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Tuesday, December 1, 2015
Column One: Lessons from the Pollard saga

Column One: Lessons from the Pollard saga
By CAROLINE B. GLICK - The Jerusalem Post 11/26/2015 21:34

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Column-One-Lessons-from-the-Pollard-saga-435523s

The American Jewish community’s response to Pollard’s self-evidently
discriminatory parole terms has been muted.

Even before the dust settled on last Friday’s happy headlines proclaiming
that after 30 years in federal prison, Jonathan Pollard was being released,
we discovered that his release wasn’t the end of his sad saga.

Pollard’s parole conditions are draconian. For the next five years he will
be under curfew, barred from stepping outside his apartment after 7 pm. He
is prohibited from surfing the Internet. Anyone hiring him will be required
to allow law enforcement authorities full access to their computers. Pollard
already lost one job due to this condition.

Pollard is prohibited from leaving the US, or even from leaving New York.
Even the smallest infraction on his parole conditions is liable to send him
back to the slammer In other words, Pollard moved from a federal prison to
house arrest.

The injustice screaming out from Pollard’s parole conditions force us to
recall the long injustice he has suffered at the hands of very specific
parts of the American establishment. The story that everyone wishes to put
behind us, remains excruciatingly familiar.

From 1983 until his arrest in 1985, as a US naval analyst, Pollard served as
an Israeli agent and unlawfully transferred classified information to
Israel, a US ally. The normal prison sentence for Pollard’s offense is 2-5
years. Pollard was sentenced to life in prison.

Generally speaking, convicted agents of allied nations serve their prison
sentences in minimum- security prisons under relatively easy conditions.
Pollard spent ten years in solitary confinement at a maximum security
prison.

Generally, prisoners receive early parole for good behavior and if they
express sincere regret for their crimes.

Pollard was denied early parole despite the fact that he was a consistently
exemplary prisoner and repeatedly – indeed continuously – expressed his
sincere remorse for his offense.

Despite the fact that Israel is the US’s closest ally in the Middle East,
none of the five presidents who served while Pollard sat in jail agreed to
grant him clemency.

And today, President Barack Obama has made clear that he will not intervene
with federal prison authorities to ease Pollard’s parole conditions or allow
him to move to Israel.

The American Jewish community’s response to Pollard’s self-evidently
discriminatory parole terms has been muted. Only Pollard’s lawyers and a
handful of other voices have spoken out publicly against them. This is not
in the least surprising.

For the past 30 years and still today, the Pollard affair has served as a
warning to American Jewry. The Pollard case taught them that their
acceptance as full Americans is conditional. In many ways, as Pollard,
American Jewry has been on parole. The same forces that railroaded Pollard
into a life sentence, and the same forces that are keeping him under house
arrest today – can turn on a dime. Speak out too forcefully on Israel’s
behalf, and you will be crushed like a bug.

If the message wasn’t clear enough, in 2004 we had the phony AIPAC spy
scandal to drive it home.

The so-called spy scandal wrecked the careers and reputations of three
innocent men – DIA analyst Lawrence Franklin, AIPAC policy director Steve
Rosen, and AIPAC’s senior Iran analyst Keith Weissman. It besmirched the
institutional standing and reputation of the largest American Jewish
pro-Israel organization. It harmed the Israeli embassy. And it intimidated
all Jewish Americans who supported Israel and served in the national
security community.

The bottom line of the scandal, which unfolded over the course of five
years, was that the FBI attempted to criminalize normal activities carried
out by law-abiding, patriotic Americans who supported Israel.

Franklin transferred information to Rosen and Weissman just as federal
officials trade information with lobbyists in Washington every day. He met
with Israeli diplomat Naor Gillon, because dealing with Israeli embassy
officials was part of his job. There was no criminal intent on the part of
any of the people involved. The charges against Rosen and Weissman were
thrown out.

And Franklin, who agreed to a plea bargain after his family was threatened,
and was initially sentenced to 12 years in prison, had his term reduced to
ten months of house arrest.

Pollard’s name lurked in the air throughout the sordid affair. The
underlying message of the probe and the subsequent criminal trials was that
as far as the powers that be in Washington are concerned, Jews who supported
Israel while working on national security issues were inherently
untrustworthy.

Outside Franklin, Rosen and Weissman, the primary victims of the fake spy
case were the Jews in the Bush administration’s national security apparatus,
who found themselves under around-the-clock surveillance, and AIPAC, which
was tarred as the agent of a foreign government with nefarious motivations.

Not surprisingly, Pollard is the object of intense hatred by many Jews in
Washington who blame him for their suffering. But of course, his punishment
was far greater than his crime. The forces that tried to criminalize AIPAC
and the Jews of Washington in 2004 were the same ones that sent Pollard to
prison for life for an offense that should have landed him 2-5 years in the
big house.

Pollard committed a serious offense. But he didn’t commit the original sin.

At any rate, the Pollard affair and the so-called AIPAC spy scandal both
taught us that there are powerful forces in the American national security
bureaucracy who do not like Israel and who believe that American Jews who
support Israel are inherently disloyal. For these forces, who seem to
comprise a permanent anti-Israel lobby in the State Department, FBI, CIA and
Pentagon, unlike Italian Americans or Irish Americans who support their
mother countries, Jewish Americans who support Israel are suspect.

This then brings us to Israel.

The Pollard affair’s lessons for Israel relate both to our relations with
the American Jewish community and to the US government.

Israelis have always had a childlike tendency to view the American Jewish
community as all-powerful. While it is true that the American Jewish
community is more powerful than any other Diaspora community, it is far from
all-powerful. The pressures exerted on the community in everything related
to US Jewish support for the Jewish state require Israel to be careful about
involving American Jews in serious disputes between Jerusalem and
Washington.

This past summer we saw how hard it is for the US Jewish establishment to
stand up for Israel, when doing so is the least bit controversial.

Although most major Jewish American organizations eventually announced their
opposition to Obama’s disastrous nuclear deal with Iran, it took a long time
for them to do so.

And even after they announced that they opposed it, they bent over backwards
to make clear that they harbored no hard feelings towards ostensibly
pro-Israel lawmakers who decided to support a deal that guarantees that Iran
will acquire nuclear weapons. AIPAC’s decision to host an event last month
for Senator Chris Coons, a key supporter of the deal, showed just how eager
American Jews are to move on and not hold anyone to account.

So too, the Jewish community’s failure to reject out-of-hand the mendacious
claims that Israel is persecuting the Palestinians stem from a discomfort
with an issue on which Israel and the administration are openly at odds.

As for the US government, generations of Israeli leaders have taken American
declarations of ironclad devotion to Israel’s security at face value. When
American leaders, like former president Bill Clinton or former secretary of
state Condoleezza Rice raised the possibility of signing a mutual defense
treaty with Israel if we gave up the Jordan Valley or Jerusalem, or the
Golan Heights, many Israeli leaders – particularly on the Left – thought
that it would be a good trade-off. After all, we can trust America.

And in many ways, we can trust America. For instance, the US is Israel’s
largest military supplier. Many of our military platforms are made in the
US. US military aid to Israel has been more or less steady for decades. The
US is Israel’s only defender at the UN.

Because of the US, Israel has avoided becoming subject to economic sanctions
and even military actions that would in all likelihood pass through the
Security Council in the absence of a US veto.

Having the US as a strategic ally has enhanced Israel’s deterrent power in
the region. As the US withdrawal from the region under Obama has shown, the
vacuum formed by the US retreat from Iraq and from the Persian Gulf more
generally has enabled the rise of forces from the Muslim Brotherhood to Iran
to Islamic State that are all dedicated to the annihilation of Israel.

While Israel’s alliance with the US is real and significant, Pollard’s story
exposes its limitations.

It warns us that while secretaries of state proclaim their eternal concern
and friendship for Israel, there are officials whispering in their ears that
Israel is the source of instability in the Middle East and that due to the
support Israel enjoys from American Jewry, America’s ability to secure its
interests in the Middle East is impaired. The weaker both US Jewry and
Israel are, the better off America will be, they are told.

Unfortunately, more often than not, when Israelis aren’t pretending that
these forces don’t exist, they tend to view them as all-powerful.

So it is that the same Israeli officials – again, predominately on the
Left – who insist that Israel can trust US security guarantees because the
US will never waver in its commitment to Israel, also insist that Israel
must never act in opposition to the US. So long as the US opposes destroying
Iran’s nuclear installations, Israel, they insist, must not raise a finger
against them.

So long as the US supports a Palestinian state, they insist that Israel must
carry on as if the so-called two-state solution is possible, let along good
for Israel.

Obviously, both positions are simplistic and wrong. For the past 30 years,
as Pollard suffered in prison, and Israel’s position in the US remained
under constant assault by its opponents in the bureaucracy, Israel’s
relations with the US expanded and deepened. The level of US popular support
for Israel has grown from year to year.

Pollard’s story tells us that we need to grow up. The US is a great ally,
but our alliance with America is no substitute for national power.

As an ally, we should take US concerns into account where we can, and act
independently where we must. Pollard’s case was a great victory for our
enemies in Washington. And they will score additional ones in the future.
But so will our friends. And so will we.

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