Pollard Gets Some Help From Israeli Government

By Ella Bancroft

"I'm no longer an orphan, this is my first victory in 10 years," convicted American spy for Israel Jonathan Jay Pollard reportedly told his new wife, Esther Zeitz Pollard, upon learning that Gen. Ehud Barak, who then was Israeli interior minster, had reconsidered Israel's rejection of Pollard's request for Israeli citizenship. Barak, who is foreign minister in Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres' new government, granted the Pollard request and, on his first visit to the U.S. as Israel's new prime minister, Peres renewed the request of his assassinated predecessor, Yitzhak Rabin, by handing President Bill Clinton a request for executive clemency for Pollard.

A revelation by Israel's Channel 2 television picked up by the Nov. 22 Jerusalem Post and other Israeli newspapers but not by any U.S. daily was that the Israeli prime minister's office secretly funds Israel's Public Committee for Jonathan Pollard. According to the report, some $3 million has been transferred to the committee with the approval of both Yitzhak Shamir and Rabin during their respective terms as prime minister. Pollard's attorneys claim that the committee has been acting to support the Israeli government's interest in avoiding friction with the U.S. rather than Pollard's interests. Either way, however, the secret activity is an example of how U.S. government aid to Israel makes possible Israeli-government activities to influence American presidents, Congress, and public opinion. This is possible because of the unique arrangement whereby Israeli use of U.S. funds is not monitored by any organ of the U.S. government. In U.S. embassies in all other countries that receive U.S. foreign aid there is an Agency for International Development office that supervises how the funds are spent. There is no such U.S. supervision in Israel, which receives more than a third of U.S. foreign aid funds world-wide.

Meanwhile Mordechi Vanunu, an Israeli of Moroccan Jewish descent who, after his conversion to Christianity, revealed the existence of Israel's secret nuclear weapons stockpile to the British media, remains in solitary confinement in Israel, despite a worldwide campaign for alleviation of the harsh conditions of his imprisonment. Will President Clinton hand back a note to Peres suggesting a swap of an Israeli who tried to warn the world of Israel's nuclear transgressions for an American who transferred to Israel a vast store of secrets he says the U.S. should have given to Israel voluntarily? Don't hold your breath.

President Leslie Gelb of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York suggested in an address to the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations that Israel "negotiate backward" in third-phase implementation talks with the Palestinian Authority under the Oslo agreement. He proposed that Israel announce its final goals—such as a full peace in return for a Palestinian state independent or in confederation with Jordan and relinquishing the Golan Heights in exchange for a full peace with Syria. Israel then would set out a step-by-step plan to achieve those goals over a period as long as 15 years, making clear that if interim steps are not met, there is no next step.

In a presumably unrelated move, "terrorism expert" Steven Emerson accused the Council of Foreign Relations of "legitimizing the militant Palestinian Hamas organzation" by publishing an occasional newsletter called Muslim Politics Report. Emerson wrote to Gelb claiming that the newsletter, which receives funding from the Ford Foundation, expresses views that "are one and the same as Hamas and other violent militant Islamic organizations." A report by the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), a group Emerson charges is a Hamas front, was discussed in the summer issue of Muslim Politics Front. Editor Daniel Pipes of the Middle East Quarterly also has written to Gelb on the matter. Gelb responded that the publication contains a disclaimer that "all statements of fact and expressions of opinion in the Muslim Politics Report are the sole responsibility of the individual author."

The study to which Emerson and Pipes referred was entitled "A Rush to Judgment: The CAIR Special Report on Anti-Muslim Bias, Harassment and Violence Following the Oklahoma City Bombing." It documented anti-Muslim incidents in the immediate aftermath of the April 5 bombing and referred to Emerson's initial public statement on the tragedy that "This was done with the intent to inflict as many casualties as possible. That is a Middle Eastern trait."

New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani's cultivation of New York Jewish voters apparently did not include attendance at a $150-a-plate dinner by the Jewish Action Alliance. Bruce Titlebaum, Guiliani's liaison officer with Jewish groups, said Alliance founder Beth Gilinsky, who made a reputation by charging former mayor David Dinkins with inaction during anti-Jewish riots in Crown Heights, misled guests when she featured Giuliani in advertisements for the dinner. In fact, the ads featuring Giuliani caused former New York Mayor Ed Koch, a Gilinsky supporter, to decide not to attend. Because of Koch's recent criticism of Giuliani's action in asking President Yasser Arafat of the Palestinian National Authority to leave a Lincoln Center concert on the 50th anniversary of the United Nations, Koch said, "They would have been applauding him (Giuliani) for his action and booing me. I would have been compelled to walk out. It didn't make sense for me to attend."

Key to the scriptures: Koch, who is Jewish American, was beaten at the polls by Dinkins, who is African American. Giuliani, who is Italian American and defeated Dinkins, would like to have all the Jewish support he can get without excessively alienating African-American voters. The moral for the United Nations is that there must be a lot of other cities in the world that would be a more harmonious place to spend its next half century than among ethnically divided and anger-filled New Yorkers.

The anger also engulfed television personality Kathie Lee Gifford, known both from her daily ABC television talk show "Live with Regis and Kathie Lee" and her televised Caribbean cruise advertisements. It started with an Aug. 31 discussion of the Oxford University Press publication The New Testament and Psalms: An Inclusive Version, in which she remarked that "they're changing who crucified Jesus." That got her a letter from B'nai B'rith's Anti-Defamation League. Subsequently she opined during a CNBC interview that she probably was more in touch with her Middle American audience than her producer, Michael Gelman, because "He's a male, Jewish, single guy, living in New York City. Nothing wrong with that, God bless him, like Seinfeld." That elicited a protest from ADL national director Abraham Foxman, who is as dependent for a living on ferreting out and defaming "anti-Semites" as was the late Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarty on discovering "communists" tearing at the fabric of American life. Neither Gelman nor Gifford, whose Jewish father converted to Christianity and who considers herself a "born again" Christian, had any comment. You can bet, however, that Foxman won't let the matter rest until he has an apology from Gifford and her network, and lots of new dues-paying paranoid members of the ADL

Historian Christina Jeffrey had just moved with her husband and children to Washington, DC early in 1995 to accept an appointment by House Speaker Newt Gingrich as House of Representatives historian when she was blasted by the ADL as a Nazi sympathizer. Gingrich's office immediately announced that the job she hadn't started had been abolished. Jeffrey had been a faculty colleague of Gingrich at Kennesaw State College in Marietta, GA when she served on a Department of Education panel considering a Holocaust curriculum project for schools entitled "Facing History and Ourselves." She had expressed her concern that the proposed curriculum did not examine the context in which Nazism arose in defeated post-World War I Germany with the clumsily worded comment that the project did not present "the Nazi point of view."

The ADL seized on the comment and Gingrich buckled without even asking to hear Jeffrey's side of it. Nevertheless, knowing her academic career was over if she allowed the ADL charges to stand unchallenged, she sought out Foxman in his den.

"I looked at the record," he said in late November. "Maybe she made a mistake—but this is not an albatross that should be around her neck for the rest of her life...For us to have credibility as experts in anti- Semitism, we have to be sensitive and wise about using the term. Here was a woman who made a significant mistake but who was pilloried, labeled an anti-Semite and called a Holocaust denier. The result is that her reputation and her dignity were hurt."

Foxman said he contacted Gingrich who "agreed with me that we have to face up to the broader issue of how reputations can be destroyed by such accusations, and by the media feeding frenzy." Now Gingrich says he wants Jeffrey to be a House educational consultant, and Foxman has shown that just as for Catholics the pope is infallible on matters of faith and morals, for American politicians ADL directors, "as experts in anti-Semitism," are infallible on matters of historical truth and political correctness.

Ella Bancroft covers U.S. and Canadian affairs for overseas newspapers.