MARTIN PERETZ ON POLLARD….PLEASE SEE NOTE

Posted By Ruth King on June 25th, 2012

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303734204577466304136240464.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion

THIS IS RATHER MEAN SPIRITED AND MISSES ONE MAJOR ISSUE, NAMELY THE LENGTH AND HARSHNESS OF THE SENTENCE WHILE OTHER FAR MORE DANGEROUS SPIES HAVE WALKED FREE. HOWEVER, POLLARD’S SPYING WAS INDEFENSIBLE AND INEXCUSABLE AND FOR ME HE IS NOT A HERO. REMEMBER THAT MANY SPIES FOR THE SOVIET UNION ALSO SPIED FOR WHAT WAS THEN AN ALLY NATION. EFFORTS TO MAKE HIM AN ISRAELI NATIONAL HERO ARE WRONG, AND EFFORTS TO PIN HIS RELEASE TO IMPLEMENTING A TWO STATE SOLUTION ARE PIG HEADED AND COUNTERPRODUCTIVE……RSK

The Mendacious Movement to Free a Convicted Spy

Pretending that Jonathan Pollard is a martyr makes a mockery of Israel.

“But the Israeli peace camp not only wants the president to force Israel out of the territories and to shrink the Jewish stake in Jerusalem. It also wants Mr. Obama to cleanse Zion of the shame of spying on its patron and its single solitary true friend in the world. Well, he may just do that—not now, not yet, but after the elections if he wins them—allowing Shimon Peres the favor of bringing home the kosher bacon. And then Mr. Obama would be in a position to demand Israeli withdrawal to the fatuous 1949 lines, borders that Mr. Peres sees as appropriate for the “new Middle East” of his feverish imagination.”

There is no end in sight for the campaign to persuade President Obama to let convicted Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard go free. It is also almost impossible to recall the beginnings of this campaign. But it started with his life sentence. All that one can say is that the agitation, a phobic mixture of fantasies of Pollard’s innocence and imaginings of anti-Semitic motives on the part of an indeterminate officialdom, has been relentless—sometimes more noisy, sometimes less, but relentless.

All kinds of comparisons are being made. One is to the great democrat, Natan Sharansky, who was kept in the Siberian gulag for 13 years and released because there was no evidence at all of his espionage against the Soviet Union. His dignified supporters, both Jewish and non-Jewish, were not hysterics, and the struggle for this particular “prisoner of Zion” was the cutting edge of the whole “let my people go” campaign that ultimately brought a million Jews from their Russian internment to Israel. One more factor: Ronald Reagan made Mr. Sharansky his own cause, like bringing down the wall of shame in Berlin.

A different analogy that comes to mind is the ongoing zeal among nutsy left-wingers for the release of Black Panther Mumia Abu Jamal, imprisoned in Philadelphia for 30 years, after having murdered a policeman in a revolutionary act. This effort also never stops, and its luminaries are altogether predictable: Noam Chomsky, the German novelist Günter Grass, Bishop Desmond Tutu and Robert Meeropol, a son of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

Ethel Rosenberg would have been more deserving of lenience because her clouded guilt was much less than that of her husband—and she was mother to two little boys. All she needed to do for President Eisenhower to grant her clemency was to confess. As Diana Trilling asked decades ago: What kind of mother would give up her life with her children only to maintain the illusion of her innocence among her ideological comrades?

There is no cloud about Pollard’s guilt, no illusion of his innocence. And he did not spy for Zion out of idealistic motives. This is a retrospective improvisation.

In fact, before he decided to deliver reams of sensitive intelligence and defense documents to Israel’s security apparatus, he was negotiating with Pakistan—yes, Islamic and Judeophobic Pakistan—to do similar chores for it. (Pakistan is not the only regime with which he was dickering as a prospective agent.) Still, there are folks in the American Jewish community and in Israel who cannot let go of their image of Pollard as a man of virtue and bravery. Hence the stubborn unrest in both Israel and America on his behalf.

So this is actually paper unrest, cheesy placards, lame demos, and also onerous statements by dignitaries trying to catch what they think to be the public wind. This is not the first time that public men and women have done folly in response to imagined popular pressure.

Still, ideological habits steam the frenzy. The placards emerge from the Israeli right which, in the Knesset as well as on the street, blames every mishap to a Jew on the immemorial phobias going back to the Middle Ages. In America, too, it is ideologically right-wing Jews, religious and nonreligious, who carry the banner of Pollard’s innocence.

The fact is, however, that there is no deep public clamor in Israel for Pollard’s release. A reliable opinion poll concluded last week that the imprisonment of Pollard is an afterthought for almost everyone.

I believe what substance there is in the matter is rooted in Israeli distrust of President Obama’s attitudes toward Jews. Hence, if the president doesn’t want to free Pollard it is because of his disdain for Israel. This is neither factual nor logical. The president needs no rationale; Pollard’s crime is enough.

I believe that Mr. Obama does exhibit a certain disdain for the Jewish state—an indifference to and ignorance of the incandescence of Jewish history. “When the chips are down,” said the president to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee last March, “I have Israel’s back.” The whole lesson of Zionism, a good and truthful lesson, is that no one but Jews can be relied on to have Israel’s back. No American troops desired, no American troops required. No Americans should die for Israel. Too many have died for Afghanistan already, a country which we will in any case leave in the deadly lurch.

But the Israeli peace camp not only wants the president to force Israel out of the territories and to shrink the Jewish stake in Jerusalem. It also wants Mr. Obama to cleanse Zion of the shame of spying on its patron and its single solitary true friend in the world. Well, he may just do that—not now, not yet, but after the elections if he wins them—allowing Shimon Peres the favor of bringing home the kosher bacon. And then Mr. Obama would be in a position to demand Israeli withdrawal to the fatuous 1949 lines, borders that Mr. Peres sees as appropriate for the “new Middle East” of his feverish imagination.

This is not the first time that Mr. Peres has pleaded for the scoundrel spy. But this time his name is annexed to what one might call a Hollywood manifesto. Mr. Peres was recently in Washington to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom. So into the fray sprang the usual left-wing celebrities, singers, actors, and the predictable literary scourges: Amos Oz, A.B. Yehoshua, David Grossman. “We feel we cannot reconcile your receiving it when the U.S. is still holding Pollard in prison. . . . Receiving the medal would make a mockery of Israel.” What makes a mockery of Israel is pretending that Pollard is a man of virtue, a martyr when he wasn’t even a gull.

Mr. Peretz was editor in chief of the New Republic from 1974 until 2011.

Comments are closed.