relations. Immediately after our outing, a reporter interviewed me. I joked that it didn’t feel like much of a day off, because my new life in the government struck me as one big circus: You must learn a high-wire act, constantly walking a tightrope. You must be a contortionist, twisting yourself into all kinds of compromising positions. You must tame some fierce lions, and find yourself occasionally putting your head in their mouths. And everyone always looks to the ringmaster for direction.
I thought my riff was funny, until Saturday night after the Sabbath, when Bibi called me, furious. “How dare you say my government is a circus,” he said, genuinely hurt.
“What are you talking about?” I asked, unaware that the reporter had turned my quip into a story claiming that even Netanyahu’s closest allies saw his coalition as a circus. My insisting that “it’s only a joke” didn’t placate the prime minister. “Be careful with your jokes,” he fumed. “Nobody gets them here.”
Much more damaging was another throwaway line in 1997. The government was managing an ugly scandal, the Bar-On Hebron affair. Reporters and rivals were accusing Netanyahu of having appointed an unqualified lackey, Roni Bar-On, as attorney general for political purposes. They claimed the appointment was part of an elaborate deal securing the Shas Party’s approval to withdraw from the ancient holy city of Hebron, in exchange for a weak attorney general who would go easy in prosecuting Shas’s corrupt leader Aryeh Deri. Essentially, they were accusing Israel’s prime minister of auctioning off Israel’s security to one of his coalition partners to keep a suspected criminal out of jail.
This conspiracy theory—pushed on television and linking Bibi, Deri, Hebron, and Bar-On—struck me as groundless. Nevertheless, the outcry was so intense that Bar-On resigned within forty-eight hours of his appointment.
Later, the new attorney general, Elyakim Rubinstein, found no evidence of any deal. Rubenstein’s investigators used what at the time struck me as a novel approach. They reviewed all the principals’ cell phone calls. I had no idea our private mobile phone records could be tracked so easily.
Nevertheless, I was angry with Bibi and his justice minister. We had trusted our leading coalition partners regarding this appointment, exactly as they had trusted us with top appointments in our ministries, but they let us down. They rushed through the appointment without informing us of the doubts surrounding Bar-On’s credentials. Feeling burned, I, along with the minister of finance, Dan Meridor, gave an ultimatum, demanding the formation of a special committee of professionals that would assess every top appointment and report its recommendation to the cabinet. Our demand was accepted. That procedure is still followed today.
“Minister Sharansky, what do you think of the charges?” reporters asked me at the height of the scandal. To illustrate how ridiculous even a hint of such corruption was, I said, “If there is even 10 percent of truth in Israel TV’s story, this government has no place in continuing to govern.” Oops.
Another morning, another phone call from Bibi. “Do you realize what you said?” he asked. “If you plan on bringing down the government, I have the right to know about it. But if not,” he added knowingly, “you have no idea what a mess you’re bringing upon yourself. And you’re going to have to clean that up by yourself.”
He was right. Reporters didn’t hear me saying the charges were absurd, they heard me saying I’d resign. My “if, then” construction was a gift to the Bibi haters. They interpreted my line as an ironclad promise. Certain that Bar-On, Bibi, and Deri were 100 percent guilty, the government’s opponents considered my 10 percent promise a low bar. My words fed their fantasy that Yitzhak Rabin’s death was going to be avenged, corruption would be revealed, and the government would collapse in disgrace.
In their minds, I was the perfect weapon. The fallen hero, now redeeming himself, had viewed things from the inside and realized how evil Bibi was. They didn’t hear my “if,” which I had thought was my oh-so-clever way of showing doubt.
When I didn’t resign, some reporters decided I had betrayed them. One journalist had given me my first job in Israel as a contributing editor to the Jerusalem Report. We became close over the years, enjoying hundreds of conversations about many subjects. Nevertheless, he was so blinded by Bibi hatred that he blasted me in an article titled “Mr. Ten Percent,” without bothering to question me about what I said or what I was thinking.
The lack of logic, the contempt for evidence, the refusal to compromise, the harsh judgments—in short, the black-and-white approach to politics—was stunning.
Beyond missing my ability to speak and joke freely, I missed my freedom of movement and spontaneity. At the time, ministers didn’t always have permanent bodyguards. That started after three Palestinian terrorists murdered Tourism Minister Rehavam Ze’evi at his Jerusalem hotel in 2001. But, beginning in 1996, my family knew when tensions were high, even before reading about it in the newspaper, because the bodyguards would arrive.
I was used to living with guards. Back in Moscow, I had figured out how to get my KGB tails to work with me, forcing them to pay their share of the taxis they jumped into and using them as a private security detail when necessary.
“At least this time,” I thought, “they’re working for me.” I was mistaken. I quickly learned that, despite my fancy title, I wasn’t in charge of my bodyguards, the Security Service was.
Avital and I tried welcoming these young men into our family, which also pleased our daughters, Rachel and Hanna. But it wasn’t up to us. During one particularly stormy Friday night, Avital insisted that the hulking security agent, who was standing outside our door in the rain and looking particularly pale, join us inside. He radioed for permission to enter the house and was ordered to stay outside, even as it started to hail.
That night, as we were sleeping, we heard a big thud outside. We scrambled downstairs, opened the door, and saw that the Hulk had fainted. Avital and I struggled to drag him into the house. There we were, outside, in our pajamas, in a hail storm—a perfect target for terrorists. I had a special phone for Sabbath-observing ministers. I called in the emergency. “What are you trying to do, kill him?” Avital shouted when the supervisor arrived. “How will that keep us safe?”
The Security Service soon built a little guardhouse outside our home. This attempt to make our guards more comfortable cost us our small ping-pong arena. These days, as I wander around Israel, I often encounter our security alumni, now much older and much less fit men. They light up, speak nostalgically, and send regards to my family.
When you enter a room surrounded by bodyguards, people, especially reporters, enjoy drawing various conclusions about you. Some journalists accuse you of using the guards to prop yourself up; others say you’re wasting state funds. That’s the cost of being in the public eye. Much as I wanted to pull some of my Moscow tricks to restore my freedom of movement, I understood that bodyguards were as unavoidable as reporters in a modern democracy.
During my time as a spokesperson for the Refusenik and human rights movements in the Soviet Union, the Russian word Korrespondent inspired me. “Natan will connect us to the Kors,” my comrades often said. The Kors—reporters—were a lifeline for us. They lived in three special apartment buildings guarded by the KGB, for the KGB’s sake of course. By visiting the compound you were defying the state. The KGB noted it, taking your information laboriously after the reporter signed you in. It felt like crossing the border. But the payoff, once you entered a journalist’s home, was your first taste of life in a sanctuary of liberty.
Some journalists became close friends. A select few helped me smuggle in “anti-Soviet” materials by diplomatic post—books on Jewish history, novels like Exodus, samizdat publications of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s banned writings, and, sometimes, personal letters.
In return for helping feed our vast below-the-radar distribution network—among other favors—I thanked helpful reporters with inside tips, quotes, and other journalistic goodies that helped them write their stories while telling our story too.
Despite always emphasizing in both movements’ public statements that we activists had nothing to hide, we kept this dimension of our relationship with the press secret. I had no regrets. We were circumventing a totalitarian regime’s illegal restrictions on our free thought. I was grateful to those journalists, some of whom remain dear friends.
Once in Israel, I had to learn to tolerate harsh articles about me as the cost of freedom. Nevertheless, I was friendly with most reporters, some of whom became my colleagues when I worked for the Jerusalem Report from 1990 to 1995.
Once elected to government, I was reminded of my previous double life in an unexpected way. All cabinet deliberations were supposed to be confidential. I took my vow of secrecy seriously. After my first cabinet meeting, one of my favorite TV reporters, Dan Semama, called, seeking my comments. Tunisian born, Dan spoke Hebrew slowly and clearly, allowing me to understand every word. Most Israeli reporters’ idiomatic Hebrew came out in bursts that sounded like machine-gun fire, especially to my immigrant ear.
“Nu, Natan what was that conflict between Bibi and Dan Meridor about?” he asked.
The question surprised, even offended, me. “Dan, are you serious? Go ask the press secretary of the PMO,” the Prime Minister’s Office, “don’t ask me. We just got this briefing emphasizing that when government meetings are off-the-record, they’re off-the-record.”
“C’mon, Natan. I’m not soliciting state secrets. People have the right to know. And I know about this exchange because others told me. I won’t use your name. I just want your take,” he explained.
“Natan, I want to tell you as a friend—we are friends, right?” he continued. “You are a politician now. You want to succeed. You have to be heard. You will not exist as a politician if you don’t talk to us, publicly and privately.”
“You know, Dan,” I said. “I’m willing to repeat what I said in the cabinet meetings regarding topics that aren’t secret. But what the others said, you will have to find from others.” That was as far as I could go. Clearly, it was not what he wanted.
After a few weeks, it was obvious that Semama was right. My press people could read any article and explain why one person was mentioned here instead of there, why another was ignored, why one received good coverage and another didn’t. They guessed pretty accurately as to who provided the information. I often witnessed leading politicians rushing to be the first to connect with journalists as soon as meetings ended, even after some of the most sensitive cabinet deliberations.
I saw that, when your people issue a press release about some achievement in your ministry, if you’re lucky it’s buried in the back of the business pages. Otherwise, unless you’re hit by scandal or pay off reporters with the information they demand, you suffer a politician’s worst fate: invisibility.
I value the free press as a guardian of democracy. But this behind-the-scenes back-scratching between journalists and politicians has become too entrenched in most Western democracies. It’s insidious.
The moment you’re elected to public office, you go from being a free man to communal property. Suddenly, it seems that everyone is looking for leverage and waving whatever they have on you in your face.
Soon after I joined Netanyahu’s government, I received a joint letter from some friends in the New York Federation. They reminded me of our long history together: how they fought for me when I was in the Soviet Union and how they helped me launch the Zionist Forum. Worried that the new government was too right-wing, they insisted I repay their loyalty by pushing Bibi to “make peace in the Middle East.”
The “you owe me because we helped you” demand was a leftover from my earlier life. The “you owe me because we voted for you” plea was more typical. Anyone who opposed anything I did seemed to enjoy mobilizing Russian-speaking workers against me. Each time I finalized a free trade agreement, the industrialists who felt threatened organized their immigrant employees to cosign attack ads in the Russian-language press. Their accusations often turned personal, essentially saying, “We didn’t give you our votes so you could take away our jobs.”
In the final rounds of a long-negotiated agreement with Turkey, the owners of Israel’s leading glass manufacturer, Phoenicia, feared competition from cheap Turkish labor. After taking out the usual advertisements, they brought Russian-speaking employees from Phoenicia to protest outside my house.
I invited the demonstrators in for a cup of tea. In this friendlier atmosphere, I joked that everything seemed much easier in the Soviet Union. “There, everyone had jobs, with no worries about competition.” Most smiled. One person, frowning, spit out a Russian proverb: the man with a full belly can never be friendly to the hungry. It meant: You’re no longer one of us. You cannot understand us.
Phoenicia survived, as did Israel’s free trade deal with Turkey, despite the two countries’ tense geopolitical relationship. In twenty years, Israel’s trade with Turkey increased tenfold, making Turkey Israel’s fifth-largest trading partner for years. Today, it remains in the top twenty.
In my new life, press relations and public opinion were not my biggest problems. Even moving from the breathless “you’re such an inspiration have a nice day” to the equally breathless “you’re such a disappointment have a nice day” was not that big a blow. The worst part for me about being a politician was managing a problem built into multiparty democracies: how to reconcile your obligation to your party and your voters with your desire to feel connected to the entire citizenry and, in my case, the Jewish people.
I now realized that living in my imagined world of Jewish unity had been easy in prison. I didn’t have the luxury to choose among factions. As an Israeli politician, I was constantly torn. Usually party interests came first, which meant prioritizing immigrants’ rights.
This constant headache overshadowed the 1999 elections. We approached our second campaign ambivalently. Our party had succeeded, pushing immigrant issues to the top of Israel’s agenda. We had many achievements we were proud of in housing, employment, education, and in promoting some new immigrants into important positions. At the same time, as I expected, the more this aliyah integrated into Israeli society, the more our voters felt ready to make ideological choices. Increasingly less willing to ignore the peace-process controversy and secular-versus-religious differences, many now wanted to vote based on more nationally oriented issues.
This time, we were insiders, bankrolled with public funding to run a costlier, more sophisticated campaign. We hired a young political consultant with a particularly good ear, Moti Morel. After extensive surveys to hear what fired up the Russian base, he targeted the Interior Ministry. In addition to being dominated by Shas, the ministry was easily caricatured as a suffocating, Soviet-style bureaucracy run by religious fanatics.
Most Russian immigrants were secular, deprived of any religious identity by our Soviet upbringing. By contrast, even non-Orthodox Mizrahim respected their rabbis. Shas supporters claimed we wanted to overwhelm Israel with non-Jewish Russians who would sell pork on the streets. In one campaign ad, Eli Suissa, a Shas leader, called Russian immigrants “counterfeiters, con men, and call girls.”
Shas’s stranglehold on the Interior Ministry since the 1980s became the flash point. It may have looked like religious tension, but our leaders ranged from kippah-wearing religious Jews to pork-eating secular Jews. None, however, could tolerate the Interior Ministry’s rigid, slow-motion, often dismissive bureaucrats.
Moti grasped this. While brainstorming with some Russian party insiders, including our spokesperson David Shechter, Moti, who didn’t speak a word of Russian, came up with the perfect slogan.
Israeli elections are public spectacles. Back when television dominated, in the final weeks of the campaign most of the country would stop every evening to watch a marathon of colorful, often sarcastic commercials. Each party’s TV time was proportional to its number of members in parliament. We ran ads highlighting the heartbreaking story of, say, a Russian mother not welcomed into Israel, blocked by the Shas-dominated Interior Ministry from reuniting with her wounded soldier son, because she wasn’t Jewish. Each ad ended with the lyrical jingle: “MVD pod Shas kontrol? Nyet, MVD pod nash kontrol.” This slogan meant: “This foreboding, heavy-handed Interior Ministry under Shas control? No way, under OUR control.”
The moment our first ad appeared on Israel’s television ad-athon, our campaign took off. The slogan electrified the Russian street, and amused most Israelis. Within a few days, Israelis had learned some Russian. They kept echoing the slogan, which took on a life of its own. Our campaign started getting so much attention, I joked that I felt like a tall, handsome man with curly hair.
Unfortunately, the messaging pitted Russians directly against Mizrahim and ultra-Orthodox Jews. The commercials stereotyped them as threatening religious fanatics, making our reelection campaign look anti-religious. I could see how effective the ads were. I knew my job as party leader was to win as many seats as possible. But I felt sick. I felt like I was running against the Jewish people and undoing all the unity I believed in.
I started scrambling, looking for ways to lower the tensions, to re-cage the beasts.
“Natan,” Moti and members of my team kept saying, “this is the time to gain votes. After the election, you’ll have enough time to make peace with Shas, like every other Israeli politician.”
As politicos, they were right. But for me, it was yet another moment when I realized I was a bad politician. Whenever someone on the street greeted me exuberantly, asking “Shas kontrol?” then shouting, “Nyet, nash kontrol,” I cringed. The passersby were complimenting us. But I heard their echo as an accusation; it felt like I was betraying my life’s mission.
After dreaming so long of Jewish unity, I couldn’t tolerate feeding intra-communal hatred. As Election Day approached, I defied most of my advisers. I had our commercials reshot. The new ads called for “nash kontrol” without the key setup line about “Shas kontrol.” Now, the consultants cringed. They warned that my antics would cost us precious Knesset seats.
I could feel the despair in party headquarters about all the trouble I was making, but I persisted. On one of the last broadcasting nights before Election Day, amid the other parties’ funny, slick, us-versus-them TV advertisements, I seized some of our precious TV time. Speaking directly into the camera, I called for unity. I insisted that we did not oppose anyone who worked for Shas. I wanted votes for us, not votes against them.
“I’m glad you feel good about what you did,” Moti Morel said, “but you’re no politician. By cooling down the temperature you lost votes today.”
We won six mandates. We were down one seat from last time, but far ahead of what the earliest polls had predicted. I became minister of interior in Ehud Barak’s short-lived government. I am still greeted occasionally by older Israelis exclaiming “nash kontrol!” It was our party’s biggest public moment, our great PR breakout. Few people realize how that success still makes me squirm.
Four missions kept demanding my attention during my years in government. First, remembering our party’s voting base, I kept seeking ways to integrate new immigrants into Israeli society. Second, I served as an informal emissary of Diaspora Jews. Although Jews worldwide didn’t vote, the Soviet Jewish exodus had proved how intertwined we all were. It was fitting that Jerry Stern threw our biggest Yisrael B’Aliyah victory party, with hundreds of activists, in his Jerusalem home. This was the Jerry Stern who had started the international lifeline linking me and Avital during our years of forced separation. Third, as a member of the cabinet who had only served for three weeks in civil defense training, I had to think what contribution my particular experiences could make to the questions around Israel’s security and foreign relations. Fourth, and most time consuming, as a minister I ran three bureaucracies with thousands of employees, making decisions that could affect quality of life for millions.
From 1996 to 2005, I served in four ministerial roles. After our party won seven seats in 1996, I was minister of industry and trade for three years. In 1999, I became minister of internal affairs for one year, until I resigned to protest Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s one-sided concessions to Yasir Arafat, the terrorist. A few months later, after Ariel Sharon’s election, I returned to the government. I was deputy prime minister and minister of housing and construction from 2001 to 2003. In Sharon’s second government, I was minister of Jerusalem and Diaspora affairs. I left the cabinet a second and final time in the spring of 2005, to protest Sharon’s unilateral disengagement from Gaza.
Surrounded by chaos, facing tactical decisions and daily headaches, I needed to arrive with a big-picture vision and a few key goals the first day, especially when leading a big ministry. I identified two big, equally important strategic goals. One was to continue freeing the economy from centralization, removing as many obstacles to competition as possible. Another was to try bridging the gaps between the haves and the have-nots through economic development, especially targeting the Arab-Jewish and immigrant-Sabra divides.
With these and other goals in mind, I negotiated many new free trade agreements in Europe, Asia, and the Americas; launched some long-stalled housing projects; and modernized the Interior Ministry, developing more user-friendly application processes for identity papers, naturalizations, and passports. I pioneered professional training courses for ultra-Orthodox Jews and Arabs and redrew some municipal borders that unfairly prevented Israeli Arab towns from flourishing. Moreover, when my team and I developed industrial zones, we insisted they offer equal access to every population sector and pushed development nationwide. Putting politics aside, I strongly believed in building the infrastructure for the prosperity of Arabs and Jews throughout the Land of Israel, be it in a Jewish settlement in the ancient heartland of our country or an Arab village in the Galilee.
The negotiations in the cabinet, the Knesset, and the ministries to launch each initiative were often exhausting. Opposition could be vicious. But, when things turned controversial, I realized that being from a new party with no experience and no connections could be an advantage.
Israel is a small, clubby country. Businesspeople often advance their interests by lobbying their friends and longtime contacts, who still sit on the leading parties’ central committees. As a leader of a new party, I was under less pressure. After all, what kind of connections did the members of my party’s central committee have? A Jewish Agency emissary here, an Absorption Ministry clerk there?
I felt particularly nimble, for example, during the long, complicated battle we waged for a simple, fair reform: requiring price labels on every grocery product. Without labels, sellers raised prices arbitrarily. The powerful lobbies representing the food monopolies and the supermarkets fought hard to keep consumers in the dark. The industry pushback had silenced two ministers before me via their party central committees. Because we weren’t an insider-dominated party, we could give Israeli consumers the Transparent Pricing Law.
Similarly, for years party central committees had blocked the necessary reallocation of undeveloped lands from the Jewish city of Rosh HaAyin to the Arab town of Kfar Kassem for industrial development. When I asked a Labor Party representative why successive Labor ministers did nothing to help, despite their policies of supporting Arabs, the answer was logical: Labor Party politicos from Rosh HaAyin, who wanted to keep the land, used their insider influence.
We implemented the plan. Furious, Rosh HaAyin’s mayor accused me of anti-Zionist activity. He said I was stealing his land, as if I had FedExed it to Saudi Arabia rather than simply redrawn municipal boundaries within Israel’s borders.
Perhaps most significant, I could defy the business elite in a budgetary tug-of-war over the Law to Encourage Investment. A leftover from Israel’s socialist past that delighted some Israeli industrialists, this law promised state subsidies reimbursing up to 32 percent of new investments, to encourage business initiatives that generated exports. Having some incentives to lure corporations into helping the economy makes sense. Too many, and it becomes corrupting.
For years, finance ministers had tried shrinking these funds to help balance the budget, while industrialists resisted because it would make them more risk averse. Here, too, without a central committee of elites, I had more latitude than ministers from bigger parties. We halved the maximum to 16 percent, without insiders blocking us.
Still, with all these achievements, was there a need to create a party for this? Definitely not. I understood that if it had not been me in the seat, it would have been somebody else who was similarly inclined to support the reforms.
Nevertheless, Yisrael B’Aliyah made history and a unique contribution by giving immigrants a voice and a seat at the table. Our efforts turned passive clients into active citizens. We helped settle the million-person Russian aliyah and implemented programs tailored to their particular needs. We placed new immigrants on dozens of boards, committees, and councils to decide their own futures, not have others decide for them, no matter how well-meaning.
The shift from being an activist and lobbyist to wielding power is abrupt. You see why power is addictive. Before entering office, you and your comrades had to shout yourselves hoarse at demonstrations demanding that doctors be given licensing examinations in their native language; suddenly, as a minister, you are the one setting the criteria. Before, you had to beg for every scientist who needed a special stipend; suddenly, you could fund scientific incubators to employ dozens of immigrant scientists. Before, you had to lobby others whenever you heard of some homeless senior citizen; suddenly, you could launch an initiative to house thousands. Before, you had to fight for cost-of-living increases to the aliyah basket immigrants received, each time inflation hit; suddenly, you could link the sal klita to the cost-of-living index.
The bigger the problem, the more allies you need to wield power effectively. Finding public housing for the elderly proved to be particularly challenging. Beyond the sheer volume of immigrants who arrived unable to make down payments on apartments, so many older Russian Jews arrived penniless, without savings and stripped of the pensions they had earned but couldn’t take out of Russia.
A special task force addressing this issue involved four ministers. I worked with Absorption Minister Yuli Edelstein, Finance Minister Dan Meridor, and Deputy Housing Minister Meir Porush. Porush was a deputy minister with no boss. He and others in the ultra-Orthodox Agudat Yisrael faction of United Torah Judaism were too ambivalent about Israel’s existence as a Zionist state to serve as full cabinet members.
We launched a massive, and expensive, public-housing initiative from north to south, building and renovating buildings to serve as special hostels for the elderly. With financing from the Israeli government and the Jewish Agency, we united the efforts of Israel with the Jewish people worldwide.
Porush and I developed a warm relationship. When I showed him my prison Psalms book, he held it reverently before kissing it. After that, he loved calling me out whenever he saw me, as “the man with the Psalm book in his pocket.” I, in turn, enjoyed the colorful family stories this eighth-generation Jerusalemite told.
When we all toasted our housing initiative, Porush grabbed my army hat. I grabbed his big fur hat. The resulting picture of our task force, with me wearing an ultra-Orthodox shtreimel and Porush with my khaki green cap perched uncomfortably on his head, was a big hit. I liked it too. For me, it symbolized how easily we can cooperate for the benefit of all people.
Alas, the next “who is a Jew” battle, which soon erupted, reminded us that sharing hats is easier than sharing a common political agenda. Both Porush and I resisted compromising on core principles. Beyond this housing success and so many others—in fact, from this success and all the others—I remained well aware of the high price of politics, personally and nationally.