Five Lessons for American Jews That Putin’s War has Confirmed

In September, 2021 we published our so-called manifestoir “Never Alone: Prison, Politics and My People”—part manifesto, part memoir. The book recounted Natan Sharansky’s nine years in a gulag, nine years in Israeli politics, and nine years in the Jewish Agency, to tell a broader story about our shared commitment to embracing identity and freedom, and rejecting the false choice between nationalism and liberalism.

Putin’s War has reinforced many of the arguments we made two years ago.

Today, with Joe Biden in, Donald Trump out, Bibi Netanyahu out, an eight-party Israeli coalition with a mini majority in, and Vladimir Putin invading Ukraine, the book may seem out-of-date. In fact, Putin’s War has reinforced many of the arguments we made two years ago. But before we share our “five lessons,” some relevant background from Natan:

The book “Never Alone” begins in Donetsk, Ukraine in 1948, when I (Natan) was born—back when the town was called “Stalino.” Most of the kids in the class were Russian or Ukrainian. Being Russian in the Soviet Union, no matter where you lived, in the 1950s, meant belonging to the most progressive nation. Russia united us all on the way to Communism, and it was the great Russian soldiers who defeated Hitler in the Great Patriotic War. But Ukrainians had strong identities too. True, cosmopolitan Communism at its purest considered nationality irrelevant; but during World War II Stalin had realized that national pride was a useful motivator. 

Being Ukrainian meant having local pride and being the Russians’ closest brothers, eternal partners for three centuries already in what we learned was a voluntary partnership, which we were in the midst of toasting constantly. If someone had said that in sixty years a brutal war would hit my own hometown, I would have replied that a clash between Earth and Mars was more likely than one between Russia and Ukraine. 

And yet, the two of us, Gil and Natan, and the world, find ourselves today in the midst of that war. Here, then, are our five lessons from “Never Alone” that American Jews could learn and that Putin’s War confirmed.

1. Dictators can’t be trusted. They thrive by warring on their own people and warring against others—with the war from within and the war from without reinforcing one another.

Totalitarian regimes have two main weapons for suppressing their subjects and maintaining their grip on power. A security apparatus unleashed against their own people tries curbing any impulses of independent thinking. Then, by picking the right enemy—real or imagined—dictatorships keep the country permanently mobilized. 

The dictators’ dual weapons of repression and aggression are like scissors’ two blades, sharpening one another and cutting down anyone in the regime’s way. As with all bullies, dictators’ aggressiveness reflects their inner weakness. But that is what makes it so hard for doubters—doublethinkers playing the regime’s game but thinking independently—to cross the line into public dissent. When your society is on red alert against enemies, dissenting both jeopardizes the life you know and forces you to have to defy an inflamed public opinion. You risk being called a traitor—to the nation, not just the regime.

From the Bolshevik Revolution until it collapsed in 1991, the Soviet Union tried making all its people totally dependent on the regime. By confiscating all property, becoming the only vehicle for paying people, liquidating the independence of all organizations and institutions, from factories to trade unions, the Soviets reduced almost everyone economically to serfs. By crushing any political independence and wiping out any possible opposition, they reduced everyone politically to pawns. 

Soviet society was permanently mobilized for a never-ending ideological war of classes for a world Communist revolution. Whether there would be a full military conflict depended on changing interests and calculations of strengths. But in such a red-alert world, you could switch into full scale war-mode immediately.

Similarly, from very start of the 1993 Oslo Accords, Israelis and the West miscalculated, failing to understand what dictators do—and need. The central assumption of Yitzhak Rabin and his people was that Yasir Arafat would be “our” dictator, able to impose peace on his people without being encumbered by populist pushback. But to maintain power, Arafat needed Israel as an enemy. So this absurd situation emerged, whereby Israel and the West propped up Yasir Arafat as the leader of the Palestinian Authority, as he bashed Israel and used whatever tools he could to control his people. 

He could not hermetically seal Palestinian borders as the Soviets did. But Arafat did his best. He destroyed any early stirrings of a Palestinian civil society that sprouted in the years before he arrived. He closed down or harassed any independent newspapers, turning the Palestinian media into his mouthpiece—and a constant source of incitement against Israel. He broke any business people who tried operating outside his orbit. And, rather than improving his people’s living conditions, he kept many living in misery in refugee camps, resenting Israel.

While speaking in English to Bill Clinton and the rest of the West, [Arafat] talked peace. But when he spoke in Arabic to his people, he talked total war against the Zionist enemy.

In short, Arafat centralized control over Palestinian lives, economically, culturally and politically. As the Soviet leaders did, he knew he had to keep his people mobilized for war. He broadcast two different messages in two different languages. While speaking in English to Bill Clinton and the rest of the West, he talked peace. But when he spoke in Arabic to his people, he talked total war against the Zionist enemy.

Arafat created an educational system that still teaches three-year-olds to kill Jews, a corrupt economic system that runs protection rackets to boost the Palestinian Authority’s cronies, and a military intelligence machine with a dual purpose: to quash the Palestinian people while attacking Israel whenever convenient.

Putin has followed the playbook of Dictatorship 101, using his external war against Ukraine to super-accelerate his internal war against any Russian doubters or dissent. 

Vladimir Putin has played a slightly different, but still deadly similar game. He is not simply lashing out at Ukraine because he needs a convenient enemy; he genuinely believes he is a modern Peter the Great righting an historic wrong. He is undoing the 1991 disaster when the Soviet Union collapsed and countries like Ukraine regained their independence. But he has followed the playbook of Dictatorship 101, using his external war against Ukraine to super-accelerate his internal war against any Russian doubters or dissent. 

We will never know what comes first, Putin’s desire to restore the Russian empire or his craving for full control. But he has once again proved that in autocracies, the wars from within and without reinforce one another. It is no coincidence that as he unleashes his soldiers on their neighbors, he imposes his police officers to control his subjects. 

It is remarkable. Within days, the informational iron curtain lifted three decades ago has fallen once again. Putin has disconnected ordinary Russians from the media sources and digital tools they enjoyed just last month. In a flash, he cut off the TV stations he could not control, every unofficial website that might criticize him, and even media-tech giants like Facebook. 

In orchestrating what the average Russians read, Putin has returned them to the days of Josef Stalin — even Leonid Brezhnev’s heavy-handed propaganda from the 1970s seems milder. A new law passed on March 4 decreed that spreading “false news” about the army can earn you 15 years’ imprisonment. The definition of “fake news” is terrifyingly broad. Those who demonstrate to stop the war or even priests condemning the war in church risk long sentences. Russians cannot criticize this war against Ukraine because they cannot even say there is a war; the actions in Ukraine are merely “special military operations.” Old dissident friends report that Putin’s slow-acting coup has finally delivered its knockout blow. This shredding of any vestiges of democracy has been in the making for years — but the ultimate assault took place virtually overnight. 

Lesson Two flows logically from this sobering analysis.

2. Take what dictators say seriously; we cannot afford to dismiss threats from Putin, from Iran, from any autocrat.

“First,” Begin replied, “if an enemy of our people says he seeks to destroy us, believe him. Don’t doubt him for a moment.”

In May, 1981, a visiting American Jewish leader asked Israel’s prime minister, Menachem Begin, what he thought were the lessons of the Holocaust. “First,” Begin replied, “if an enemy of our people says he seeks to destroy us, believe him. Don’t doubt him for a moment. Don’t make light of it. Do all in your power to deny him the means of carrying out his satanic intent.” One month later, Begin defied most world leaders by destroying the Iraqi nuclear reactor in Osirak — then lived long enough to have many of his most heated critics at that moment eventually thank him.

Alas, the world, including the United States, has lacked leaders with Begin’s moral clarity. In the United States, the messages emboldening Putin have come from both parties for more than a decade. The first major retreat came in 2012, when President Barack Obama declared that if the Syrian dictator Bashar-al-Assad used chemical weapons against his own people, that would cross a “red line” requiring a severe response. In 2013, Assad’s forces used chemical weapons to slaughter hundreds of civilians in the rebel-controlled suburbs of Damascus. Obama blinked. The President did little, and Putin noticed.

A year later in 2014, Putin invaded Crimea and started his under-the-radar war of reconquest of Ukraine, and most Americans and Westerners chose to barely react. In 2015, Putin established a military base in Khmeimim, Syria. Those moves not only tested the West but also complicated Israel’s military situation, giving the keys to Israel’s northern airspace to Putin. That daily threat forced Israel to handle Putin directly, but carefully.

Barack Obama seemed much more concerned with delivering an Iran deal than protecting either Ukraine or Israel. Beyond our skepticism that Obama’s JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) helped slow Iran’s rush to go nuclear, we both saw clearly how the deal weakened Israel and delighted Putin. Almost immediately, the United States transferred 25 to 50 billion dollars in long-frozen funds back to Iran, with no linkage to the regime’s aggressive promotion of terrorism throughout the Middle East. That red-white-and-blue goody bag included $1.7 billion flown in pallets of untraceable, non-U.S. currency to Tehran. Some of that money flowed quickly to Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon. As that guerilla group committed to Israel’s destruction started to become a standing army, Israel’s military leaders worried—while Western leaders continued to dither. 

President Donald Trump similarly showed minimal interest in promoting human rights or democratic values abroad. He even fell for the dictator’s classic con, naively trusting Putin, for whom he had “a very good feeling,” while claiming that North Koreans “love” their dictator Kim Jong Un with great fervor. More substantively, Trump’s withdrawal of American Special Forces from Syria in 2019 continued this double-downward spiral, diminishing America’s strategic position and moral standing simultaneously. One European official, watching the Trump retreat, admitted to an Atlantic reporter, that it left Europeans with less “confidence that in a time of crisis or challenge we will have the backing of our American allies.”

We have to recognize that the already-dangerous world becomes even more dangerous when you trust the dictators to do what they please but cannot trust the West to do what it must.

Last summer’s Afghanistan abandonment was simply the latest in a long line of American debacles. Pictures of helpless, desperate Afghanis and Americans were a green light to Putin, suggesting that this was the right time to start phase two of his Reconquista. We in the West not only have to learn to take what dictators say seriously, be it about expanding Russia, destroying Israel, or overrunning Taiwan. We also have to recognize that the already-dangerous world becomes even more dangerous when you trust the dictators to do what they please but cannot trust the West to do what it must.

We are optimists. All is not lost. In addition to mobilizing even more intensely against Putin’s invasion, starting with imposing a no-fly-zone over Ukraine, the Biden administration should toughen its Iran strategy. Washington’s negotiators should disrupt the current nuclear talks with Iran and let the Mullahs know that America now has peripheral vision: it is not just focusing on Iran’s nuclear program; it is looking more broadly. American must no longer tolerate Tehran’s regional aggressions and manipulations. Another option would be to continue to place financial pressure on Iran, until the theocrats take verifiable steps to protect human rights within Iran and stop fomenting terrorism from without. That’s what moral clarity could look like, even at this late stage.

3. Renewed faith in liberal democracy begins at home—with occasionally criticizing the leaders you love while occasionally complimenting the ones you hate.

Since February 24, when Russia renewed and intensified its assault on Ukraine, we keep hearing pundits and people talk about the renewed Western alliance and restored faith in American democracy. Yet we see how hard it is for people to choose unity, to mute their partisan attacks, to practice what they preach. Too many of our Democratic friends refuse to recognize the way Obama and Biden telegraphed moral and military weakness, simply yelling “what about Trump?” Similarly, too many of our Republican friends refuse to acknowledge how toxic a threat Trump posed, and continues to pose, to America’s democratic legitimacy and world standing.  

Looking at the American Jewish community, we continue to criticize pro-Israel liberals who could not thank Donald Trump for moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, recognizing Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights, and negotiating the Abraham Accords. There is a striking contrast between the excitement the breakthrough with the UAE, Bahrain, and Morocco has generated in our neighborhood in Jerusalem, and the continued skepticism among many of our closest friends in the United States, who simply cannot stomach such an impressive achievement signed by Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu.

Similarly, we are shocked at conservative friends who deny the violence of the January 6th Capitol Hill riots and keep feeding Trump’s delusion that the presidential election was stolen from him. Even as we praise many of President’s Trump’s moves in the Middle East, we criticize his demagoguery moving many in the Midwest, the South and the rest of “red America.” 

We understand that in a liberal-democracy, sometimes you have to live with grays; it is not all black and white or blue-versus-red. No president is perfect, or perfectly awful. Acknowledging complexity is a first step toward the occasional compromises so essential to keeping the nation going or democracy growing.

4. Stop judging others so harshly and yourselves too kindly.

Both of us have criticized our current Israeli government for lacking the moral clarity we have long demanded from the West. We understand that Putin’s aggression threatens the entire free world, and Israel cannot pretend to be a bystander. As the cruel bombing sorties terrorizing and murdering Ukraine’s civilians continues, we regret that our technology is not being mobilized to help them. We want Western aircraft and Israeli anti-aircraft Iron Dome missiles protecting the Ukrainian skies.

Yet even as we patriotically criticize our government, we acknowledge the delicacy of Israel’s situation. It is not just that America’s abdication put Putin’s Russia right on Israel’s northern border by dominating Syria. It is also that Israel is caught between its eternal mission to be a Jewish State and its day-to-day struggle to survive as a regional power in a dangerous neighborhood. 

Ultimately, as we call on Israel to remember its founding principles and embrace Ukraine, we call on our American Jewish friends to criticize Israel with a little more empathy. We have noticed on many Zoom calls and in many interviews how quick liberal American Jews are to take Israel to task morally — even as they resist any critique of their own political heroes’ role in this mess. 

Even more disappointing, not enough American Jewish Democrats are willing to challenge the Biden administration to be much, much tougher in dealing with the dictators oppressing Iran and threatening “Big Satan” (America) and “Little Satan” (Israel). We need one united front against the world’s most threatening autocrats, starting with Vladimir Putin and the Mullahs. 

We understand that people often like to lower the bar when criticizing others and raise the bar before actually criticizing their own. We suggest, both when it comes to assessing your own representatives and your own country-of-residence, to intensify the self-criticism and modulate the broader criticism, just a bit. The humility, and lowered volume, could do us all a world of good.

Finally, we end on a reassuring note. Celebrating the great unity we have experienced in much of the Jewish world, as religious and non-religious, right-wingers and left-wingers, reach out to help all Ukrainians, but especially Ukrainian Jews.

5. Remember what our lives have taught us — you are Never Alone.

Back in May, 1981, Menachem Begin offered another lesson all Jews should learn from the Holocaust. Beyond responding proactively to all genocidal threats, he said, “when a Jew anywhere is threatened, or under attack, do all in your power to come to his aid. Never pause to wonder what the world will think or say.”

This notion, that a Jew is never alone because the extended Jewish family will always protect us, has guided both our lives as Zionists. 

This notion, that a Jew is never alone because the extended Jewish family will always protect us, has guided both our lives as Zionists. It’s why I (Gil), joined the Young Judaea Zionist movement and became an activist for Soviet Jewry, disappearing from the final weeks of preparing for my graduate orals in 1985 to visit Soviet Jewish Refuseniks over Passover. And, far more profoundly, it is why I (Natan), understood, throughout nine years in the Gulag, that I was not forgotten, I was not abandoned, and I was never alone.

As the world now knows, the town where I (Natan) was born, Donetsk, did not fare well in the post-Communist years. Back in the 1950s, it symbolized the deep friendship between Russians and Ukrainians. Alas, Donetsk ended up in the middle of the prolonged war between Russia and the Ukraine, years ago. When I grew up there, we lived among many nations and nationalities. There were people who had “Russian,” “Ukrainian,” “Georgian,” or “Kozaki” written on their identity cards. It was not particularly important—there was no major difference among these nations—unless you were saddled with one particular label. 

If your identity card said “Jew” on the “fifth (nationality) line, it meant only one thing: You were singled out as belonging to the one outcast nation in the Soviet Union. It was a disease without a cure, a sentence to a life without hope, an invitation to be pitied because there was no one to help us. 

We knew nothing about Judaism; there was nothing significant in our Jewish identity other than antisemitism and hatred toward us. So we just knew how the world worked. No one tried replacing the word “Russian” with the word “Ukrainian” on his ID card, for example, to be accepted to university, because it did not matter. But if your card said “Jew” and you could change it, you tried. It was obvious: Your chances of escaping this nightmare of oppression and of being accepted to university suddenly became greater.

Now think of the contrast today. Night after night, we see heartbreaking images of thousands of people standing at the borders, trying to flee the Putin-imposed Ukrainian tragedy. They stand there day and night, in the bitter cold, with the few possessions they could carry.

But, now, there is one magic word that can help them escape from that nightmare: “Jew.” If you are Jewish, there are Jews out there who will take care of you, there is someone on the other side of the border who is looking for you, and your chances of leaving suddenly jump.

The world has turned upside down. When I was a child, “Jew” was shorthand for evil, for loser. No one envied us. Today on the Ukrainian border, the same word “Jew” is shorthand for “lucky”; it’s a passport to freedom, and it describes people who have a place to go. 

The world has turned upside down. When I was a child, “Jew” was shorthand for evil, for loser. No one envied us. Today on the Ukrainian border, the same word “Jew” is shorthand for “lucky”; it’s a passport to freedom, and it describes people who have a place to go and know that there is an entire people who are their family, waiting for them outside. Most Jews today are still used to living in a world where one feels exceptionally unlucky to be Jewish rather than exceptionally lucky. But that shift in perception should remind us of the big boost we’ve all gotten from the Zionist Revolution and the State of Israel.

We hope that no Jew will need to undergo the trauma Ukrainian Jews are currently enduring to understand that we are blessed. 

That is why, for all the stress of this moment, we can also view today in historic perspective, in Jewish time and not just CNN time. And that triggers a more optimistic stance. We note the West stirring, refusing to be bullied. And we appreciate our good fortune to be living in Jerusalem, protected by the Israeli army, and to be watching a European conflict where the Jews are no longer in the crosshairs, but where the Jews also refuse to sit on the sidelines. We hope that no Jew will need to undergo the trauma Ukrainian Jews are currently enduring to understand that we are blessed. Although some worry that the global community won’t ever leave us alone, we Jews have an extra insurance policy—and an extra expressway to meaning, to identity, to community—because we are never alone.

Natan Sharansky is a former political prisoner of the Soviet Union and served in four Israeli cabinets. Today he is chairman of ISGAP, the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy. 

Gil Troy is a distinguished scholar of North American History at McGill University and the author of 10 books on the U.S.  presidency.