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Natan Sharansky’s Fourth of July, and His Long Road to Freedom

On July 4, 1974, Natan (then Anatoly) Sharansky—who had spent the previous fifteen days in a Soviet prison—married Avital (then Natalia Stieglitz) in Moscow. The next day, Avital departed for Israel, but Natan was denied permission to leave the country and scant years later would be arrested on fictitious charges of espionage. It was not until 1986 that he was released, thanks to sustained pressure on the Soviet government from President Reagan, various members of Congress, and the American Jewish community. In a powerful interview with David Samuels, Sharansky describes his role in the refusenik movement and his wife’s activism during his imprisonment. He begins by explaining how he formed his sense of Jewish identity:

[As a child], I didn’t know anything about Jewish communities. I knew nothing about Judaism; I knew nothing about Jewish history, nothing about the Jewish religion. I knew very well that I was a Jew because that’s what was written on my parents’ ID cards, and there was a lot of anti-Semitism and discrimination—that’s all. . . .

I first realized that I had a history, a people, and a country in 1967, after the Six-Day War. For the Soviet Union, Israel’s victory in that war was a great humiliation. [As a result], Jews suddenly discovered that all the people around them, friends and enemies, Jews and non-Jews, connected this country with them. And so we wanted to understand what this connection meant. That’s when, in the underground, we started reading about ourselves and about our history in the books that were brought to us by American Jews. And we found out that we had such an exciting history, beginning with the Exodus from Egypt and continuing into the present.

There were Jews coming [to the Soviet Union at the time] from all over the world. They would say, “Oh, your father is from Odessa. My grandfather is from Odessa. We are family; we want to help you.” And we discovered there was the state of Israel, which also wanted to help us. So that’s how we discovered our identity, and that’s what gave us the strength to start fighting for our dignity and our freedom.

Read more at Tablet

More about: Avital Sharansky, History & Ideas, Natan Sharansky, Refuseniks, Ronald Reagan, Six-Day War, Soviet Jewry

The Summary: 10/7/20

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.

Read more at Mosaic