A Time to Shout -FREE POLLARD
By Caroline Glick, carolineglick.com
December 21, 2010
The new campaign calling for the release of Israeli agent Jonathan
Pollard from prison in the US is in many ways a curious development.
Pollard was arrested in 1985 and convicted on one count of
transferring classified information to Israel during his service in US
Naval Intelligence. He pleaded guilty to the charge in the framework
of a plea bargain in which the US attorney pledged not to request a
life sentence.
Despite this, Pollard was sentenced to life. So far, he has served 25
years, much of it in solitary confinement and in maximum security
prisons. His health is poor. He has repeatedly expressed remorse for
his crime.
Pollard's sentence and the treatment he has received are grossly
disproportionate to the sentences and treatment meted out to agents of
other friendly foreign governments caught stealing classified
information in the US. Their average sentence is seven years in
prison. They tend to serve their sentences in minimum or medium
security prisons and are routinely released after four years.
The only offenders who have received similar sentences are Soviet
spies Robert Hanssen and Aldrich Ames. While Pollard transferred
documents to Israel over a period of 18 months, both Ames and Hanssen
served the Soviets - the US's primary enemy - for decades. Their
espionage led to the death of multiple US agents operating behind the
Iron Curtain.
Pollard was given a life sentence because then secretary of defense
Caspar Weinberger wrote a classified victim impact assessment to the
sentencing judge in which he insinuated that he had transferred
information to the Soviet Union as well as to Israel. Weinberger
reportedly attributed the deaths of US agents to Pollard's activities.
Weinberger's accusations were proven false with the subsequent arrests
of Hanssen and Ames. As it turned out, the damage Weinberger ascribed
to Pollard was actually caused by their espionage.
OVER THE past five years, and with increased urgency over the past
several months, several former senior US officials who had in depth
knowledge of Pollard's activities have called for his immediate
release. Former CIA director R. James Woolsey has stated that,
contrary to Weinberger's allegations, none of the documents Pollard
stole were transferred to the Soviets or any other country. A few
months ago, former senator Dennis DeConcini, a past chairman of the
Senate Select Intelligence Committee, sent a letter to President
Barack Obama asking him to immediately release Pollard from prison.
And in October, Lawrence Korb, who served as assistant secretary of
defense under Weinberger, became one of the most outspoken champions
for Pollard's release. Korb currently works for the Center for
American Progress, which is closely allied with the Obama White House.
The renewed interest in Pollard's plight has garnered a great deal of
attention in the local media as well. After Korb's initial call for
Pollard's release in an op-ed published in The Los Angeles Times in
October, Ma'ariv published a cover story in its weekend news
supplement about Pollard's suffering. Reporter Ben Caspit demanded
that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu formally request that Obama
commute Pollard's sentence and release him from prison.
Ma'ariv's article caused a spike in media coverage of Pollard in
November. And this month, Pollard was back in the news when the
government intervened to help his former wife Ann and her father make
aliya after the consulate in New York discovered they were both ill
and living in poverty.
Public pressure on Netanyahu seems to be working. Before Monday,
Netanyahu refused to make any public statements regarding Pollard. At
his recent meeting with Obama, he refused to deliver a letter signed
by 109 of the Knesset's 120 members formally requesting Pollard's
release. On the other hand, heavy public pressure caused Netanyahu to
initially agree to speak at Monday's rally for Pollard's release at
the Knesset. Netanyahu canceled his appearance at the last moment
however, and insisted on sufficing with a private meeting with Korb
and Pollard's wife Esther. Obviously more pressure can and should be
applied.*
On the face of things, it seems that this is a particularly
inauspicious time to renew the campaign to release Pollard. This is
true first of all because of the nature of the current president who
is the only one with the power to release him.
By now there is little question that Obama is the most hostile US
leader Israel has faced. It is hard to imagine the circumstances in
which he would agree to do something for Israel that his vastly more
sympathetic predecessors George W. Bush and Bill Clinton refused to
do.
In light of Obama's attitude, at first blush it makes more sense to
try to advance Pollard's case through quiet diplomacy. This is the
argument that cabinet secretary Zvi Hauser made in testimony before
the Knesset earlier this month. Hauser appeared before the State
Control Committee to respond to State Comptroller Micha Lindenstrauss'
recommendation that Netanyahu set up a ministerial committee to
oversee a public, formal campaign calling for Pollard's release.
But on second thought, the current campaign is eminently sensible. To
understand why, we must consider the relative benefits of quiet,
behind the scenes diplomacy and loud, public diplomacy.
Quiet diplomacy works well when all sides share a perception of joint
interests and when its exposure is likely to change that perception.
For instance, Israel and its Arab neighbors perceive a shared interest
in blocking Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. But given the nature
of Arab politics, that perception, which enables the likes of Saudi
Arabia, Egypt and Bahrain to work with Israel on preventing Iran from
developing nuclear weapons, disappears the moment cooperation is made
public.
Likewise, Lebanon's Sunnis and Christians share an interest with
Israel in defeating Hizbullah. But their ability to work with Israel
on defeating Hizbullah is destroyed the moment such work becomes
public.
Quiet diplomacy does not work when there is no perception of shared
interests. For instance, regimes that repress human rights to maintain
their grip on power have little interest in cooperating with free
societies, when the latter demand that they free political dissidents
from prison. Quiet diplomacy in the field of human rights between the
US and the Soviet Union during the Cold War never succeeded, because
the Soviets realized that opening up their tyranny to domestic
criticism would destroy the system.
And today, as Cairo's fake parliamentary elections and Teheran's
continued repression of democracy protesters shows, the Obama
administration's quiet diplomacy with the Muslim world regarding human
rights and democracy has utterly failed.
It is in cases like this where public, noisy diplomacy comes in handy.
Public campaigns are helpful when one government wishes to persuade
another to do something it doesn't want to do. Last week we received a
reminder of the effectiveness of such behavior with the publication of
protocols of meetings held by president Richard Nixon in the Oval
Office.
One such meeting involved a conversation between Nixon and secretary
of state Henry Kissinger following a meeting with prime minister Golda
Meir. She had asked Nixon to support the Jackson-Vanek amendment that
linked US economic assistance to the USSR to the latter's willingness
to permit Jews to emigrate. Kissinger opposed the request, telling
Nixon, "The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an
objective of American foreign policy. And if they put Jews into gas
chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a
humanitarian concern."
On the face of it, Kissinger was right. Using humanitarian
considerations to weaken Soviet tyranny probably didn't help US arms
control negotiators score points with Leonid Brezhnev. But on a deeper
lever, he was completely wrong.
The Jackson-Vanek amendment not only forced the Soviets to permit
limited emigration of Jews. It started a process of opening the Soviet
system, which ended up destroying the regime just a decade later.
SINCE TAKING office, Obama has only used public diplomacy in the
Middle East to convince one government to take action it believed was
antithetical to its interests. Last year he waged a forceful,
unrelenting public diplomacy campaign to convince Netanyahu to
abrogate Jewish property rights in Judea and Samaria. And it worked.
Although it harmed the sacrosanct pillar of Zionism that Jewish rights
are nonnegotiable, although it weakened Netanyahu's standing with his
party and voters and although it empowered the Palestinians to expand
their political war against Israel on the international stage,
Netanyahu gave in. The public pressure Obama exerted on him compelled
him to act against his interests.
The US is not an evil empire. And it is hard to see how a clear demand
for Pollard's release on humanitarian grounds will have any
fundamental impact on its nature.
And that is fine. But the fact is that Obama has no interest in
freeing a suffering Israeli agent who was railroaded by Weinberger and
remains in prison due to the efforts of Israelhaters who wrongly
insist he did untold damage to US national security. Indeed, many of
Pollard's detractors are members of Obama's political camp.
Israel can't expect a lot of help on this from American Jews, although
they stand to be major secondary beneficiaries if Pollard is released.
The impact of his case on the US Jewish community has been
debilitating. Although the US and Israel are strategic allies which
share many of the same interests and fight the same enemies, Israel's
detractors in the US foreign policy community use the Pollard case as
an excuse for questioning the loyalty and patriotism of American Jews
who serve in the US government and support Israel. His continued
incarceration casts a long shadow over American Jewry.
The odds are poor that a public campaign to win Pollard's release will
succeed. But if Israel is going to do anything at all, its actions
should be concentrated in the public realm. As we have seen, quiet
diplomacy, the strategy the Netanyahu government tried until now, will
never get him out of jail.
And Israel must act. Pollard's unfair, unjustified and discriminatory
sentence and treatment are a dismal symbol of Jewish vulnerability.
His personal suffering is inhumane, real and unrelenting. He needs us
to stand up for him.
And so we must. And so we will. The time has come, against all odds to
shout that Pollard must be freed. Now.
*Tuesday afternoon Netanyahu announced he will formally request that
Obama release Pollard.
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