Sharansky: Freedom and a strong identity go hand in hand

By Seth Mandel

July 4, 2008

Looking around the notorious Soviet torture prison, where his fellow inmates were randomly selected for KGB "interrogation," Natan Sharansky saw his allies.

Sharansky, the ardent Zionist, found that the people he trusted most in that prison had nothing to do with Israel or Judaism.

"You're looking for some objective criteria, how to know who is more reliable and who is less," Sharansky recently told an audience in Manhattan. "And you find out that your best allies are people with strong identities. Because people with strong identities, they can be Ukrainian nationalists… they can be Muslims from Crimea who were exiled to Siberia. But if they have strong identities… it means that there are things for which they are ready to die, but not to give up to the KGB."

Sharansky spoke to an audience June 24 at the home of Susan and Martin Sanders, at an event sponsored by the American Friends of Likud (www.thelikud.org) about his new book, "Defending Identity: Its Indispensable Role in Protecting Democracy". Sharansky, former Soviet dissident, political prisoner, and human rights icon, has spent his life championing democracy and freedom. In 1977, he was arrested by the KGB for his activism and his support for Soviet Jews' demands to immigrate to Israel and was imprisoned for nine years. He is the author of "Fear No Evil" and "The Case for Democracy". Sharansky has served as a senior minister in the Israeli government, and now heads The Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies.

The failure of multiculturalism

"I always felt that the desire of people to be free somehow is very deeply connected to their desire to belong," Sharansky said of the thesis of his book. "It's not enough to be free, you must also belong -- to a community, to a faith, to history."

Sharansky said multiculturalism has ingrained in people the idea that a strong nationalist or religious identity interrupts the natural human drive toward freedom and open-mindedness.

These days, Sharansky said, you often read about how freedom and identity are supposedly mutually exclusive, but this is wrong; freedom and identity are powerful allies.

"It's possible that for me it was so obvious, because I was really very lucky in my life -- I was deprived of both at the same time," Sharansky said.

Living in the Soviet police state, he said, he knew nothing about his religion, and he certainly had no freedom.

"The only really Jewish thing about life was anti-Semitism," he said.

There were a lot of rules about what Jews could and could not do, he explained. And not only did the people around you connect you to Judaism no matter your level of belief or observance, but they also connected you to Israel.

That, he said, was a blessing in disguise.

"And suddenly we discovered our real identity," Sharansky said. "We found out that if you put yourself in the framework of this great history, great people, and great country, then you suddenly feel strength."

The KGB, Sharansky said, tried to defeat you mentally by convincing you that the most precious thing you had was your life.

"They wanted me to concentrate on physical survival," he said. "And it was clear that if your aim is physical survival, then there is no way you can succeed in this confrontation. So you have to find that there are things more important than your survival."

Sharansky was able to accomplish that, he said, by putting himself in the context of the great historical struggle of the Jewish people. Those with strong identities, he said, are a much more formidable threat to the KGB than those without.

Sharansky also warned against the post-nationalism of Europe and the college campuses both here and in Europe, and how such denial of a greater purpose and service is used against the West by its mortal enemies. One example of this, he said, is how terrorists like Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah gleefully use the words of John Lennon's "Imagine," which asks the listener to imagine a world with no afterlife and no religion -- "nothing to kill or die for."

Hezbollah often parrots lines like, "we will destroy you because you love life and we love death." What is meant by that, Sharansky said, is that they are ready -- even happy -- to die for their identity.

But the new European multiculturalism has itself become a religion, Sharansky said. They religiously follow a doctrine of not asking anything of their Muslim immigrants, especially not to adopt liberal values.

"Because all the values are relative [to them]; so what is good can be bad for them, and vice versa," Sharansky said.

He said the situation is much better in the U.S., though not on college campuses, where a European-style intellectual elitism reigns.

In Europe, he said, public space belongs to no one; in America, public space belongs to everyone. It's a key difference, he said.

To illustrate that point, he told two stories. The first was when an assistant of the late former congressman and senator "Scoop" Jackson showed up to an event on a Jewish holiday. Jackson asked the assistant why he was working on a Jewish holiday, and the youngster responded that the work they were doing for Jackson was more important.

"My boy," Jackson responded, "if you want to be a good American, you better be a good Jew."

The second story was about a prominent Jew in Britain who objected to the Oxford Chabad's public celebrations of Jewish life and traditions. "Don't you understand," the man told Sharansky, "[the Chabad director] tries to bring everything to the street." We are guests here, he continued, and should keep our Jewishness in the home.

Challenges to a strong Jewish identity

Sharansky concluded by briefly discussing three aspects of identity he deals with in the book. The first is the creation of the state of Israel from various unique Jewish identities. One issue the state encountered, he said, was when the state decided to create a new type of Jew -- the Israeli -- which strained relations between Israeli and Diaspora Jews.

The second aspect, he said, is the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state. American leaders unabashedly defend this right, but European leaders -- even those who are our allies --won't go quite so far, because in the atmosphere of politically correct post-nationalism, it's much more appropriate to be a state for all the people than to be a state with a certain religious character, he said.

The downside is that our enemies use this logic all the time, and are given credibility to do so by our European friends, he said.

"They have to understand that to defend this democratic state without passion of identity -- without this feeling that generations of Jews who were dreaming about Jerusalem are behind you and you are fulfilling all this -- without this deep connection with your people, with their dreams, with their prayers, and so forth, you'll have no inner strength to defend this abstract freedom in the Middle East," Sharansky said. "There's no way to do it."

The third aspect of identity in his book is that of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Israeli leaders said, in 1993, that Yasser Arafat could better control Hamas than Israeli could, so the route to peace was through strengthening the Palestinian dictatorship, Sharansky offered. But this, he said, hurt Israel's identity by taking the form of post-Zionism, which held that the less we are connected with this chauvinistic narrative, the better.

"What will create our union with Arabs?" the thinking went, according to Sharansky. "We are all afraid of poverty, of hunger, and so we need to build a prosperous world. And that's why there the interests of Jews and the interests of Arabs are the same. We must not be trying to be better Jews, we have to be a better part of the world."

Sharansky related a story told by an Israeli journalist, about a conversation the journalist had with a jailed Arab terrorist in Israel. The terrorist highlighted the moment he understood that the Jews could be defeated: when he saw his jail guard eating pita on Passover.

The terrorist said, "In this moment I understood that we should not agree to any compromises. These people -- we will defeat them. Because if history means nothing to them, we will throw them away from here."

The Jewish people cannot and should not run away from Jewish history and Jewish identity, Sharansky said, and this can be a lesson to the world.

"I believe that real peace and stability in the world, for all of mankind, will be brought through strengthening this very important alliance between the desire of people to be free and the desire of people to belong," he said.