Just before the Pesaḥ festival began, Israel Hayom published an exclusive interview with former “Prisoner of Zion” Jonathan Pollard that shook the Jewish establishment in the United States.
Many US Jews continue to condemn Pollard’s actions, while ostensibly balancing their condemnation with expressions of disapproval over his harsh sentencing (such expressions may have had value when Pollard was still incarcerated but now that he’s free and home they’ve become meaningless). Some have even accused Pollard of damaging the place of Jews in American society and of fueling anti-Semitism.
All of this shows us that after nearly four decades, the overwhelming majority of Jews in the United States still lack the emotional maturity to confront the Pollard Affair’s deeper lessons to our people.
Despite the severe sacrifice Jonathan made to protect the people of Israel, it is not surprising that so many Diaspora Jews are uncomfortable with his actions and have sought to obscure the importance of the choice he was forced to make. This is largely because Pollard exposed and continues to expose the deeply problematic nature of the US-Israel relationship.
AIPAC and the broader organized Jewish community in the United States generally try promote the US-Israel relationship as an “unbreakable bond” and speak of Israel as having “no greater friend than the United States of America.” This allows pro-Israel American Jews to convince themselves that they’ll never have to choose a side. But history and even our present reality paint a very different picture of long-standing policy differences that include aggressive US efforts to partition our land, influence Israel’s democratic process, and control Israeli policies.
Even more than the policy differences between Washington and Jerusalem, the real discomfort that the Jewish establishment has with Pollard is the tension inherent in American Jewish identity that he brings to the surface.
Following centuries of brutal persecution in other countries, Jews have spent over a century laboring to gain whiteness and inclusion in American society – something that has often driven Jewish leaders to zealously dispel any notion that they might have loyalties to other Jews elsewhere in the world that could potentially complicate their loyalties to the United States.
These efforts proved disastrous for the Jewish people during the Holocaust, when the Roosevelt administration exploited Jewish fears of “dual loyalty” accusations and the precarious state of US Jews at that time, to silence the few Jewish voices that called on the US government to rescue our people from the Holocaust by either taking in refugees fleeing Europe or bombing railroads to death camps.
Any Jew connected to their own identity, history, and national aspirations can easily feel the tensions present in American Jewish identity. As a US Naval Intelligence analyst, Pollard became a living symbol of this contradiction when he discovered that the United States was betraying its agreement to share intelligence critical to the State of Israel’s security and survival. Pollard suddenly found himself in a position where he had to make a difficult choice between being an American and being a Jew. By placing loyalty to his people before loyalty to his host nation, Pollard essentially corrected the sin of the US Jewish community leadership during the Holocaust.
Not surprisingly, the American Jewish establishment can’t even bring itself to recognize the very real dilemma Jonathan was faced with. Leading Jewish figures and organizations across the political spectrum prefer to condemn Pollard’s actions rather than exhibit the emotional maturity to confront the real issues behind the choice he was forced to make because doing so could potentially call their Americanism into question (a similar immaturity exists within some Israeli figures heavily invested in the US-Israel relationship).
But is what Pollard did so different from Edward Snowden exposing successive administrations spying on US citizens and lying about it to Congress? To be clear, I am not advising that anyone violate the laws of the United States. But it’s not responsible to allow a drive for whiteness and inclusion to blind us to the fact that Jewish interests don’t always align with those of the US power structure.
Let’s be honest about the US government’s failure to help the Jewish people during World War II. Let’s tell ourselves the truth about the Truman Administration’s arms embargo against Israel in 1947-1948 and Eisenhower’s threats against us in the 1950s (and Johnson’s threats in 1967). Let’s not forget that Nixon and Kissinger tied our hands in 1973 and that successive US administrations have worked to remove us from the heart of our country, engaged in actions to topple elected Israeli governments, and pressured Jerusalem to act in accordance with US interests even when those conflicted with Jewish interests.
Pollard faced the contradictions in American Jewish identity head on. He had the courage to act in defense of the Jewish people and to hold the US government accountable for its betrayal. He didn’t act for financial gain, adventurism, or even out of loyalty to the Israeli government that betrayed him for decades. Pollard acted out love for the Jewish people and out of a desire to correct the American Jewish community’s failure to help the Jews of Europe escape the Holocaust. Under the circumstances he found himself in, Pollard made the correct moral choice.
The right thing for Jewish leaders to do at this point is to acknowledge Pollard’s sacrifice and humbly show gratitude.
