Hillel Halkin has an oped worth reading in the New York Sun, Sharansky's Moral Inconsistency:

The problem that I, like many Israelis, have with Mr. Sharansky isn't about democracy in Iraq or the Palestinian Authority. It's about democracy in Israel, for which we sometimes wish he would show as much enthusiasm.

Israel's attorney general, Emmanuel Mazuz, wishes it, too. That's why, a few days ago, he wisely overruled a decision secretly taken last June 22 by the Israeli government's Ministerial Committee for Jerusalem Affairs, of which Mr. Sharansky is chairman.

This decision was outrageous in every sense. It chose to apply to Arab property in Israeli-annexed East Jerusalem a 1949 law on "absentee ownership" that permitted the expropriation of land and houses abandoned by the Palestinian refugees who fled in the 1948 war. (Hundreds of thousands of acres passed into Israeli hands under this law.) Every building and tract of land in the Arab section of Jerusalem owned by West Bank Palestinians living outside the city's municipal limits, the Committee for Jerusalem Affairs ruled, would from now on be subject to uncompensated government confiscation.

Such confiscation would have amounted in the best of cases to outright theft. What made it almost sadistically absurd in this case was that many of the "absentee" Palestinian owners were living practically around the corner from the property they had supposedly "abandoned." Without due process and hiding behind closed doors, Mr. Sharansky's committee voted, with his approval, to commit wholesale robbery by administrative fiat.

One might think this strange behavior for a man who spent eight years in Soviet prisons. Yet Mr. Sharansky, whose bravery as a dissident earned the admiration of the world, has been a disappointment before this, too, if not quite on such a breathtaking scale. Not once in all his years in Israel has he ever stood up for the rights of the Palestinians of the occupied territories - who, however necessary Israel's policies toward them may or may not be on an overall basis, have undeniably often been, individually, the helpless victims of unchecked state power, just as he was...

Mr. Sharansky acquired, during his years as a prisoner of conscience, great moral authority...Yet moral authority that is acquired is also moral authority that can be frittered away. The case for democracy isn't helped when it is.

Posted by Laura at February 15, 2005 12:18 PM