THE HOLOCAUST IS OVER WE MUST RISE FROM ITS ASHES

would never again hide the truth. None of the members of my own faction welcomedme as I walked down from the podium, just a few weak handshakes to go throughthe motions. “Why did you have to say that? It will come back at us like boomerangin election time,” a colleague said. Only later was I approached by a group of ArabKnesset members, and one of them said, with tears in his eyes: “Just for this day andfor this speech is it worth becoming a Knesset member.”Meanwhile, Minister Natan Sharansky, who at the time was in charge of thegovernment’s struggle against anti-Semitism, took the podium. My relationship withSharansky is impersonal, yet it carries a special meaning for me. On the day hearrived in Israel, shortly after his release from a Soviet prison, an impressive statereception was held at Ben-Gurion International airport in his honor. All the majorpolitical figures attended. Every staff member of then Prime Minister Shimon Pereswas assigned a task. I was then the prime minister’s advisor on Diaspora affairs, andI was charged with chauffeuring Sharansky and his wife, Avital, in the Subaru that Iwas given for that special evening. First I drove them from the plane to the VIP room,where a press conference was held. Then, after the deluge of interviews and photoops, I drove them to the home that had been prepared for them in Jerusalem. On ourway we stopped at Mount Scopus and the Mount of Olives to “kneel down” to theCity of Eternity. I drove, and they were discussing their private affairs and cuddling inthe back seat, trying to make up for the years that they were apart and the prisonwalls between them. From there we drove to the Western Wall, and to their home. Iwas with them just a few hours, yet Sharansky was etched in my memory not as arefusenik (Soviet Jews who were denied permission to emigrate abroad by theauthorities of the Soviet Union), but as a courageous activist who struggled shoulderto shoulder with Andrei Sakharov, the greatest freedom fighter of the Soviet Union.Let us be accurate here: it was everyone’s struggle before it was the struggle of theJewish individual. Over the years Sharansky disappointed me again and again.Sharansky is an impressive, wise, quiet, moral man with extensive personal andpublic experience. He could have changed Israel’s very soul. But he chose to enter acozy corner, preferring to hide in the Jewish bosom than to play in the open field ofuniversal human rights. He became a refusenik even though he had started out as adissident. He was saved from Soviet prison by the widest coalition of liberty fighters,but he landed in Israel as a limited, localized Jewish immigration activist. Somewherein the air between Europe and the Middle East he huddled into his own national