The Middle East Angle of the Pollard Case

by Paul Findley

The web first spun from the deceit of Jonathan Jay Pollard is still causing entanglement a decade after the paid spy for Israel, trying to flee U.S. officers, rattled the gates at the Israeli embassy in Washington in a vain plea for asylum.

Pollard is now serving a life term in a federal prison in Butnor, North Carolina, for espionage he committed in the mid-eighties while employed by the U.S. Navy as an intelligence analyst. He was charged with providing Israel with 1,800 classified documents totaling 500,000 pages, a monstrous example of theft that Caspar Weinberger, then secretary of defense, said had done incalculable harm to national security. He said the offense was so great Pollard deserved to be executed.

Ever since his arrest in 1987, Pollard has been using his influnece with Israeli officials and prominent U.S. Jews in a quest for freedom.

On several occasions, the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and his predecessor, Yitzhak Shamir, asked Presidents Bush and Clinton to commute Pollard’s sentence. Failing that, they requested that Pollard be released to the custody of the Israeli government. This, of course, would be tantamount to freedom, as Pollard would be welcomed in Israel as a conquering hero and would never spend a day in prison. All requests on Pollard’s behalf were shelved. Since then, Prime Minister Shimon Peres has focused on the turmoil caused by Hamas-led bus bombings in Israel, but the Pollard dilemma will not disappear.

Since his candidacy for the White House in 1992, Bill Clinton has had before him a series of renewed requests from Israelis and U.S. Jews for a commutation of Pollard’s sentence.

As Clinton begins his bid for a second term, he is torn between a desire to please his highly supportive Jewish constituency and the public outcry that may erupt from others if he grants the request. During an interview with Clinton on his last trip to Washington, Rabin again requested commutation. After the prime minister’s assassination, a letter addressed to Clinton was found on Rabin’s desk that repeated the request in writing.

During a recent visit to the White House, Prime Minister Shimon Peres asked Clinton to grant this “last request” of the slain prime minister and suggested it would also be a suitable response to Israel’s release of a number of Palestinian political prisoners.

Some U.S. officials, especially those in security affairs, oppose commutation. Even Martin Indyk, the U.S. ambassador to Tel Aviv who once worked for Israel’s U.S. lobby, calls Pollard’s thefts the equivalent of “stealing the crown jewels” and not to be forgiven.

The Pollard web is getting more complicated. Peres, seeking to extend his leadership through early general elections, is grappling with a dilemma involving Pollard that is similar to the one facing Clinton.

Peres needs to show strong support for Pollard in a public way.

For reasons explained later, Peres needs to show strong support for Pollard and do it in a public way. But through the years since Pollard’s arrest, the government of Israel has insisted that the spy’s perfidy was a “rogue operation” that had no official sanction and has declared that Israel has never and will never spy on the United States.

Peres needs, somehow, to demonstrate that Israel will not forsake those who take great risk for the Jewish state—specifically Pollard and other spies and collaborators.

It is an urgent task closely entwined with the peace process. Except for Hebron, Peres has withdrawn Israeli military forces from major Palestinian population centers in the occupied territories. He also wants to make peace with Syria and Lebanon. The latter necessarily entails the withdrawal of Israeli military forces from southern Lebanon, the strip of land that Israel has used as a base of military operations for more than 20 years. It will also require major, if not complete, withdrawal form the Golan Heights, a part of Syria that Israeli forces have controlled for nearly 30 years.

Over the years, in both states and within the occupied territories, Israel has purchased the collaboration of a number of Arabs who serve as spies for the occupations forces.

The collaborators have reason to be afraid. In southern Lebanon, a number of Arabs have secretly cooperated with Israel Defense Force officers who, as a practical matter, have long controlled that part of Lebanon. Under Israeli prodding, they have helped the invaders maintain the strip of land as a base for Israeli military operations and as a buffer that protects northern Israel from violence.

Whether the collaborators volunteered or not, they may be the object of harsh vengeance if Israeli forces withdraw. In the eyes of Lebanese, Syrians and Palestinians, the collaborators will certainly be despised as traitors whose service to the enemy caused hardship, injury and sometimes death to citizens who remained loyal to their own country.

The “Rogue” Fiction

Several Palestinians, suspected of spying, have already been murdered in the occupied territories. Even if Arab authorities grant amnesty, the collaborators may remain targets. Understandably, they will want a new life and new identity elsewhere. Israel may be the safest haven, but its government has a long tradition against granting citizenship to non-Jews. The “rogue” fiction must worry the Arab collaborators to no end. Will Israel simply abandon them, declaring that their undercover work for Israel was also an unauthorized “rogue” operation? Will Israel make an exception for Arabs who risked their lives as spies?

Israel cannot reassure other spies about their future if it maintains the fiction that Pollard’s spying was an unauthorized “rogue” operation for which the government of Israel should not be held responsible. While maintaining the “rogue” pretense, the government of Israel actually has been substantially but quietly helping Pollard, an assistance that has had little publicity. Long ago it promised Pollard a safe haven when released from prison and began depositing $15,000 a month in a bank account in Switzerland for his future living expenses. The government has also provided most of the funds for Pollard’s immense legal expenses. Given America’s enormous and steadfast aid to Israel, this help constitutes an absurd irony; in effect, the American taxpayers are meeting the legal expenses of the man Israel paid to spy on the United States.

The government of Israel has now taken a controversial, public step on Pollard’s behalf. The minister of interior recently ceremoniously presented a passport in Pollard’s name to the spy’s attorney. This was done in the wake of an appeal the attorney had made to the Israeli supreme court. The petition contended that Pollard is entitled to an Israeli passport under the state’s longstanding “law of return” under which all Jews worldwide are automatically entitled to citizenship.

Pollard views the issuance of the passport as a significant step in his rehabilitation: “By conferring citizenship, the Israeli government has implicitly acknowledged its culpability in my affair. It sends the strongest, most unambiguous message possible that the government of Israel is accepting responsibility for my fate and for my future.”

Peres is trying to disentangle himself from this web of deceit but, in the process, may find himself tied up in still another one. In granting citizenship and other favors to Israel’s paid spy in the United States, how can the government of the Jewish state deny similar support to its spies in the Arab world?

One thing is certain, Israel’s spies everywhere will watch with great interest how Israel responds to Pollard’s plight.