Pollard Clemency Campaign Poses Dilemma for Congress

By Lucille Barnes

Twenty-one members of the House of Representatives contributed to the pressure upon President Bill Clinton to commute the life sentence of U.S. Navy counterintelligence agent Jonathan Jay Pollard, convicted in 1987 of turning over highly classified U.S. military information to Israel. Among them were congress members who seemed acutely unhappy at being asked in media interviews why they had signed a congressional letter declaring Pollard's punishment "excessive and unreasonable.''

The issue has split the U.S. Jewish community, with neither the American Israel Public Affairs Committee nor B'nai B'rith's Anti-Defamation League willing to join other national Jewish organizations and hundreds of rabbis who have signed newspaper advertisements calling upon the president to free Pollard. Increasingly, members of Congress sense that Pollard's Jewish supporters are isolating themselves from mainstream U.S. media and public opinion on the subject.

Outspokenly supporting Pollard was Democratic Rep. Gary Ackerman, who represents a heavily Jewish constituency in Queens, NY. ''He found himself on the horns of a moral dilemma," Ackerman said. ''What do you do when you've signed an oath [but] in his mind the entire state of Israel might be lost had he not taken action?"

Less certain was Republican Rep. Benjamin Gilman, representing Rockland, NY, who also signed the letter. "Matters related to our sources and methods are among the most closely guarded of our secrets because they can reveal our capabilities and can allow foreign powers to hide their activities from us," Gilman wrote. "Replacing those systems cost hundreds of millions of dollars, or more, and may cost human life.''

Democratic Rep. Eliot Engel, who represents the Bronx and Westchester, told reporter Larry Cohler of the Jewish Week of New York, ''I don't think it's my place to judge [Pollard] morally. Certainly, legally it was wrong. The morality of it must be left for each individual to decide. Quite frankly, a lot of the intelligence should have been given to Israel, but I don't believe any individual has the right to take on that decision on his own."

Illustrating the discomfort of members of Congress who rely on the support of Israel's lobby for campaign funds but who know their constituents would be deeply perturbed to learn that they were lobbying Clinton for clemency for Pollard, an aide to Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY) tried to straddle the issue in an interview with journalist Cohler.

Moynihan took an appeal for clemency from Pollard to Clinton last March. Pollard, however, has since disavowed a section of that letter expressing repugnance at his act. The convicted spy says now that he would "rather be rotting in prison than sitting shiva [praying for the dead] for the hundreds of thousands of Israelis who could have died because of my cowardice.''

The Moynihan aide told Cohler that Pollard's lack of contrition "creates a problem" for senators who took Pollard's letter to Clinton. Just how serious the problem is was illustrated by a spokesman for Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-CT). The spokesman refused to confirm whether or not Lieberman also had commended the original Pollard letter to Clinton. Instead, the spokesman said Lieberman "was unprepared to comment at this time" on the Pollard appeal.

Congressmen Weigh in on Syria

Less controversial was a public appeal by several pro-Israel members of the House of Representatives to Secretary of State Warren Christopher on the eve of his December trip to the Middle East to renew U.S. pleas to Syrian President Hafez Al-Assad to allow the country's Jewish residents to emigrate or visit abroad. Among those pressing the issue with the secretary of state were Representatives Engel and Gilman and Rep. Charles Schumer (DNY), one of Israel's most indefatigable supporters in Congress.

Equally indefatigable is the Washington representative of one of the newest national Jewish organizations to set up a lobbying operation on Capitol Hill. Rabbi Levi Shemtov, who represents American Friends of Lubavitch, the Israeli Orthodox Jewish sect active in support of Israel's right-wing Likud platform, held a Chanukah party in a Senate caucus room on Dec. 9 "to give Jewish staffers a chance to meet each other and celebrate Chanukah properly.''

Senator Leahy Criticizes Both Aid To Israel and Arab Boycott

Sen. Patrick Leahy is one of the few members of Congress who has warned Israelis that they must begin to think about the day when the United States government, rather than Israel's lobby, determines how many U.S. taxpayer dollars will go to Israel each year. In the past, however, his concern for the U.S. budget has been more than offset by his fear that Israel's lobby will find and fund rival aspirants to his Senate seat at election time. SO, after warning about Israel's ever growing share of an ever-declining U.S. foreign aid budget, Leahy has cast his vote in favor of increasingly lopsided divisions of U.S. foreign aid.

In 1993, the Vermont Democrat campaigned against the earmarks that protect Israel's $4.3 billion share of U.S. economic and military aid, and Egypt's $2.1 billion in foreign aid for keeping the peace with Israel. Leavy also helped insert into legislation authorizing Israel an additional $2 billion in annual U.S. Loan guarantees a provision that the U.S. withhold one dollar from the following year's loan guarantees to Israel for every dollar the Israeli government spends on Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem.

That provision forced President Clinton to withhold $437 million from Israel's 1994 total of $2 billion in loan guarantees. However, Clinton later ordered that Israel receive extra U.S. government funding to offset the legally mandated deduction.

The senator from Vermont "is a hard man to figure out," according to the Jewish Week of New York. The weekly newspaper pointed out that in an apparent attempt to ward off the Israel lobby's evil eye, Leahy "sounded like a gung-ho pro-Israel enthusiast" in a 1993 speech to the annual conference of the National Association of Arab Americans in which he called the continuing Arab boycott of Israel "a blow to peace" and a "failure of statesmanship and goodwill" and threatened that until they lift the boycott, Arab states "cannot expect attitudes in Congress to change significantly."

Both Houses Call for End Of Arab Boycott of Israel

In fact Senator Leahy doesn't seem hard to figure out at all. On some days, when he speaks from the heart, he sounds like a statesman. On other days, when he is motivated by fear of Israel's lobby, he sounds like a typical member of Congress.

An example of typical members of Congress at work was provided by Maryland Democratic Sen. Barbara Mikulski, who jokingly calls herself "the senator from Rockville," a heavily Jewish Maryland suburb of the U.S. national capital. Mikulski, a member of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Foreign Operations, which Leahy chairs, campaigned successfully to retain the 1994 fiscal year earmarks protecting U. S. aid to Israel, saying that eliminating them would disrupt the Middle East peace talks.

In another typical example of U.S. Legislators doing the bidding of AIPAC, Israel's Washington lobby, the House of Representatives in November passed by a 425-to-1 vote a resolution calling upon the League of Arab States to lift the Arab boycott of Israel in all its forms. The House resolution was introduced by freshman member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee Peter Deutsch (D-FL). A concurrent Senate resolution introduced by Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) was passed by voice vote a day earlier.

Neither resolution acknowledged the fact that major Arab states offered earlier in 1993 to lift the boycott if the Israeli government, in turn, halted its support of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza territories scheduled to return to Palestinian control under U.N. Security Council Resolution 242's land-for-peace formula. The Israeli government ignored the Arab offer, continued its subsidization of the settlements, and sought instead to tie lifting of the Arab boycott to Israel's signing, with the Palestine Liberation Organization, of the Sept. 13 declaration of principles of peace.

Newt Gingrich Campaign for House Leadership Good News for Israel

Rep. Newt Gingrich is campaigning to succeed House Minority Leader Bob Michel, who does not plan to seek re-election in his Illinois district in 1994. In support of the Georgia Republican's candidacy, Washington political columnist Douglas Bloomfield, a former AIPAC legislative director, describes "important differences between the outgoing and incoming House Republican leaders on issues of importance to the Jewish community."

The differences, Bloomfield wrote in the Nov. 18 Washington Jewish Week, "may surprise those who love to hate the combative Georgian." Both Michel and Gingrich, Bloomfield points out, "are usually in synch with each other and at odds with mainstream Jewish views" on such domestic issues as "church-state relations, civil rights, environment, economic justice, campaign finance reform, women's issues and reproductive rights."

However, Bloomfield reports, "there are clear differences when it comes to Israel. While both were generally supportive of foreign aid during the Reagan and Bush administration, and so far in the Clinton era, they split on other issues, particularly arms sales to Israel's enemies. Based on the letters, resolutions and votes of the past dozen years, Gingrich has been far more supportive of the pro-Israel community's concern over the sale of advanced American weapons to Israel's enemies. He also has been more willing to go public regarding support for Israel.

"Gingrich has shown a better understanding of the politics of the issue and has built closer ties to the Jewish community nationally. He fills some of the vacuum in Republican leadership left by the departure of two of Israel's most staunch House GOP friends, Reps. Jack Kemp and Vin Weber. He and his staff work closely with pro-Israel activists and have been effective in lining up Republican votes."

Bloomfield quotes an unidentified pro-Israel lobbyist as saying that "the difference between Gingrich and Michel is the difference between someone who is passive and someone who really believes in Israel and foreign aid and acts on those beliefs and is an influential voice on those issues in the Republican Party."

Bloomfield also reminds his readers that "Gingrich was one of four House Republicans to attack publicly Senate GOP Leader Bob Dole in 1990 for advocating a cut in aid to Israel and for his 'personal attacks' on Jewish leaders, accusing them of being 'selfish' for disagreeing with Dole. "

Nita Lowey Protects $80 Million for Israeli Refugee Resettlement

New York Democratic Rep. Nita Lowey has no doubt which segment of the U.S. Jewish community she is working for. Her interests coincide with those of AIPAC, Israel's powerful Washington lobby. Recently administration budget-cutters sought to take back one-third of $80 million tucked into the U.S. foreign aid program to help Israel resettle refugees. Their reason was that few refugees now are going to Israel, and their numbers are largely offset by Jewish emigration from Israel for the U.S. and other Western destinations.

Lowey, who represents a heavily Jewish Westchester and Queens constituency, almost single-handedly kept the program at the $80 million level. "Thank God we prevailed," she told James D. Besser, Washington correspondent for the Jewish Week of New York and other U.S. Jewish weeklies.