Unequal Battles to Free Pollard and Vanunu Spread to Canada

By John Dirlik

A number of activists have proposed that Jonathan Pollard, the U.S. naval intelligence officer serving a life sentence for selling secrets to Israel, and Mordechai Vanunu, the Israeli technician jailed for revealing details of his country's nuclear arsenal to a London newspaper, should be freed simultaneously by their respective governments (Washington Report, July/ August 1993). But while supporters of Vanunu have raised no objections to Pollard's release on humanitarian grounds, those lobbying for Pollard have bristled at the very mention of Vanunu's name.

"I question the motives of anyone making such a link," said Elaine Zeitz, who heads the Canadian effort to free Pollard. "Vanunu spied against Israel, Pollard helped an ally," she said. At a Canadian Jewish Congress meeting in Toronto, Herb Landis of Citizens for Justice for Pollard was asked by the Washington Report if he would back any effort to free Vanunu also. "I don't know enough about him," he replied and cut short the interview.

Pollard supporters have flooded North American newspapers with full-page ads, articles and letters arguing that Pollard's harsh sentence was a "gross miscarriage of justice. " In a dizzying display of mental acrobatics, one article in the Jewish Press of New York reasoned that because Pollard supplied information to Israel about Iraq's chemical warfare capacity, which enabled Israel to prepare itself against gas attacks during the Gulf war, which in turn allowed it to stay on the defensive and thus keep the Arabs from breaking up the U.S.-led coalition necessary for a swift victory, "Pollard may thereby have helped to save more American lives, and the lives of more Arabs, than anybody who actually fought in the Gulf war."

Headline-grabbing lawyer Alan Dershowitz, author of the best-selling book Chutzpah, which advocates more political assertiveness by American Jews, joined the chorus, insisting that Pollard already has paid his dues for "an act of civil disobedience calculated to save innocent lives * " One letter writer to the Canadian Jewish News-without a trace of sarcasm-wrote that "Pollard was not a spy, he simply transmitted classified information," while yet another hailed him as "one of the greatest Jewish tragic heroes of our time."

Supporters of nuclear whistle-blower Mordechai Vanunu, with considerably less funding at their disposal than that available to the Free Pollard Campaign, nevertheless have achieved considerable success in publicizing his case. Vanunu has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize three times, and has been called a "hero of peace" by anti-nuclear activists for helping focus attention on the danger of nuclear proliferation in the Middle East. "What he has done will put him in history beside people like Martin Luther King," said Israeli author David Ish-Shalom.

Ish-Shalom's view of Vanunu is not shared by many in Israel. Despite support from a handful of activists, Vanunu has been contemptuously branded as a traitor by many of his countrymen. His brother, Meir Vanunu, said that Mordechai was subjected to a smear campaign in the Hebrew press, and that his conversion to Christianity was used as evidence of his betrayal not only of Israel but of Judaism.

"They said he sold the secrets for money. That he was a homosexual. Everything was written about him," said Meir Vanunu. Supporters stress, however, that the former technician from the Dimona plant did not commit any act that endangered Israel's security. What Vanunu did was provide evidence which confirmed what the world strongly suspected, that Israel's military arsenal contained nuclear weapons. Furthermore, unlike Pollard who was paid handsomely for the information he provided Israel, Vanunu did not sell secrets to a foreign government but made them freely available to the media.

In reaction to the proposal to link Pollard's release to Vanunu's, the coordinator of the U.S. Campaign to Free Mordechai Vanunu said the cases are not comparable. "We would not call it an exchange of prisoners because they are not really equal," said Sam Day. "Both are victims of excessive sentencing, but the similarity ends there." Day, who supports the release of Pollard as long as Vanunu is also freed, emphasized that "Pollard was a spy while Vanunu's disclosure was an act of conscience."

This distinction seems to make little difference to the well-financed Pollard campaigners relentlessly pressuring President Bill Clinton to commute Pollard's sentence to time served. For them, Pollard is a hero who deserves to be pardoned because he spied for Israel, while Vanunu is a traitor who should rot in his cell for spying against Israel.

Meanwhile, while one camp can afford full-page ads in The New York Times signed by hundreds of rabbis, the other relies on a handful of volunteers to publish a skimpy newsletter. "In terms of power and clout," said Day of the Free Mordechai Vanunu campaign, "the relation between them and us is like that of an elephant and an ant."

For information, contact: The U.S. Campaign to Free Mordechai Vanunu, 2206 Fox Avenue, Madison, WI 53711.

John Dirlik, a free-lance writer from Quebec, writes on Canadian and Middle Eastern affairs.