Haaretz’s Lily Galili, talking to Israeli author Bernard Avishai, on the Russian Jewish population of Israel and its profound issues with reality:
This is very Russian, the idea that ”˜liberalism’ is holy and yet something for Jewish suckers, which is why they have such common language with American neo-conservatives.… Natan Sharansky is in many ways their hero—the chess player, the intellectual, the world prophet.… He appealed to international liberal conscience while he was in prison, but after coming to Israel, he seems to have found that he could both lecture to the world about democracy and lecture Israelis that the Jewish claim to Jerusalem was a ”˜higher value’ than liberalism—that the Arabs… had better learn to accept it—that Israel, being a better ”˜democracy’ than its neighbors, should be immune from Western criticism.
This group is becoming the future of Israel; belligerent, racist and insular.