IMRA - Thursday, February 5, 2009 Livni and Pollard

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Thursday, February 5, 2009

Livni and Pollard

Livni and Pollard
"Remarkably, what we did not get was any assistance from the government of
Israel,
nor any sense of a joint effort to help get Jonathan Pollard out."

Shevat 11, 5769, 05 February 09 12:19by Farley Weiss
www.israelnationalnews.com/SendMail.aspx?print=print&type=1&item=8559

(IsraelNN.com) Jonathan Pollard is right to blame Israeli Foreign Minister
Tzipi Livni especially for the failure to obtain his release from prison
after over 22 years in prison. Tzipi Livni has been foreign minister for
three years and there has not been any indication during that time that she
made any progress in obtaining the approval of the United States president
to release Pollard, despite the obvious argument that the average sentence
for crimes similar to Pollard's is between two and four years. Furthermore,
whatever quiet diplomacy she claims she used quite clearly failed, something
she needs to be able to readily acknowledge.

Of course, Livni is not solely to blame. Defense Minister Ehud Barak
apparently took no action to help Pollard - a fact that is particularly
disturbing some eight years after he helped get President Bill Clinton to
pardon the very controversial Mark Rich. You would think he would try to
correct his record right before the coming Israeli elections, but he did not
do so.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was also part of this failed policy when he
publicly told Eli Yishai not to raise the Pollard issue with President
George Bush when he visited Israel, ostensibly because Olmert had already
raised it and the president in turn said no. It is also public knowledge
that Israel's President Shimon Peres was asked repeatedly to make a request
to President Bush to free Pollard, and Peres refused to raise the concern.

This much is certain: if there were indeed quiet efforts made to secure
Pollard's release, then they were too quiet. In any case, these efforts did
not work, and one must wonder why Livni apparently made clear that she and
this Israeli government will continue the same failed policies with the
Obama Administration. One can only hope that there exists a better chance to
obtain approval with the Obama Administration, in part because
Vice-President Joe Biden stated in a 2007 interview on Shalom television
that "there's a rationale in my view why Pollard should be given leniency.
But there is not a rationale to say what happened did not happen and he
should be pardoned." In other words, it sounds like Biden supports clemency
for Pollard. It is clear from her comments on Pollard that Secretary of
State Hillary Clinton will not be an impediment to his release and President
Barack Obama, being a former law professor and one concerned about civil
rights, should be an easy sell on the matter. To paraphrase the Obama
campaign mantra, it is time for a change in the Israeli government's
approach to the Pollard affair.

I worked under the leadership of Rabbi Pesach Lerner of the National Council
of Young Israel, the leading figure in the effort to try to obtain the
commutation of Pollard's sentence to time served. This effort included
obtaining the support, in a public interview, of former CIA Director James
Woolsey for Pollard's release, a fact that helped refute the well-publicized
opposition from the intelligence community. We also obtained a letter from
the former head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, former Arizona Senator
Dennis DeConcini, in favor of Pollard's release. We approached some of
President Bush's closest and wealthiest friends in the Jewish community and
asked them to lend their support; some agreed and apparently raised the
issue with the president directly. We even got some of the closest people in
the Jewish community to two of the three Attorney Generals for President
Bush (people who were so close to the AGs that they had their home phone
numbers), and they raised the Pollard issue with them. We worked with the
Conference of Presidents to get a letter from them in support of Jonathan's
release; additional letters came from the Reform and Conservative Jewish
community as well. We even worked with those formerly connected to the
President's Administration - non-Jews and great friends of the Jewish people
who understood the injustice - who kindly helped press the case. Finally, we
also solicited support for Pollard's release from the likes of Pastor John
Hagee of the evangelical Christian community.

Remarkably, what we did not get was any assistance from the government of
Israel, nor any sense of a joint effort to help get Jonathan Pollard out.
There is a famous story in American Jewish history when a friend of Harry
Truman, Eddie Jacobson, was approached by Chaim Weizmann and the soon-to-be
government of Israel to obtain a meeting with the president. Jacobson
acquiesced and the meeting helped lead to Truman's support for the State of
Israel. Today, while undertaking all of these actions for Pollard we were
only aware of assistance from Natan Sharansky in Israel. We heard nothing
from the government of Israel. It is not surprising that Sharansky helped,
considering his personal experiences and the fact that he himself visited
Pollard. It is not surprising that Binyamin Netanyahu was the last prime
minister to make a serious effort for Pollard, and is the only one running
for office who has actually visited Pollard in prison. Neither Livni, Olmert
nor Barak ever took the time to visit Pollard on their many trips to the US,
and therefore it is not surprising that they failed in their efforts, if in
fact there were any, to obtain his release.

One would have hoped, on the last weekend of Bush's presidency, that Livni
would have asked, as part of a face-saving agreement to leave Gaza without
Gilad Shalit, to at least have Pollard released. But, truth be told, there
is no indication that she even raised the issue, despite others working
tirelessly the last week to try to get the president to commute Pollard's
sentence.

I am writing this not to place blame, but rather to request a change of
policy. Fact: the policy followed by the government of Israel has failed.
Pollard must now be made a major issue of discussion by both the government
of Israel and the American Jewish community. I met once with the Jewish
liaison to President Bush and he expressed surprise that I was raising the
Pollard issue. He asked why, if the matter was so important, it is not being
raised by American Jewish leaders. I happen to know that not only was it not
being raised, but those going to the White House were specifically told not
to raise the Pollard issue.

Clearly, this policy of not letting people raise the issue only furthered
the view of the White House that it was not important to the Jewish
community. It was not sufficient to try to change this view in the last two
months of an eight-year Bush presidency. The Obama Administration needs to
hear from the Jewish community at every meeting that this is a major issue
for the Jewish community. Former Prime Minister Netanyahu showed at the Wye
summit that Pollard's release could be secured at any time by the president,
if only the matter is pressed by Israel.

Albert Einstein once famously said that one who thinks that they can follow
the same actions and obtain a differ ent result defines the essence of
insanity. For Livni to continue the same failed policy is insanity, because
it has not and will not achieve the desired result. The Pollard case must
become an imperative for the Israeli government and the entire US Jewish
community; and its leaders must reflect that urgency beginning right now.
There has been a joint effort to try and prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear
weapons and there needs to be a joint effort on Jonathan Pollard as well.
After all, even "now" is two decades too long.