Martyr or Traitor ?

After 30 years in a US jail, and five more years on parole, the American citizen Jonathan Pollard, who betrayed his country and stole reams of top-secret documents from his US Navy Intelligence office selling them to Israel, is now free to leave America, if he wishes.

For America the man is a traitor. Israel portrays him as a quasi-martyr.

 

Pollard was not an Israeli sent on a secret mission to steal documents in the United States. He is an American Jew, with a seemingly disturbed personality, who had a history of spreading fibs to exaggerate his own importance, and who had offered his services to several other countries, before closing a deal with a special unit of the Israeli secret service.  

 

It is not unusual for countries to go to extreme lengths in order to release their caught spies. One need only go back to some well publicised spy-swaps during the cold-war era. Israel, however, has turned Pollard into some kind of a Jewish martyr.

 

Both Prime-Minister Netanyahu and Israel’s President Rivlin have tweeted their delight with his release. “Now we will be able to welcome him and his family home after many difficult years of imprisonment and restrictions...” wrote President Rivlin, as if Pollard was a ‘Prisoner-of-Zion’ locked up by the Soviet Union, because of his wish to emigrate. Israel’s public outpour of “welcome home Jonathan” is unacceptable and way over the top.

 

                       We Want Pollard At Home

 

In the us-against-the-rest world-view that Israel propagates, it increasingly implicates the Jewish People. This is bad for the Jews. To put it bluntly, Israel’s actions can cause increased Antisemitism. In a standard question in polls measuring Antisemitism, interviewees are asked to agree/disagree with the statement «Jews are more loyal to Israel than to the USA« (or country of citizenship). The notion that Jews tend to be more loyal to Israel than to their country is considered to be antisemitic. Israel enabled Pollard to entrench this view.

 

Israel motivating diaspora Jews to serve her interests, has never really been a secret. There is an understandable logic for many Jews to have an emotional bind to Israel. Quite a few Americans of Irish or Italian descent know the feeling. But, if they cannot be relied upon to be loyal, one is justified in distrusting them and disliking them. Once such bias is ingrained, Jews will no longer be considered equal citizens. It is up to the leaders of diaspora communities to ensure that their members do not get pushed into such dilemmas, in which their loyalty to the country is eroded to serve Israel.

 

Pollard not only betrayed America; he also betrayed American Jews. By feeding the notion that Jews are not to be relied upon, he made their lives more difficult.

 

There is no reason whatsoever to celebrate this.