Politics in Israel's raucous democracy is no easy task-especially when trying to balance Palestinian demands against Israeli security needs, religious expectations against secular. One man has tried to steer a course of respectful compromise.

On Natan Sharansky's desk in the Yisrael B'Aliya Party office above a flower store on Jerusalem's Ben Yehuda Street lies a khaki army cap he sometimes wears and sometimes doesn't. It has come to symbolize its wearer's commitment to Israel as a democratic Jewish state that must be capable of defending itself. Sharansky has, in fact, been called the last Zionist.

As Arab riots shook the foundations of the peace process, many found his voice of caution and balance more important than ever. He has long demanded that Palestinians live up to their promises. "Mutuality not only means that Arafat disarm the tanzim [fatah] militia," he says, "it is also that they stop their anti-Israel propaganda in the media and in the education of their children. As long as they continue to use hostility for political gains, we should grant very few concessions. We've already conceded 40 percent of the territories; we should add a little more for passage from place to place and that's that."

As this article is being written, the rampaging continues. Arafat will put a stop to the violence, Sharansky feels, only when he realizes he has nothing to gain from it. "But we have lost a great deal of our deterrent power," he says, referring to Israel's reactive role in confronting the mobs, the desecration of Joseph's tomb and the Jericho synagogue, the abhorrent lynching of two Israelis. "If we seem weak in the eyes of the Palestinians and they think they can get away with it, we're in for a long and difficult haul."

Economic measures can be taken to curtail the violence, he asserts, like not allowing lead and cement into Gaza for construction and putting an embargo on commercial goods. And the Israel Defense Forces can act where necessary. "In the Middle East we can't allow ourselves to be a weak democracy," he says. Sharansky talks fast in a Russian-accented Hebrew, and is sometimes hard to understand. He is warm and unaffected but hard-hitting. The khaki army cap, proletarian and galut-like, could have belonged to a peddler in Eastern Europe.

Yet the former refusenik has been faulted for not struggling for human rights in Israel as he did in the Soviet Union, an accusation he denies. It was in Soviet prison that he learned how tough one must be to stand up to totalitarian forces. "Human rights demands that Israel not rule over another nation, and as painful as it is, we must concede some of the biblical territories," he says. "The human rights of Arabs can be curtailed only if they endanger Israel's survival. So that those concessions not undermine our identity as a Jewish state and the bonds between us, we Jews must make those concessions together.

"Every important decision, whether it relates to Jerusalem, the Jordan Valley or religion and state, must have a full Knesset majority," he adds. "When we have a consensus on issues we can know what is vital for us as a nation and stand up to pressures from the Arabs and other countries."

Sharansky realizes that Israelis are splintered. "Israelis are hung up on categorizing each other," he says. "From the moment I arrived here, journalists tried to put me in a corner: Was I religious or secular, left wing or right wing."

When his wife, Avital, was campaigning through the late 1970's and 1980's for his release from Soviet prison she became increasingly observant. After her husband was freed and the couple reunited in Israel, the whole country was curious: Would Anatoly Sharansky put on a kippa or would Avital take off her head covering? "If her hat went off, it was a victory for the left," he recalls. "If my hat went on, it was a victory for the right." Perhaps this is why his hat goes on and off. "This was very difficult for me. I wanted to be connected to all the Jewish people and all Jewish symbols."

Which is why he fasts on Yitzhak Rabin's yortzeit: "The day a Jew killed a Jew is a day of mourning for me."

He also believes that Prime Minister Ehud Barak must take the views of diaspora Jews into account on far-reaching decisions such as the status of Jerusalem. "We are not only determining the borders of a territory," Sharansky explains, "but just as the 1948 War of Independence and the Six-Day War in 1967 unified us, a peace process that entails transferring biblical lands, determining the fate of a Jerusalem we have prayed for for 3,000 years, will also transform our identity as a nation with the potential for dangerously undermining our sense of being one people."

The Russian voter, crucial today, turned away from Benjamin Netanyahu in the last election and went for Barak. Sharansky won five Knesset seats and joined Barak's One Israel coalition. He greatly respects the prime minister's integrity and intelligence, but was disappointed when he began to learn about secret negotiations.

"I sat in jail because I was accused of being a Zionist spy," he says, smiling mischievously. "But apparently I wasn't very good at it; I couldn't even figure out what was happening in my own government where I served as a minister. Suddenly I discovered that Jerusalem was on the table. We were conceding the Jordan Valley. How can we have thought of doing this without a broad consensus?"

Consequently, he left the coalition on July 7. "They say our party is only interested in the needs of the Russians," he states, "but [by leaving] we gave up the [interior] ministry where we could most help the Russian sector because we felt the national good was being endangered."

A strong advocate of a unity government, Sharansky says, "The most important thing is to have a clear and consistent policy. We Jews have sold ourselves cheap; we vie with each other to give away more." About American pressure, he says without missing a beat, "Washington will pressure us as long as they can get something from it. They don't pressure Arafat because they know he won't give more."

Sharansky feels Barak acts like a commando officer. "He sets himself a goal and singlemindedly goes for it," he says. "Until the riots, his goal was a peace treaty. But the more right-wing Shas, Mafdal and Yisrael B'Aliya parties left his coalition over his concessions on Jerusalem. He then tried to build a new alliance on the issue of separation between state and religion, what Barak calls the secular revolution, which he feels will appeal to the Russian voters."

But Sharansky opposes such action because it would alienate those who are religious. "Israel is an amazing experiment," he says, "bringing many different types of Jews together to create a pluralistic mosaic. And while I believe in pluralism, the main task is to find a common denominator. That's the only way we'll survive."

He wants to balance a Jewish vision with human-rights values and politics. But it is not easy, even for this master chess player. On one hand he observes Shabbat and kashrut, and he and Avital send their daughters to religious schools. On the other, he must navigate the waters of his immigrant constituency, which includes the 25 percent of the Russians who are not halakhically Jewish and need civil solutions to marriage and divorce.

Yet he points out that both haredim and many Reform Jews are disappointed in him. Ella Greenbaum, a linguist from the former Soviet Union, notes that "as the most famous prisoner of Zion he could do no ill, but as the head of the Russian immigrant party, with hundreds of thousands of critical eyes upon him, he can do no right."

But the clear-eyed Sharansky can point proudly to his ministerial accomplishments. "We fought for consular marriage in foreign embassies for those who cannot marry within the rabbinate, and achieved a very respectable burial for non-Jews in family plots within Jewish cemeteries. I found pragmatic solutions to many of the issues Barak is brandishing as novel," Sharansky says. He even granted Law of Return rights to those with non-Orthodox conversions who had been active in diaspora communities.

In the event of new elections, would Sharansky, who has been in governments led by each, prefer a coalition under Netanyahu or Barak? He would not join one that would divide Jerusalem, he asserts.

When he sat in a Soviet jail, Anatoly Sharansky never dreamed he would someday be an Israeli minister, leader of a national party. Any regrets? "In jail I had to call upon all my resolve not to compromise myself," he says, "while in politics I am constantly attempting to find common ground for compromise.

"On a different plane, I try to apply the same guidelines to politics that I set for myself in the Soviet jail. In prison I had to be extremely serious, entirely focused to stand up against the authorities. Here, too, the highest seriousness is necessary to participate in the Israeli government, decide the fate of the Jewish people. There is nothing more important. Yet I feel now as I did then that I must also be able to stand back and laugh at myself and see things with a sense of humor and self-irony." More than anything else, it seems, the "last Zionist" is wearing the hat of Jewish unity.

By Rochelle Furstenberg