In the Soviet Union, it was obvious to all of us that anti-Semitism was the dictator’s friend, a natural weapon in the hands of our oppressors. From czarist times to Communist times, whenever the authorities needed a scapegoat to reinforce their control over the population, the Jew was the perfect target.
Seeing how autocracy and anti-Semitism went so well together, I just assumed that anti-Semitism and modern democracies would be incompatible, especially after the Holocaust. That’s why watching Jew-hatred survive Communism’s collapse and move to the free world, just as I got there, has been one of the profound disappointments of my life in freedom.
A second lesson I learned from my youth has actually held and proved depressingly useful. All of us in the Soviet Union understood that anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism meshed together naturally. Hostility to the Jew and the Jews flowed seamlessly toward Israel, the collective Jew. The Jewish state just broadened the target for the Jew-haters, giving them much more cannon fodder. We could all see how de facto restrictions on accepting Jews in Soviet universities were justified by the need to restrict Zionist influence. When official Communist Party propaganda criticized Israel, the cartoons used all the classic Jew-hating images, depicting Israel as the Yid with a big nose, fangs, and long, hungry fingers. Beyond that traditional anti-Semitism, Israel was an all-purposed and useful target. When Soviets persecuted Jews for being nationalists, we were Israel’s agents; when Soviets persecuted Jews as cosmopolites, we were advancing the international Jewish conspiracy, with Israel at the center.
That’s why, throughout the 1990s, it was easy for me to see familiar traces of anti-Semitism in many attacks on Israel. Making such a link was heresy. The conventional wisdom throughout the West denied the very idea that criticism of Israel could be connected to any form of anti-Semitism.
Whenever I or anyone else suggested that some attacks on Israel resurrected the old Jew-hatred, many political leaders and intellectuals acted as if I had uttered some four-letter word. Some young Jewish radicals resisted the argument too. “You’re paranoid,” I kept hearing. “You see anti-Semitism in everything. You’re trying to stop legitimate criticism of Israel by connecting it to anti-Semitism, which is obviously evil.” Or, “We’re not anti-Semitic, just anti-occupation.”
It’s true, I thought, we are paranoid. We’ve earned the right to be, after thousands of years of persecution. The old Soviet dissident punchline, probably echoing Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, applies: “Just because you’re paranoid about being chased, doesn’t mean you’re not being chased.”
I realized I would need convincing proof to justify my parallels between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, even to many Jews. Unfortunately, by 2002, when the attacks on Israel’s very existence cascaded as we defended ourselves against Palestinian terror, these parallels became even more obvious and abundant.
There are, of course, all kinds of words, images, comparisons used to criticize Israeli policies. But when I saw how frequently modern anti-Zionists compared Israelis to Nazis, it rang a bell: the Soviets equated Nazism and Zionism in speeches, cartoons, books, and pamphlets. These lies were even presented as part of academic research. In 1982, a forty-seven-year-old Palestinian, Mahmoud Abbas, received a candidate of sciences degree—a Soviet PhD—for writing “The Other Side: The Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism.” He defended his work at the prestigious Institute of Oriental Studies of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Considering the deep hatred the Soviet people had for Nazis after World War II, these false comparisons and imagined conspiracies helped demonize the Jewish state.
Now, in the free world, I was seeing newspapers publish cartoons of Israeli soldiers or leaders that looked exactly like the anti-Jewish caricatures in Nazi Germany and anti-Israel posters in the Soviet Union. One cartoon in the liberal British newspaper the Independent turned Israel’s prime minister Ariel Sharon into a grotesque monster eating Palestinian children, their blood drooling from his lips as he asks, “What’s wrong? You’ve never seen a politician kissing babies before?” That was bad enough. But then it won the British Political Cartoon Society’s political cartoon of the year award.
When the Nobel Prize–winning Portuguese writer José Saramago visited the Palestinian Authority in 2002, his choice of words was also familiar. He said Israel imposed “the spirit of Auschwitz” on the city of Ramallah and that “this place is being turned into a concentration camp.” Just spending one minute in the Nazi Auschwitz would have confirmed that there was no comparison. He was deliberately libeling Israel.
There was another familiar line of attack against Jews that I recognized. On the fifth line of the Soviet passport, there were up to 150 different nationalities that could be mentioned. But when someone said, “He has a fifth-line disease” or “a fifth-line problem,” everyone knew that meant Jew. In other words, behind the Iron Curtain we Jews were treated by a different standard than anyone else.
There were 191 countries in the United Nations as of 2002. Each had its own founding story, political system, and collective set of sins, because no country is perfect. Yet, somehow, Israel was the problematic nationality there, the only country subjected to the harsh double standards we Jews knew all too well. Only Israel sat as a permanent agenda item on the UN Human Rights Committee, subject to more condemnations than all other countries combined—including dictatorships—no matter how many killing fields popped up elsewhere, no matter how many despots actually committed ethnic cleansings.
I once challenged the UN high commissioner for human rights Louise Arbour about this anomaly. Arbour was a former professor at York University and a serious, idealistic Canadian jurist. “There is only one country that is on the permanent agenda for condemnation, Israel,” I said. “How can you allow this double standard?”
Arbour admitted the situation made her uncomfortable. It all came from the member states, not from her, she insisted. Russia, China, and some African and Asian members had agreed among themselves to keep Chechnya, Tibet, Darfur, and Arab human rights abuses off the agenda. Each respected the others’ claims out of self-interest. The only country this horse-trading didn’t protect was Israel.
“Yes, it’s very logical,” I acknowledged. “But it only proves that anti-Semitism can sound very logical.” I told her about a book I had at home “with one thousand czarist-era laws treating Jews differently, legally. Each has its own logical-sounding explanation, especially to the Jew-hater. It doesn’t make it less anti-Semitic.” It just makes it a double standard.
In the Soviet Union, Jews were the only group chosen by Joseph Stalin to be subjected to a high-profile article by him arguing that our historic community was not really a nation. That meant that there was only one nationality among the 150 that, despite appearing on the Soviet ID’s fifth line, was so illegitimate that any requests for specific Jewish national institutions were usually dismissed.
Now, in this new democratic world I had entered, there seemed to be a permanent debate about only one country’s legitimacy: Israel. All these upsetting parallels between my old world and my new world helped me see the three main tools that anti-Semites use against Jews and anti-Zionists use against Israel: demonization, double standards, and delegitimization.
So there you had it. Traditional anti-Semitism for thousands of years has demonized Jews as children of Satan, as suckers of young Christian blood, as poisoners of the well, as power-hungry financial manipulators. Jews were repeatedly subjected to double standards, from expulsions in the Middle Ages to university quotas in the modern world. While early Christians attacked the legitimacy of Judaism as a religion, centuries later, when identities went national, xenophobes attacked the legitimacy of the Jews as a people.
Now, seeing the same principles applied to the collective Jew and the pillar of modern Jewish identity, Israel, it was clear to me that we were not just facing anti-Zionism, but anti-Semitism.
Mulling this over, I thought of the 3d movies I enjoyed as a child. Without special two-toned glasses, the picture was blurry. With the glasses, the screen came alive, and you could see everything clearly. If traditional anti-Semitism demonized, delegitimized, and pathologized the Jew—often treating Jews as the biggest threat to all that is good in the world—you could start seeing how the New Anti-Semitism did the same to Israel. Similarly, if you did not wear the right glasses, the line between legitimate criticism of Israel and anti-Semitism could become blurred, so that you failed to even recognize this ancient evil, these age-old poisoned darts, much less fight it.
I wanted to help draw those lines by articulating specific criteria to identify when hostility toward Israel turned anti-Semitic. That’s when my brainstorming partner and coauthor in this and so many ventures, Ron Dermer, helped me package the pattern. We started writing articles about demonization, delegitimization and double standards, using this 3d analogy. “It’s time to put on those 3d spectacles,” I insisted, “to distinguish between legitimate criticism of Israel and the New Anti-Semitism.”
Starting in 2005, Europe marked the day of Auschwitz’s liberation, January 27, as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. This was three months before the Jewish Holocaust Remembrance Day, which is commemorated in the spring on the anniversary of the Warsaw ghetto revolt against the Nazis.
As Diaspora minister, I proposed that we use Auschwitz liberation day in Israel as Let’s Fight the New Anti-Semitism Day. Working with the army and the schools, in public forums and other educational organizations, we addressed this old-new threat.
Moving beyond Israel, a new college-based, pro-Israel organization, StandWithUs, integrated the 3d test into its educational platform. Abe Foxman and the Anti-Defamation League he led soon followed. Once new campus leaders emerged, the international network of Jewish student centers, Hillel, accepted it too.
Still, we discovered that defining the criteria was the easy part. It was much harder to convince others to apply the formula. The big challenge remained the politicians. Many still claimed we were trying to suppress criticism. How could we get them to realize that criticism of Israel can sometimes be anti-Semitic?
I found a most unlikely ally to help me convince people they needed to recognize how the world’s most plastic hatred had been molded into a new form. Although Joschka Fischer was my age, and we each had had an activist awakening around 1968, we couldn’t have been more different. A German, Fischer became a Far Left radical in the late 1960s, swayed by Karl Marx and the calls for revolution that were suffocating us in Moscow. People in his circle turned toward terrorism. Fischer participated in several street battles with the radical Putzgruppe, an abbreviation for Proletarische Union für Terror und Zerstörung (the Proletarian Union for Terror and Destruction). By 1977, the radicals’ violence disgusted him, including their involvement in the Entebbe hijacking, which targeted Jews. Denouncing terrorism, he joined Germany’s Green Party, and eventually served as Germany’s foreign minister and vice chancellor from 1998 to 2005.
Naturally, Fischer was a big fan of the Oslo peace process and Shimon Peres’s new Middle East. But on June 1, 2001, while visiting Israel, he jogged by the Dolphinarium, a disco on the Tel Aviv beachfront. A few hours later, a Hamas terrorist walked into a line of young people waiting to enter the club and blew himself up, killing twenty-one, sixteen of them teenagers. Fischer, who believed that the German nation had a sacred obligation to lead the struggle against anti-Semitism, was shaken. He promised to help. He saw that, in this new criticism of Israel, the old prejudices were playing a role.
By 2002, the new Jew-hatred could not be ignored. The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE)—an organization with roots in the Helsinki Accords of the 1970s—addressed the spike in synagogue vandalism, harassment of Jews, and anti-Semitic incitement in Europe. But most liberal politicians wanted to stick to fighting swastikas and Holocaust denialism, ignoring the Israel connection.
After an initial 2003 OSCE meeting in Vienna focused too rigidly on traditional anti-Semitism, Fischer volunteered to host the next meeting in Berlin on April 28 and 29, 2004. He made sure to invite me, as Israel’s Diaspora affairs minister, to address the conference. It attracted over six hundred participants to Hitler’s former capital. I proposed my 3d test, explaining that it was essentially the same criteria traditionally applied to identify anti-Semites.
Many politicians feared opening the Pandora’s box of Israel, the Palestinians, and the Middle East conflict. But I benefited from some timely outside help. In addition to Fischer, whose trips to the Palestinian Authority convinced him that anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism reinforced one another, I had the pro-Palestinian movement. Its rhetoric was so drenched in Jew-hatred, I simply shared cartoons, newspaper headlines, articles, and video clips.
Thanks to Fischer and others, the 2004 Berlin conference had what seemed like a minor breakthrough but was actually a big deal. The official notes of the conference—approved after heated debates—reported that “an important number of delegations agreed that criticism of Israel can, at times, serve as a cover for anti-Semitism or be motivated by it, although all delegations also stressed that criticism of any government’s policies, including Israel’s, is legitimate and an essential feature of democratic political systems.”
Lurking behind the weak phrasing was a powerful turning point. This conference was finally ready to accept that some forms of Israel criticism can be anti-Semitism. After years of resistance, the international community was targeting the New Anti-Semitism—the shift from singling out the Jew for a special, obsessive hatred to singling out Israel, the collective Jew, for the same special, obsessive hatred.
After Berlin, I turned to our American allies. Continuing to use the Helsinki channel, I returned to the independent government agency established to monitor the fulfillment of the Helsinki Accords: the US Helsinki Commission, formally known as the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe. The commission’s chairman, Republican Chris Smith, and the ranking Democrat, Tom Lantos, vowed to target this New Anti-Semitism. After my testimony on June 16, 2004, my American friends accepted the language of the three Ds, then took the lead in Congress and the State Department.
On October 8, 2004, Congress passed the Global Anti-Semitism Review Act. Responding to the “sharp rise in anti-Semitic violence,” Congress authorized the State Department to monitor the problem, catalogue incidents worldwide in a detailed report, and appoint a special envoy for monitoring and combating anti-Semitism. The preface to the bill stated, “Anti-Semitism has at times taken the form of vilification of Zionism, the Jewish national movement, and incitement against Israel.”
The Europeans lagged behind. Eventually, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) incorporated the 3d test into what is now the most widely accepted official definition of anti-Semitism in the West: “Anti-Semitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews.” In offering official examples, the guidelines state that “manifestations might include the targeting of the State of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity. However, criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as anti-Semitic.” Other examples included
• making mendacious, dehumanizing, demonizing, or stereotypical allegations about Jews as such or the power of Jews as collective;
• denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor;
• applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation; and
• using the symbols and images associated with classic antiSemitism (e.g., claims of Jews killing Jesus or blood libel) to characterize Israel or Israelis.
Again and again, we could see how the three Ds were baked into the document.
Today, more and more European countries are adopting that IHRA definition, incorporating all three Ds. In 2019, President Donald Trump’s executive order embraced that definition too, which unfortunately made it off-limits for some Trump haters. With anti-Semitism rising—in old and new forms, targeting Jews and targeting Israel—we need the 3d spectacles. Only by seeing clearly can we fight it effectively, on the Left and the Right.
The shift was profound for another reason. Beyond saying that some forms of criticism of Israel can be anti-Semitic, the three Ds taught that not all critiques were bigoted. Unlike many campus speech codes, the three Ds helped carve out room for legitimate debate while highlighting when attacks crossed into illegitimate criticism. Mapping such boundaries identified legitimate territory too. This process was crucial for many liberals, especially Jewish students. Justifiably, they wanted the freedom to criticize the Israeli government without feeling stifled or like they were abetting the world’s Jew-haters.
At the OSCE Berlin conference, I singled out the Al-Shatat TV series to illustrate how modern Israel-hatred fed modern Jew-hatred. I discovered this twenty-nine-episode series for Hezbollah’s Al-Manar network reluctantly, on one of those rare days when I was trying to escape with my wife to one of our favorite guesthouses, far from the public eye. Yigal Carmon, the inexhaustible, Arabic-speaking former intelligence officer who advised both Yitzhak Shamir and Yitzhak Rabin before founding the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) in 1998, called me excitedly. MEMRI, which translates Arabic media for the West, began when Carmon translated one of Arafat’s pro-jihad speeches into English, and journalists attacked him for destroying their illusion. “You’re just not going to believe this, Natan,” Carmon told me. “This time they’ve outdone themselves. It’s a kind of bloody anti-Semitism far beyond all three of your Ds.”
Indeed shocked by what I saw when I returned to Jerusalem, I often showed a clip from the series when speaking. A short sequence of evil Jews cutting a Christian child’s throat over some uncooked matzah ended with the blood of this poor, innocent boy spurting all over and filling the screen. Its crudity and brutality made most viewers gasp. Carmon informed me that because Eutelsat, the European satellite operator, carried this Hezbollah station, this series had been widely distributed throughout the continent.
The obscenity of the images struck even the most uninformed viewer. More sophisticated spectators understood how such lies had helped kill Jews en masse in the past. Following the clip, I often showed cartoons like the one of a bloodthirsty Ariel Sharon. This demonstrated how far beyond acceptable debate many in the modern media were going and how they were dredging up deep, traditional Jew-hatred. When I showed the film clip to the cabinet, my colleagues were speechless.
A few months later, I attended a Germany-Israel dialogue about anti-Semitism. I decided to show the film clip to supplement my speech, which I would deliver during the conference’s main banquet. One of my cabinet colleagues, Justice Minister Tommy Lapid, objected. “It’s too depressing, Natan,” he said. “It’s a festive dinner.” The organizers were more flexible. When they could not get a video screen into the dining hall, they showed the video outside, before my formal dinnertime talk.
The video shocked the participants. “That is what some of your Arabic-speaking citizens are seeing,” I warned them. Quoting the newspaper I had read on the plane while flying to the conference, I said, “Look, anti-Israel demonstrators in your cities are shouting ‘Israelis are not human,’ further demonizing us.” Lapid watched, wide-eyed, as the diners shifted uncomfortably.
At the conference, the French Jewish leader Roger Cukierman asked me for the video. The world wasn’t so digitized then, so I gave him my only copy. When he returned to Paris, he showed it to the French prime minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin. Raffarin worked with the parliament and the courts to block the series from French satellite TV to avoid further inflaming France’s Muslims against the Jews.
I confess, I did put a damper on the conference’s most elaborate meal, with its fine china and overwhelming array of German meats, serving hundreds of diners from Europe and Israel. Rather than eating all that sausage and Wiener schnitzel on the fine china, my senior adviser Vera Golovensky and I received two kosher airline meals, wrapped in endless layers of plastic and foil. We sat there unpacking them, filling the beautifully set table with our trash. This was too much for the aggressively secular Lapid. Shuddering and pointing at my dismal meal while still fuming about the video, he muttered, “Clearly, you’re not suited for polite society.”
Of course, it was polite society I was aiming at.
It was harder for me to resign from Ariel Sharon’s cabinet in 2005 than from Ehud Barak’s in 2000. Arik and I had worked closely together for years and were friends. A Zionist with a strong commitment to the Jewish people, he supported my fight against the New Anti-Semitism wholeheartedly. He often was the only minister to take home the materials I brought to cabinet meetings tracking the new Jew-hatred. Like Amnon Dankner of Maariv, Sharon was surrounded by well-intentioned young Israelis who didn’t appreciate the importance of a robust Jewish people as much as we did.
The ugly anti-Semitic demonizing of Sharon unsettled him. “Congratulations, you have outdone Bibi, Shimon, all your rivals. You are the anti-Semites’ favorite target,” I said, trying to laugh off the attacks. He grimaced, unamused.
Arik was smart, determined, and patriotic. But he guarded his power jealously and was too image conscious for his own good. A crude example of how hard he tried to control matters with an iron fist, while oscillating between playing Mr. Tough Guy and Mr. Nice Guy, occurred during the delicate Wye negotiations in 1998. I attended, along with Prime Minister Netanyahu, Defense Minister Yitzhak Mordechai, and Arik.
When Bibi asked our opinions about Yasir Arafat’s demand for a seaport in Gaza, Arik, who was then foreign minister, tried bullying his boss. “How dare you even discuss it?” he yelled. “Do you know what a threat that will be to our security?”
A few hours later, the first official three-way session with the Palestinians and the Americans took place. It was a closed meeting. The Americans kept requesting that we avoid reporters during the talks. They insisted that our assistants wait for us in a building next door.
Swaggering amid all the polite, if awkward, exchanges, Sharon conspicuously refused to shake Arafat’s hand. I then watched him go to the doorpost of our conference room, wave over an aide, and report his antics to his assistant outside. Within minutes, Sharon’s favorite reporters were circulating the story of how this Israeli hero had “bravely” rebuffed the terrorist, quoting Arik saying, “Shake the hand of that dog? Never.”
But a funny thing happened in the room itself. The Palestinians raised the issue of the seaport. Remembering the fireworks, Netanyahu turned to Sharon to answer, as he was the new foreign minister and had also served as minister of energy and water resources for almost two years. Sharon had so enjoyed proving how tough he was when yelling at the prime minister that morning, Netanyahu was happy to let him repeat the performance before an international audience.
Sharon looked straight at the Palestinians and bellowed, “If you want a seaport, you come to me.” Netanyahu, Mordechai, and I couldn’t believe our ears. Frustrated, as soon as we left the room, I snapped at him, “Why didn’t you shake Arafat’s hand? It would have cost us a lot less.”
Seven years later, Sharon’s plan of disengaging unilaterally from Gaza and northern Samaria highlighted his weaknesses. He wanted to show everyone that he was the boss, and that he could act unilaterally. He hoped to improve Israel’s image and his own. And, as when Bibi gave him the floor at Wye, he liked to emphasize that having responsibility changes what you see. The world looks different when you’re looking at the prime minister’s chair from outside versus when you’re sitting in it.
Unlike Barak, Sharon didn’t go behind our backs as ministers. He just bulldozed through. He believed he could find favor with the international community—and liberal Jews—by destroying twenty Jewish communities flourishing in Gaza.
I considered this disengagement plan irresponsible and immoral. Much as I liked Arik, I knew he had no patience for my theories. I continued to believe, as I wrote him in my resignation letter, “that every Israeli concession in the peace process must be made contingent upon democratic reforms on the Palestinian side.” Instead, this “plan will lower the chances for the establishment of a free Palestinian society, and will even provide terrorist elements with a supportive wind” and “increase terrorism.”
“Don’t you understand that the world has been against us for so long?” Sharon explained. “Now, the world will be with us. If at any time over the next ten years, the Palestinians dare launch anything from Gaza, we will be able to carpet-bomb them—and no one will object because we did our best to separate from them.”
“You won’t have ten years, Arik,” I replied. “You won’t even have ten days.”
I knew, even though Sharon was ignoring his generals and withdrawing from every inch of Gaza, that it would not be enough for the Palestinians and that our critics, including those within the Jewish community, would still not be satisfied. The issues ran deeper and the new Big Lies were just too tempting. Not only would we remain occupiers, but when we were soon forced to defend ourselves against Hamas’s assault from Gaza, the region would become “the world’s largest concentration camp.”
Out of courtesy, I informed Arik of my intention to resign two weeks before I left. “I want you to stay in the government,” he said. “It’s OK. You can continue voting against the disengagement.” He didn’t need me for that; he had the votes. “But we need you. You take us as a government to the places we never were before and where we should be.”
I just could not continue. Foreseeing that this disengagement policy would create another terrorist base to attack us, once I had done everything I could to stop it as an insider, I had reached my limits. I could not be a partner in a government that implemented another self-defeating move.
Netanyahu heard of my plans and called me. “Natan, why don’t you wait and we will resign together?” Bibi didn’t want to abandon the dramatic reforms he was implementing as treasury minister. He was also planning a comeback as prime minister and wanted to stoke the right-wing base without losing the middle. “Bibi,” I replied, “if you want to stop disengagement you have to resign now. Three months from now it will be too late.”
I resigned.
But I had learned a thing or two in politics. When I resigned in 2000, newspapers all over the world accused me of betraying the peace. Most people did not want to hear my claim that I feared Arafat was snookering Barak. This time, I decided to try getting my arguments published first.
Having informed Sharon in advance, I gave the New York Times an exclusive interview a few hours before I sent my official letter of resignation. The article appeared just as I resigned. It explained, “Mr. Sharansky, whose ideas on the promotion of democracy have been endorsed by President Bush, said he objected to the lack of linkage of the Gaza withdrawal to specific reforms to create more freedom in Palestinian society.” The article went on to say that I “also objected strongly to Mr. Sharon’s intention to separate the Israeli economy as much as possible from the Palestinian one, arguing that Israel will not find real security in physical borders or walls, but only in a Palestinian state that is truly democratic and free, politically and economically.” I was quoted saying, “Their problems are our problems,” while calling for economic cooperation.
Arik and I maintained our relationship, despite all the pain during those days of disengagement. Unfortunately, we were deprived of the chance to sit and really compare notes about the decision, the process, and its impact. Four months after the disengagement, Sharon suffered a massive stroke that left him in a coma for eight years until his death in 2014.
Immediately after I resigned, I flew to Germany for the Bilderberg meetings in Rottach-Egern. Every year, between 120 and 150 people designated as world leaders are invited to this getaway to discuss the world’s problems off the record. It’s a happening for the world Establishment. Inevitably, it showcases the conventional wisdom of the moment, which in August 2005 cheered the Gaza pullout.
Shortly after I arrived, in that Murphy’s Law for conferences, I bumped into the one person I was hoping to avoid. James Wolfensohn, the head of the World Bank and a generous Jewish philanthropist, was close to Bill Clinton and an enthusiastic member of the Bilderberg club. We had always had friendly relations. But, just a few weeks earlier, he had been appointed as a special envoy for Gaza disengagement by the Quartet on the Middle East—the group of major powers, plus the United Nations, deeply invested in the peace process. “Oh boy,” I said to myself. “I’m going to get it.”
“Natan, I saw your interview in the New York Times,” he said. OK. This friendly, silky smooth Australian American financier was starting in neutral. Good opening gambit. But then he really surprised me. “Of course I agree with you. You’re absolutely right. We have to work together economically and I share your concerns about democracy. But,” he added as I relaxed, “we have to trust Sharon.”
I don’t really know if Wolfensohn believed that disengagement would improve matters or not. Like many others, he hoped Sharon knew something he didn’t. Wolfensohn worked extra hard to make sure the deal succeeded economically for both sides. A few months after we met, Wolfensohn raised $14 million from generous Americans to buy three thousand greenhouses from the Jewish farmers in the Gaza Strip and pass them on, intact, to the Palestinians. This way, the Gazans could continue the work the Jews had done in making the desert bloom.
During those difficult days before the pullout, Mort Zuckerman called me. “I am contributing to Wolfensohn’s effort. What do you think?” Mort asked.
“I can’t complain if these unfortunate Jewish farmers who are being expelled will get more compensation from all of you,” I said. “But if you think this will help peace—or the Palestinian economy—just watch. Give it a couple of months. They’ll destroy the greenhouses on purpose, for political reasons.”
I was wrong. They didn’t wait that long. Within hours, Palestinians had started looting the greenhouses, destroying them as symbols of Zionist imposition on their homeland.
Predictably, within days of the Gaza disengagement, the rockets started flying. They haven’t stopped. In June 2007, Hamas seized control of Gaza in a violent coup that dislodged the Palestinian Authority. Gaza became the biggest terrorist base threatening Israel. Terrorists have launched thousands of missiles and imposed years of trauma on the neighboring communities. Over five years, from 2009 to 2014, Israel would have to mount three major defensive military operations. Israel would endure intense criticism for attacking civilian areas that Hamas had turned into rocket-launching pads targeting Israel’s citizens.
The disengagement didn’t help chances for peace. It didn’t help the Jews. It didn’t help the Palestinians of Gaza. And it didn’t help improve Israel’s relations with American Jewry. Now it’s Gaza that sticks in the throat of many Israel critics, including many American Jews on campus. People even insist that the Gaza we withdrew from completely is still occupied.
A few years later, I asked some of the disengagement’s architects what they thought of their plan. In the interim, thousands of rockets from Gaza had bombarded Israeli cities, reaching Tel Aviv. Hamas had seized power, turning the Gaza Strip into a large terrorist base. And the United Nations’ Goldstone Report had unfairly pilloried Israel for defending its civilians against the attacks the pullout unintentionally intensified. “Ah,” the experts replied, “if only Ariel Sharon had not fallen into a coma shortly after disengagement, then it would have been different.”
I hear this wistful phrase—“if only, then”—often. When Israelis say it about Sharon, they usually imagine he would have rained hellfire on Gaza after the first rocket was fired on our citizens. No one knows what he would have done, but it doesn’t matter. What matters is that Sharon’s attempt to make peace—or to buy Palestinian cooperation and Israeli popularity globally—clearly failed. The only question is which leader might have done a better job aggressively cleaning up the mess.
Most American Jewish if-only-then-ers use the same phrase but seek the opposite result. They demonstrate a deep faith in historical superheroes who can change reality and bring peace whatever the circumstances—whether your partner recognizes your right to exist or not.
If only Yitzhak Rabin hadn’t been shot, then Oslo would have worked. If only Bill Clinton and Ehud Barak had muscled Yasir Arafat through the door, or Israel had offered more land, then peace could have been sealed. They then follow through to the logical conclusion: if only Netanyahu, or whoever is leading Israel, would have the courage to follow in Rabin’s or Sharon’s footsteps, there would be peace.
History doesn’t happen in a vacuum, where good people want good things to happen. The magical belief in superheroes differs from dissidents’ belief that we can change history. The dissident also believes that individuals acting boldly can make a difference. But the dissident builds success on appealing to the deep desires of people to belong and to be free—not defying them.
I, too, am tempted to wonder, “if only” Andrei Sakharov had lived longer than his sixty-eight years, what would have happened in Russia. I don’t know the answer. But I know that he became the moral role model who helped doublethinkers cross the line to inner freedom. I also know that his impact outlived him, because his major contribution didn’t depend on his charisma or presence but on his expansive vision and his harmony with democracy’s flow.
I once unintentionally insulted Mikhail Gorbachev at a conference in Warsaw analyzing why Communism fell. Addressing the question “Who are the symbolic figures who brought down Communism?” I answered hesitantly, conscious of his presence: “Sakharov, Reagan, and Gorbachev,” adding “the order’s important.”
“But I released you and the others from prison,” Gorbachev told me afterward in private, miffed at his third-place finish. He was more used to Westerners idolizing him, as Time magazine did when knighting him “man of the decade” in December 1989. “The 1980s came to an end in what seemed like a magic act, performed on a world-historical stage,” Time reported. “Trapdoors flew open, and whole regimes vanished.” Who was “the force behind the most momentous events of the 80s and the man responsible for ending the Cold War”? Mikhail Gorbachev! Ronald Reagan wasn’t even mentioned.
“I understand,” I told Gorbachev. “And I really appreciate that you released me, but…” Like Sakharov, Reagan understood that Communism’s weakness came from its systematic enslavement of its people. Sakharov symbolized the pressure on the Soviet system from within, while Reagan symbolized the pressure from without. These reinforcing pressures together forced the system to choose between granting citizens freedom or collapsing.
Gorbachev didn’t want to replace the system; he wanted to save it. As a true Communist, he didn’t realize there’s no such thing as a little freedom. As soon as he decreased the pressure, it all started falling apart. So while Sakharov and Reagan were active agents, pushing the tide of history along, Gorbachev was swept up in it, unsuccessfully trying to slow the process, inevitably half a step behind until it collapsed. Without Gorbachev, I might have spent more years in prison. But without the Sakharovs and the Reagans pressuring the system, Communism might have survived into the twenty-first century.
To the West, Gorbachev seemed to be the ultimate hero because he was the doer, the brave public face of change. In Russia, he was much less popular. To those who believed in the Soviet Union, he was the man who destroyed it. To those who had already become doublethinkers or dissidents, he was the man who tried to save Communism by giving it a face-lift, resisting its demise until its collapse.
A similar insider-outsider gap shapes the legacies of Rabin and Sharon and risks becoming yet another wedge separating the American Jewish liberal conversation from the one among Israelis. Most American if-only-then-ers continue yearning for another superhero to advance the peace, in the footsteps of Rabin and Sharon. Most Israeli if-only-then-ers belong to the growing majority of citizens in the Jewish state who have given up on peace efforts without reasonable partners.
Both sides risk locking themselves into problematic positions. One group says, “There’s no partner, but we want peace now. Let’s rush ahead and make it happen.” The other group says, “There’s no partner, so let’s wait and do nothing.” A substantive dialogue could help. It could bring both sides to meet in the middle and answer the pressing question: How can we encourage the emergence of a serious partner? For this to occur, each side has to take the other side more seriously and be ready to engage constructively.
We created Yisrael B’Aliyah and I joined the world of electoral politics to welcome the voices of Russian immigrants into the Israeli dialogue. We succeeded. Of course, throughout my nine years in politics, improving the dialogue with Diaspora Jewry was always on my agenda, independent of my position.
Looking back on the hundreds of different projects I was involved in during that time, large and small, international and local, economic and social, I especially enjoyed those that connected different sectors: new immigrants and veteran Israelis, Jews and Arabs, religious and secular Jews. While I took pride in advancing affirmative action and removing injustice, I particularly appreciated these programs for being proactive. I always felt that this dialogue, with all of these different groups, weaves the different strands of community together.
That kind of mediating and compromising resonated with the life I enjoyed during my years of struggle in the Soviet Union. When, thanks to Israel, I discovered the rich, chaotic world of the Jewish people, I also found that I enjoyed connecting one group to the other: the world of young demonstrators, the hongweibing, with the older, more cautious, bonze; the kulturniki and politiki; the upstart American Jewish activist organizations and the American Jewish Establishment.
I got the nickname of the Spokesman because I enjoyed spending time explaining to Westerners the challenges the Refuseniks faced as we transitioned from doublethink to dissent. I also enjoyed helping my colleagues understand what journalists were looking for and what made good copy for their stories.
Learning how to compromise and build understanding among these various groups was essential. But in the Soviet Union it was clear that there could be no compromise with one organization, the KGB. Any compromise with it meant bringing back the fear: losing your freedom and losing this unique world that can exist only so long you are free.
In Israel, years later, I kept hearing Oslo’s defining cliché: “You don’t make peace with your friends. You make peace with your enemy.” That missed something. You only make peace with your enemies if they are ready to become former enemies and at least partners, if not friends.
That is why I was not ready to support all those concessions that we were ready to give to our sworn enemies, who showed no interest in becoming our former enemies. That is why, in 2005, the prospect of expelling 8,500 fellow Israelis from the homes the state had encouraged them to build, so that Palestinian leaders could establish the world’s largest missile launching pad there, was too much. For that, I could not take responsibility. On that, I could not compromise.
When I left the government, as I contemplated my next steps, I knew I would continue working with others on these complicated, pressing, and compelling issues. I also knew that my closest allies would be those who also wanted to strengthen our shared commitment to our Jewish journey together, wherever we may live.
After nine years representing the Israeli government to world Jewry, I shifted vantage points. Within a few years, I would switch perspectives entirely, representing world Jewry to the Israeli government. Deeper problems were brewing between Israel and American Jewry. It wasn’t about Arafat or Oslo or Sharon or disengagement or Netanyahu, per se. It was the growing feeling of a more profound disengagement from one another as liberal American Jews and Israeli Jews.