J4JP 25th Anniversary Review Series - Article #12 An Ugly Distortion of
Justice

Justice4JP - November 23, 2009

To mark Jonathan Pollard's 25th year in American captivity - which is also
his 25th year of abandonment and betrayal by the government of Israel - J4JP
will be reviewing some of the best-written, most informative, and most
interesting articles, essays and information written about the case over the
last two and a half decades.

Article number 12 in this series, "An Ugly Distortion of Justice" was
written 3 months after Jonathan Pollard was sentenced to an unprecedented
life sentence in March of 1987. Change the date on this article, from 1987
to 2009, and it remains as accurate, insightful, and disturbing as it was
more than 2 decades ago.

Two days ago, on November 21, 2009, Jonathan Pollard entered his 25th year
of a life sentence with no end in sight. Never before in the thousands of
years of the history of the Jewish People has there been a Jewish captive
languishing in captivity for 25 years.

For those who believe in the eternal nature of the Jewish People, this fact
alone ought to have provoked some serious reflection on the part of Jewish
leaders and opinion-makers .Even for those who have no great sense of
history and no belief in the transcendent nature of Jewish People, a Jewish
captive languishing in captivity for an unprecedented 25 years ought to have
been the stuff of editorials, op-eds, and news articles. It should have been
the catalyst for deep soul searching and intense activity by leaders
hastening to resolve this case, the consummate symbol of Jewish impotence
and humiliation.

Yet, oddly enough, there has been virtual silence out of all of those same
Jewish leaders, media outlets, and opinion-makers who have for years and
years excoriated, lampooned, maligned and generally spilled an ocean of ink
over Jonathan Pollard since he was arrested 25 years ago. They have never
forgiven him for disturbing their "Jewish tranquility".

Indeed, the only Jewish captive in Jewish History began his 25th year in
captivity this week, and virtually no one in a position to do something
about this ugly distortion of justice gave any sign that they even noticed.

#####

AN UGLY DISTORTION OF JUSTICE

By William Mehlman & A.S. Epstein- Jerusalem Post - June 9, 1987

It is 1985. You are a young American Jew of the post-Holocaust generation,
employed in the US Naval Intelligence. Your loyalty to your country of birth
has never been in question. But you are also a Jew, one stamped with the
"Never Again" vow and a love and admiration for Israel, its ultimate
guarantor.

Across your desk comes a flow of information that seems deliberately
designed to test the veracity of that vow and that love. It is intelligence
of the most disturbing nature concerning inter alia, the existence and
location of Arab chemical warfare and nuclear development facilities, the
size and strength of PLO and other terrorist positions within striking
distance of Israel, and the deployment of massive quantities of American
weapons sold to Saudi Arabia over the past decade. You have also seen
evidence pointing to possible serious Egyptian breaches of the Sinai
demilitarization provisions of the Camp David Accords.

You are convinced that this is the kind of information that could spell the
difference between victory and defeat for Israel in another round. You also
know that it is being routinely, calculatedly withheld in violation of
America's repeated pledge that Israel would suffer no strategic disadvantage
as a result of US arms sales to the Arabs or its agreeing to hand over its
Sinai buffer to Egypt. You know that America is playing fast and loose with
Israel's security.

You have two alternatives: (1) Keep silent about the intelligence that has
come into your possession using loyalty, duty, or self-interest to justify
your silence; (2) Sound the alarm in the only effective way possible -
relaying these facts to Israel, whatever the personal cost.

Those who say they would chose silence must know that by that decision they
would reincarnate and legitimize the Jewish silence of the 1940's, the
conspiracy that may have consigned hundreds of thousands of European Jews to
avoidable extermination. The rest of us would choose to sound the alarm,
even at the risk of being accused of "dual loyalty", even at the risk of
being charged with "treason", and in so doing we would, each of us, become
Jonathan Jay Pollard.

What this episode tells American Jews about themselves is disquieting. One
might have assumed, nearly a century after the great East European Jewish
immigration, that this second and third generation of American Jews, with
its pacemakers in the arts, sciences, professions, business, and politics,
was free of the anxieties and insecurity of its immigrant forebears. In
fact, it turns out that in the paranoia department, our great uncle from
Byalistok couldn't carry our shoes. What else can explain the shower of
renunciatory Op-Ed articles, the frantically apologetic letters to the
editor, the organized proclamations of contrition that came in the wake of
Pollard's conviction?

Pollard's real sin was that he had put a tack under the fat, complacent
position of Jews in American society. Better he should have remained silent
about the dangers he saw threatening Israel than that their tranquility
should have been disturbed.

We also discovered that the canard of "dual loyalty" thought to have been
laid to rest by Justice Louis Brandeis half a century ago, was alive and
well - in the timorous hearts of untold numbers of American Jews. With no
urging from their non-Jewish compatriots they came out of the woodwork in
droves to confess that there might now be a conflict between their loyalty
to America's interests and the security of the only nation in the Middle
East which embodies those interests.

Another sobering revelation of the Pollard affair was the discovery that to
this new legion of "Jewish Americans" the promise made to our martyrs and
renewed each year on the Day of Remembrance, Never Again to stand silent in
the face of any threat to any portion of the Jewish people was not worth its
weight in breath. With what alacrity they took to the hills the moment one
man had the temerity to display the courage of their conviction.

But perhaps the most disheartening discovery we have made about ourselves is
our virtual loss of the capacity for honest righteous rage. Erich Remarque,
the brilliant diarist of the Hitler-driven generation of the 1940's,
observed in his last book Shadows in Paradise, that maybe Jews were "too
neurasthenic" for real anger. Because of that, he wrote: "their hatred had
no stamina; it soon gave way to resignation and, to preserve their
self-respect, they turned their energies to understanding the enemy."

We have surely by now had more than our fill of Jews who make a career of
understanding the enemy, be it the "students" cum rock-throwing terrorists
of Bir Zeit, the "Poor Palestinians" who ask for nothing more than a
"homeland" from which to prepare a final assault on Tel Aviv, or the East
Jerusalem "journalist" so "undemocratically" barred from circulating his
incendiary hate sheet. Their unmitigated contempt for the self-haters in
Israel who are trying so hard to "understand" them is surely no greater than
that displayed by Caspar Weinberger (Secretary of Defense) towards 5.7
million American Jews when he declared that it was contrary to America's
interests for either side in the Middle East conflict - read Israel - to
achieve strategic dominance in the region?

Pollard's "crime", he said, in effect, was his attempt to provide Israel
with the Intelligence (deliberately withheld by the Pentagon) vital to
maintaining the 'edge' over an Arab foe vastly superior in numbers,
resources, and hardware - and thus subvert the Defense Department's policy
of keeping Israel on the strategic defensive.

If the American Jewish community, fully aware that it was precisely this
strategic edge that saved Israel's life in five wars of intended
annihilation, had an iota of righteous anger left in its system, it would
have risen to a man to demand Weinberger's resignation. Instead, like
Remarque's hopeless neurasthenics they fell over themselves in a rush to
understand Weinberger and Co. and turned their fury inward on Pollard, the
young Jew who had thrown it all away - his name, his freedom, his life - to
warn Israel and the Jewish people of the dangers threatening them.

They did not even raise their voices when a conscienceless prosecutor and a
vindictive judge, sensing the opportunity for cheap self-aggrandizement at
the expense of a young Jew obviously abandoned by his people, conspired to
sentence him to a lifetime behind bars, callously abrogating an agreement to
treat his case with a modicum of perspective in return for the "full
cooperation" he gave the authorities. And when, his bloodlust still unsated,
Weinberger protested that life in prison was too lenient a punishment for
Pollard, did the "Jewish Americans" even raise their voices? Most of them
hid in the corner, silent witnesses to one of the ugliest distortions of
justice in American history.
--

The authors, William Mehlman is editor of THE INSIDERS CHRONICLE, a weekly
financial newsletter; A.S. Epstein was publisher of the Magazine Supplement
LIFE IN ISRAEL