NATAN SHARANSKY
17
and knowledge of the realm of Israel- of course I am not such an ex–
pert here as on the Gulag- there is absolutely no way to compare a
totalitarian regime that has tried to destroy you as an individual, to
deprive you of your language, your right to read, to write, to decide
whether to live here or to leave this country, in a word, where you
feel yourself simply the property of the state - and that is the struggle
in the Soviet Union-with the struggle, the dilemma of the state of
Israel, which has all the democratic institutions that can exist only in
our society ." We have a free press, at least as open and critical as
in
America. We have a variety of opposition parties, we have all sorts
of juridical commissions, and so on . After all, I saw an Israeli
prison, and after being in Soviet prison, there is no comparison.
I've been speaking with a number of Arabs who were supposed
to be the most moderate Arabs, in eastern Jerusalem and other
places . The biggest tragedy of the Palestinian people is that for the
seventy years of our existence those very few leaders who tried to
move in the direction of accepting our right to exist and negotiating
with us were simply killed . I said to one of the moderates, perhaps
not as moderate as I would like, but much more moderate than the
P.L.O. , "Say publicly what you just told me. Publish
it
tomorrow in
The Jerusalem Post ,
and we'll at least start negotiations." He replied:
"That will mean that the next day I will be killed." It is virtually im–
possible to have negotiations without a partner. It is impossible to
make peace with your own shadow. I think that at some moment we
will have to take some unilateral steps to diffuse the situation,
without waiting for the partner, in fact ignoring him.
The Western press is disappointing. I was recently with the
army in the middle of a riot, although I was in civil defense, and
many of my friends who were coming from Gaza and the West Bank
were telling me what was happening every day. We asked ourselves
if the shootings were in accord with the moral principles of our state .
In the Soviet Union we don't have any discussions about Afghanis–
tan. The Soviet government orders you to fight, and you know you
shouldn't question it. Here, it is a real problem for each of us, left,
right, religious, unreligious; And we demanded that top officials of
our army tell us exactly what kind of orders they are giving, how
they've improved, what kind of investigations they are conducting,
how they put on trial those soldiers who have beaten Palestinians,
and so on . But here in America everything becomes black and white,
not so much in the press as on television, where the bad Israeli
