Despite scattered protests and the last-minute cancellation of his speech in Knuth Hall, Israeli politician Nathan Sharansky spent Thursday, April 15, visiting with SF State students and faculty and touring the campus.

Sharansky, a Ukrainian-born Jew, former Soviet dissident and the current Israeli minister of Jerusalem and Diaspora affairs, was recently in the Bay Area to address issues of human rights, democracy, and academic freedom and to encourage public support for Israel across college campuses. Last year, Sharansky conducted a similar tour of over a dozen East Coast universities.

“What I discovered during my first trip (is that) a big majority of Jews are indifferent or discouraged, and that it’s very unfashionable to be involved with anything Jewish or – god forbid – Israeli,” Sharansky said in a phone interview from Israel. “It was only natural that I also wanted to visit the West Coast.”

Aryeh Green, adviser to Sharansky, said that the minister’s speech was called off due to an irreconcilable conflict between SF State’s security policy -- which states that visiting speakers are not permitted to bring their own armed guards -- and an Israeli government policy which requires Knesset (Israeli parliament) members to be accompanied by their own armed bodyguards when publicly addressing audiences.

According to Green, out of the 21 college campuses Sharansky has previously visited and spoken at, SF State is the first to have had such a problem with the Israeli government’s security policy.

“If it had been just up to me, I would have still given the speech,” Sharansky said in a news at San Francisco Hillel. “But, every organization has a right to its (own policies).”

Sharansky was able to keep with the rest of his SF State itinerary, which included meeting with President Robert Corrigan, students and faculty; holding a newsconference; and touring the campus.

Seth Brysk, director of Hillel, said many politicians and commentators skip past SF State and opt for academic institutions such as Stanford or UC Berkeley when visiting the Bay Area.

“Sharansky wanted to make sure to make a stop here. And although it was on very short notice, we couldn’t refuse an offer like this,” Brysk said.

Sharansky made headlines in the late 1970s and '80s for his work and eventual imprisonment as one of the founding members of the Helsinki Monitoring Group, a human rights organization in the former Soviet Union, and for his activism on behalf of Soviet Jews (under Communist rule, Jews were denied access and immigration rights to Israel).

Sharansky served nine years as a political prisoner in gulags and prisons throughout Moscow and Siberia, until, following mass international pressure, he was freed in 1986. He immediately immigrated to Israel, where he reunited with his wife (whom he hadn’t seen in 11 years) and was welcomed as a hero, eventually receiving the U.S. Congressional Gold Medal.

In ensuing years, Sharansky embarked on a political career in Israel: he started his own political party, became a member of the Knesset and adopted generally right-wing political views.

In his April 15 news conference at SF State -- just one day after President Bush expressed public approval for Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s plan of a partial withdrawal from Palestinian territories -- Sharansky acknowledged that he does not intend to vote in favor of Sharon’s disengagement proposal in the upcoming referendum.

“When we have a real process of peace, then we will leave Gaza and the West Bank,” Sharansky said. “I’m going to speak my mind… (This is) a natural part of the democratic process.”

Sharansky believes that in the end there will be a two-state solution, but that the question is how to get there.

“I tell students to lead the freedom for Palestinians as well,” he said when asked what his reaction was to a “Free Palestine” banner hanging on campus.
Sharansky has continued to be a firm proponent of worldwide human rights, but he says that, in recent years, the whole human rights issue has been used against Israel and manipulatively lumped together with other “liberal” issues such as anti-pollution, anti-colonialism, etc.

“The banner of human rights, once identified to a great degree with Jews, has become a weapon against them,” Sharansky said. “There is a double standard (for Israel), and a demonization, such as comparing Israel with Hitler’s Germany, and some of this anti-Semitic propaganda is coming from this school.”

According to Green, the primary purposes of Sharansky’s Bay Area visit were to balance the dialogue about Israel and to “return to a traditional definition of human rights, rebutting the twisted notion that territorial disputes (whether the Basques, Palestinians, Irish or Kurds) are at base human rights disputes.”

“Liberal, pro-rights San Francisco, where issues of human rights, such as gay rights and women’s rights (let alone freedoms of religion and speech and the like) should be of paramount interest, is an incongruous place for students to aggressively attack the only democracy in the Middle East,” Green wrote in an e-mail prior to Sharansky’s visit.

Ido Heskia, an Israeli and SF State mathematics major, said that although he is happy to see some representation from Israel on campus, he’s not so sure Sharansky is an appropriate messenger for SF State.

“For such a liberal university, shouldn’t they try to bring someone like Shimon Peres or Yossi Sarid – someone a little more leftist?” Heskia said. “He (Sharansky) is very, very Zionist and supports the settlements.”

“But, I guess it’s better than no one,” Heskia added.

Compared to Sharansky’s previous East Coast tour, in which a Rutgers University student threw a cream pie in his face as he addressed his audience, his recent visit to SF State was relatively smooth.

As he walked through Malcolm X Plaza, though, he received both opposing and supportive reactions from students.

“There was a guy with a microphone saying I was not welcome to this campus,” Sharansky said. “But right afterwards several students came up to me, shook my hand, and told me that, in fact, I was very welcome here.”

Sharansky considered his introduction to SF State an overall positive experience, but he did say he was concerned and disturbed by several incidents he heard about from students, including classes in which SF State professors espoused their personal anti-Zionist beliefs, and an overall anti-Israel atmosphere on campus.

Sharansky said he wants students, both Jewish and non-Jewish, to realize the importance and effect of activism.

“Student activists were the main allies in the struggle against the former Soviet Union,” Sharansky said. "And (SF State) students are living in the center of the free world, not the Soviet Union.”

Sharansky’s visit was sponsored by Hillel, the Israel Coalition, and a New York-based organization called Caravan for Democracy.