December 08, 2006
Natan Sharansky for president
Published in the Jewish Chronicle
Give me an election and I’m happy. For a politics junkie, elections are the drug of choice: as soon as one is over, we hunt around for the next. We’ll get a fix next spring, with ballots in Scotland and Wales, but Israel watchers have their eye on another contest, scheduled for July 2007 but which may well be brought dramatically forward.
The race in question is for the presidency of the state of Israel, which falls vacant next summer. For an addict, an election for a ceremonial post like this one is almost ideal: pure politics, with nothing so tedious as policy to get in the way.
The post is largely symbolic and so, therefore, are the candidates. All the names that have been floated belong to men whose elevation would send a message. An unlikely runner, once said to be favoured by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, is the former chief rabbi Yisrael Lau. If he were to win the ballot of Knesset members — the people have no say in choosing their president — then it would be a gesture of respect towards Israel’s religious Jews, who tend not to be represented in the highest offices of the land.
Olmert’s motive is not entirely pure: when he first mooted Lau’s name, he was keen to win orthodox political support ahead of any planned withdrawals from the West Bank. If he was going to dismantle more Jewish settlements in the biblical lands revered as Judea and Samaria, it would be handy to have the hechsha of a rabbinic head of state. Secular Israelis will doubtless shudder at the thought, worrying that the notion of a cleric president carries too much of a whiff of Iran and the ayatollahs.
No less symbolic, though always less likely, would have been President Elie Wiesel. The Nobel Peace Prize winner has rejected the idea, but it would have been rich in symbolism. Wiesel, survivor of Auschwitz, would have embodied the close connection between the Jewish state and the Shoah — for good and ill. Friends would have seen it as a final act of remembrance, a reminder that Israel is the haven whose necessity was demonstrated so irrefutably by the Holocaust. Enemies would have seen it as proof that Israel and Jews remain obsessed by the past. No one would have said it, but the election of Wiesel would also have been the perfect two fingers to the Holocaust-denying President Ahmadinejad of Iran.
If it has to be a politician, then rather than the Likud’s expected nominee Reuven Rivlin, the perennial Shimon Peres, now of Kadima, would be the obvious choice. The last member of the 1948 generation and a political player since the birth of the state, he is surely qualified. But would he win MKs’ votes? I doubt it.
Peres is so electorally jinxed, Israelis joke that if there was a poll of the immediate Peres family, Shimon would still lose. He has failed to win a staggering five general elections, and has already lost one presidential contest, back in 2000.
A safer bet might be Natan Sharansky. And he may even be the right man for the job. Too hawkish for my tastes and, alarmingly, venerated as an ideological guru by George W Bush, a President Sharansky would nevertheless achieve an important and necessary goal.
His election would recognise the arrival of the one million Russians who have come to Israel in the last 15 years or so, granting them the status of fully accepted members of Israeli society. By making the man who embodies the Soviet aliyah the national figurehead, Israel would be saying that the Russians are no longer newcomers, no longer even “the Russians,” but that they are Israelis.
That balm to communal pride might also be wise politics. For otherwise the appetite among Russian-
Israelis to see the elevation of one of their own could find its outlet in Avigdor Lieberman, the Moldovan-born authoritarian, bigot and would-be Czar who now, terrifyingly, serves as Israel’s deputy prime minister.
If Russian-Israelis need a role model, let it be Sharansky over Lieberman every time. What’s more, the refusenik formerly known as Anatoly, and his personal struggle as a Soviet prisoner of conscience, makes him, still, a man of international reputation and moral authority.
And heaven knows the presidency of Israel needs that just now. The current incumbent, Moshe Katzav, stands accused on multiple counts of rape and sexual harassment and yet refuses to step down. Every day he clings on as president he demeans an office that is meant to supply a measure of dignity to Israel’s bruising political culture. He should resign now and make way for a man who knows only too well the value of democracy and democratic institutions — because he learned those lessons the hard way.
Posted on December 8, 2006 01:04 PM