Pollard’s return gets a bug in US-Israel ties out of the way - analysis
Ever since Pollard’s arrest 35 years ago, his case has been a fly in the ointment of the US-Israel relationship.
By LAHAV HARKOVJonathan Pollard, a former U.S. Navy intelligence officer convicted of spying for Israel, exits following a hearing at the Manhattan Federal Courthouse in New York City, May 17, 2017(photo credit: BRENDAN MCDERMID/REUTERS)
When former spy Jonathan Pollard’s plane landed in Israel on Wednesday, he said shehechiyanu, a blessing said on a momentous occasion, or when doing something for the first time. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who met Pollard on the tarmac, said a blessing thanking God for freeing prisoners.But there is another blessing that fits the occasion of the Pollard saga coming to an end: Baruch sh’ptarani me’onsho shel zeh. That blessing is traditionally said by a father on the occasion of a Bar or Bat Mitzvah, expressing gratitude that he no longer carries the responsibility for his child’s sins.Ever since Pollard’s arrest 35 years ago, his case has been a fly in the ointment of the US-Israel relationship. For most of those years, there have been ups and there have been downs between the US and Israel, but Pollard has been an enduring sore point.Documents declassified in the years since Pollard’s arrest showed officials had argued that the materials he gave Israel had the potential to hurt US abilities to gather intelligence, and expose American secrets. Israelis have credited Pollard with giving Jerusalem information about its enemies that the US had not disclosed. He was sentenced to life in prison, the longest-ever sentence for an American spying for an ally.Israel apologized immediately after Pollard’s arrest, and has promised not to spy on the US again. The Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee found that the Scientific Liaison Unit headed by Rafi Eitan, which used Pollard’s services, found that it had done so “without any check or consultation with the political echelon, or receiving its direct or indirect approval,” and the unit was disbanded.A decade later, Netanyahu admitted that Pollard spied for Israel – and his government gave him Israeli citizenship.Netanyahu, former prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and subsequent prime ministers all tried to secure Pollard’s release, but were met with American refusals. Former US president Bill Clinton weighed it, but intelligence officials vehemently opposed it. Peace negotiators on both sides raised Pollard’s release as a possible incentive for Israel to make concessions to the Palestinians from the late 1990s through former US president Barack Obama’s second term.In the end, a parole board let Pollard out of prison in 2015, and relaxed the conditions of his parole to allow him to leave the US this year – without any connection to the peace process or politics, other than Obama and US President Donald Trump not going out of their way to block those steps.Throughout these past 35 years, US-Israel ties had been strained.In 2006, Eitan told The Jerusalem Post that he regretted using Pollard’s espionage services, saying that “it is likely we could have gotten the same information without him.”
Yesh Atid MK Ram Ben Barak, a former Mossad deputy director, told The Daily Beast last year that “our entire relationship with the US deteriorated... people lost jobs over it. It made for years and years of suspicion, with Americans suspecting he wasn’t the only one, and feeling that they hadn’t gotten the necessary explanations. They didn’t believe it wasn’t authorized... They saw it as a betrayal.”American Jews also suffered the consequences. Dennis Ross, the perennial Middle East peace negotiator, expressed sentiments in 2014 that are shared among many American Jews, especially those working in government, that Pollard exposed them to greater antisemitic accusations of dual loyalties.At the time of Pollard’s arrest, Ross “was contending with a prejudice that lingered in the national security bureaucracy that in not-so-subtle ways suggested that anyone who was Jewish could not work on Middle Eastern issues because they would serve Israeli as opposed to American interests,” Ross wrote in Time.Meanwhile, plenty of Israelis and some American Jews as well, were angry at the US over its handling of the affair, feeling that the US reaction was unduly harsh, and reflected an unfair double standard against Israel.For years, Pollard was a cause célèbre in Israel, treated by a broad swath of the political spectrum almost as if he was an Israeli prisoner of war, although the passion for Pollard’s case has waned among the general public over the decades, and critics have been more vocal.Now Pollard is in Israel, where he wants to be, and it seems likely that his time as a political cause and a diplomatic irritant is over.Netanyahu seemed to take special care, on the one hand, to honor someone who suffered greatly for Israel – whether it was wise for Israel to spur him to do so or not – and on the other, not make too big of a fuss. Some of the international press said Pollard was given “a hero’s welcome” – he was not. Reuters got the event right, saying the spy received a “warm, but low-key homecoming.”If too much is made of Pollard, whether by Netanyahu trotting out his immigration to Israel in his lists of campaign achievements – even though, despite Netanyahu’s efforts over the years, Pollard did not get special treatment – or by Pollard entering the political fray, though that does not seem to be his plan, it could become a sticking point again between Israel and the US and could be viewed as a provocation.But if this is more or less where Netanyahu and Pollard leave things, it will likely be the end of this particular bug in the US-Israel relationship.
