MONTREAL — More and more emissaries from the Jewish Agency are being sent to North American university campuses to counter the “delegitimization” of the State of Israel, said the agency’s head, Natan Sharansky, while in Montreal last week.

“Delegitimization is a direct continuation of the antisemitism of thousands of years, which has always been against Jewish identity, whether it be a religion or nationality. Now it’s the connection with Israel.

“The heart of the problem is that they want to destroy us as a people… On the campuses, the aim of our enemies is to disconnect young Jews from our people,” he said at an event sponsored by Federation CJA, which saw Sharansky in conversation with Mount Royal MP Irwin Cotler, who served as his legal counsel while the former dissident was in Soviet prisons from 1977 to 1986.

Those foes are succeeding to an alarming extent, Sharansky said.

“I know many hundreds of cases of young Jews who believe it would be better for their careers or relations to stop being involved in anything to do with Israel. The next step is to stop involvement with anything Jewish, then they disappear from our people. It’s a big problem.”

He believes “a few hundred Jews [in the world] are lost every day” due to assimiliation and isolating themselves from Israel.

Sharansky, 63, who became Jewish Agency chair in 2009 after a political career, says his aim is to expand the organization’s campus activities. This year it has 50 “fellows” at U.S. colleges, up from 15 two years ago. (He said there are one or two in Canada.) They are young Israelis who know how to debate, he said.

The goal is to have a presence at every university with at least 1,000 Jewish students, which is about 100 institutions in the United States.

It’s hoped that a core of 10 to 30 Jewish students on each campus will become capable of being effective defenders of Israel through their presence.

Cotler suggested that Jewish students face the dilemma of wanting to be part of the pervasive “human rights culture” on campus, but feel estranged from it because it often attacks Israel for alleged repression and racism.

The Jewish Agency is also organizing more months or year-long study or work programs in Israel for young Diaspora Jews, as well as joint humanitarian projects between Israelis and Jews from abroad in places such as Ethiopia and South America.

Sharansky said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu invited him to be part of his current government, but he refused, joking, “Nine years in prison and nine years in the Knesset is enough.” He said Netanyahu was surprised that he wanted the Jewish Agency job. As Cotler pointed out,  the organization no longer plays the same central role in connecting Israel and the Diaspora that it once did.

Sharansky believes the Jewish Agency continues to provide a necessary forum for ongoing dialogue between Israel and Jews abroad and encourages unity. The success of the Soviet Jewry movement of the 1970s and 1980s showed that Jewish solidarity can accomplish great things, Sharansky said.

“When Jews feel mutual responsibility, no dictatorship, no force in this world, can stand against this.”

Without Jews in the free world fighting in tandem with their long-lost Soviet brethren, Jewish rights and emigration would never have been secured. And, what’s more, Sharansky believes, the Soviet Union would not have fallen.

“We paralyzed the Soviet Union. Once it had to make concessions to Jews, it fell apart. It could no longer control the minds of people.”

Commenting on the political upheaval in the Arab world, Sharansky said it’s inevitable that when given a choice between corrupt dictatorship and fundamentalist ideology, people will choose the latter.

The United States was wrong to support Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak and Israel to support PLO leader Yasser Arafat as preferable to Islamic radicals, he thinks.

“The longer Mubarak was in power, the stronger the fundamentalist movement grew,” he said. And while Mubarak maintained the peace treaty with Israel in exchange for U.S. aid, Cairo was a world capital for the publishing of antisemitic material, he added.

Today, the free world should assist in the building of civil society in Egypt rather than funding its military, he said.

There are millions of Egyptians who want freedom, but they’re not organized politically like the Islamists, he said. Western support should be going to pro-democracy student, academic, labour and free-market business groups.

The day before, at the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue, at an event also organized by Federation CJA, Sharansky was asked what the Jewish Agency can do help obtain the release of Jonathan Pollard, the former American civilian intelligence analyst sentenced to life in prison in 1987 for spying for Israel.

Sharansky replied that the Jewish Agency can’t do anything, but he personally believes there’s “no justification” for keeping Pollard behind bars any longer.

The American Jewish community today is generally in favour of his release, as are many influential Americans, including former CIA director James Woolsey, he said.

“The Jewish community in the U.S. is now starting to speak public about it… They are united from the left to the right, from Reform to Orthodox. I hope this [Pollard’s imprisonment] can end.”

While in Montreal, Sharansky also spoke to more than 500 Jewish high school students gathered at the federation, and university students at Hillel House.