No More Nice Girls: Countercultural Essays

Exile on Main Street: What the Pollard Case Means to Jews

Exile on Main Street:What the Pollard Case Means to Jews hen Jonathan Jay Pollard was sentenced to life in prison, I hought wewere in for some national psychodrama, and perhaps some nasty politics. It didn't happen. If you're reading this article because you're angry about (or at) Pollard, you're probably Jewish. If, on the other hand, you're thinking, "Pollard? Oh yeah, one of those spy scandals—was there something special about him?" you're probably not. A.NewTork Times poll published in April found that 62. per cent of the Jews sampled, but only 18 per cent of the gentiles , knew that Pollard, an American Jew, had been convicted of spying for Israel. Pollard, who says that while he was paid for his efforts, he spied out of commitment to Zionism, wassentenced inWashington, D.C., in March. Afterward, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia pronounced it "highly unlikely" that he would ever be eligible for parole. If this is true, Pollard, who is only 3Z, could serve 40 years or more. Such a punishment, for the crime of passing military intelligence to an ally in peacetime, is almost unheard of. In a letter to the Times, Robert C. Liebman, an assistantprofessorof sociology at Princeton, provides some illuminatingcomparisons: in 1985 an American who, like Pollard, is a former naval intelligence analyst got two years for "stealing secret Navydocuments for a Britishpublication "; in i98z an American who sold "secret electronic-warfare documents" to South Africa was sentenced to eight years (he served two) ; even a former CIA agent, convicted in 1981 of selling the KGB "information on U.S. intelligence operations and the names of some 30 covert U.S. agents," got only 18 years. The sentence was also unusual in that it overrode Pollard's plea bargain. He had pleaded guilty, apologized abjectly, cooperated with W E X I L E O N M A I N S T R E E T ZIZ the authorities, fingered his Israeli contacts; in return the Justice Department had asked for "substantial incarceration" rather than life, the maximum sentence allowed bylaw.The judge, however, was more impressed by Caspar Weinberger, who presented him with an affidavit —classified, therefore closed to public scrutiny—detailing Pollard 's betrayals and charging that "it is difficult for me to conceive of greater harm to national security" than Pollard had committed. It is difficult for me to conceive of a sillier charge. Reportedly, the information Pollard passed to Israel was mainly about other Middle Eastern states. Even assuming—a large assumption—that the secrets in question are as major asWeinberger implies, Israel's getting hold of them is less a breach of our security than a diplomatic embarrassment . To put the least conspiratorial interpretation on Weinberger's overweening outrage, he was furious at the Israeli government's insistence that it had nothing to do with this "rogue operation," closely followed by its nose-thumbing promotion of Pollard's contact, Col. Aviem Sella, just before Sella was indicted for espionage in the U.S. This move was indeed insulting, not to mention incredibly stupid, especially in light of American-Israeli tension over the Iran-contra follies. But it doesn't justify making Pollard a scapegoat. Clearly the combined trauma of a Jew's disloyalty and a Jewish state's arrogance breached the limits of the administration's tolerance: just who do these people think they are, anyway? In the wake of Pollard's sentencing, Jewish organizations worried publicly about anti-Semitism—not the kind implicit in thevindictive sentence (chillingly reminiscent of the Rosenbergs'), but the kind Pollard himself was said to have incited by lending credence to the stereotype of the treacherous Jew. And who knows? Perhaps there would have been a flare-up of bigotry if Jewish spokespeople, with few exceptions, had not hastened to out-goy the goyim by denouncing Pollard and the Israelis in the strongest terms. As it was, though, the Pollard case ended up revealing little about the current state of Jewish-gentile relations in America except that being a Jewish spy for Israel doesn't mean much in the way of name recognition. Instead, Pollard became an issue among Jews, an occasion for the surfacing of chronic, profound, and painful conflicts over What the Pollard CaseMeans toJews 2.13 the meaning of Jewish identity and the Jewish condition. Who do we think we...