Don Krausz responds to Terry Crawford Brown

 Re: Failure of talks is good – by Terry Crawford-Browne (TCB)

 

TCB avers that the two-state solution is a dead duck, yet within the reality of the Middle East and given the history over the past millenia there is no other solution.

 

Jews have been hounded out of their own land since the days of the Babylonians. It took the horrors of persecution and the finality of the Holocaust to eventually convince them that they had no future in being pawns on the chessboard. They had to be in control of their own destiny. Even after thousands of years of sojourn amongst other peoples, sooner or later they stood to be expropriated, uprooted, expelled, forcibly converted or murdered.

 

The Jew knows that he dare not submit his fate to a binational Palestinian state. Only he himself must be in control, all other solutions, final or similar, have proved to be disastrous, even suicidal. After the events of the past two and a half thousand years and the loss within living memory of one third of his number, the Jew ought to be entitled to state: “Here I stand; I can do no other!”

 

I won’t even bother to respond to TCB’s fulminations. In 1947 the United Nations divided Palestine between its resident peoples. The Jews accepted, the Arabs did not. Today those Jews have created a land flowing with milk and honey, the Palestinians a land whose main product appears to be rockets for launching at neighbouring civilians and boundless hatred.

 

Twenty percent of Israel’s citizens are not Jewish. They are not discriminated against through legislation, and therefore the labeling of the country as an apartheid state is totally inappropriate. These people have reached the highest positions in the land and show no desire to emigrate.

 

Let Terry Crawford-Browne explain that.

Victor Gordon to The Star: Pollard, the spy left out in the cold.

Refer: “Pollard, the spy left out in the cold?”

Some years ago I became interested in the plight of Jonathan Pollard and the circumstances surrounding his life sentence for espionage. Having read every book concerning his case available at the time plus countless articles, in depth analyses and other publications – some of which were kindly brought to my attention by his current wife, Esther – I proceeded to write a stage play (“Pollard’s Trial”) which was translated into Hebrew and remained in production at Tel Aviv’s Cameri Theatre for over 2 years. The impact of the play on Israeli society was quite astonishing, culminating in an unprecedented invitation from the Knesset to mount a special performance.

While I make no claim to be an authority on the story of Jonathan Pollard I can claim to have been exposed to sufficient commentary to enable me to judge whether journalists have done sufficient homework prior to expressing their opinions.

In the case of David Lerman’s article, “Pollard, the spy left out in the cold?” there is much to be desired. A great deal that Lerman offers as fact is no more than conjecture and many of the accusations he levels against Pollard have never been substantiated and were certainly never tested in court.

What is not mentioned is that Pollard followed the path that he chose because of the USA’s deceit in purposely withholding from Israel strategic information vital to its defence, despite having undertaken to do so by treaty. This placed both countries under obligation to assist the other with relevant intelligence. While Israel honoured its commitment, America did not.

The reason, it would appear, was American pique at having not been informed of Israel’s plans to bomb the Osiraq Nuclear Reactor in Iraq in 1981. While Israel was castigated by the entire world, including America, for having done so, she was later thanked following the 1^st Gulf War for having effectively removed what would obviously have been a major threat.

Having discovered America’s duplicity, Pollard, a staunch Zionist, took the decision to pass on to Israel the information to which she should have had access through normal channels. This included (as summarised by Lerman), “Iraqi and Syrian chemical warfare programs, Soviet arms shipments to Syria and other Arab states, Pakistan’s nuclear programme and the capabilities of Tunisian and Libyan air-defence systems.”

American double dealing did not end there. Having offered Pollard a plea-bargain in exchange for his co-operated with the investigation, the terms of which precluded the possibility of a life sentence, Pollard agreed to forgo a trial which would have afford him the opportunity to plead his case.

Unprecedented last minute intervention by the then Secretary of Defence, Casper Weinberger, who submitted a 45–page memorandum to the judge calling for a life sentence, resulted in the judge complying and imposing upon Pollard the harshest sentence ever handed to a spy guilty of espionage in favour of an ally. Previous to Pollard’s case, the longest sentence served for a similar offence was 14 years with the vast majority released within far fewer years.

The accusation by Vincent Cannistraro, director of intelligence programmes in the National Security Council at the time of Pollard’s arrest, that Pollard passed secrets to countries beside Israel, have never been substantiated and are no more than rumours. After 29 years, no evidence has ever been produced to support this claim. In fact, following the passing of sentence, all documents, including Weinberger’s damning memorandum which included many of these untested accusations, were immediately classified and locked away. Never have they been made available for scrutiny despite many appeals by Pollards legal representatives through the highest courts of the land. Every attempt has been blocked on a technicality, some so ridiculous as to be comical.

One of the most damning accusations was that Pollard had compromised the lives of about thirty American agents stationed in the Soviet Union. Some twelve had been identified by the Russians and executed. Several years later, CIA agents Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen, both caught spying for Russia, admitted that they were guilty of disclosing the identities of these agents and had purposely used Pollard as a scapegoat.

When Weinberger was interviewed about his newly published memoir, he was asked why, in view of his claims about the seriousness of Pollard’s transgressions, there was not a single mention of Pollard. His replay was to dismiss the Pollard affair as “a very minor matter”.

A final callous display, Pollard was denied the opportunity to see his dying father or attend his funeral, despite personal requests to the American authorities from those of Israel at the highest level.

In Lerman’s article Pollard is referred to as “an unrepentant spy” despitehim expressing his deepest remorse in writing to every American President since Ronald Reagan. Remorse has also been regularly expressed through several other avenues, with Pollard acknowledging that while he deserves to serve time for his actions, he also deserves to be treated fairly. Twenty nine years is beyond the realms of fairness or compassion.

The suggestion by Secretary of State John Kerry that Pollard could be released in exchange for Israel’s co-release of 400 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, is unacceptable to both Israel and Pollard himself, who refuses to be manipulated, pawn-like, as part of a so-called “peace negotiation that is, firstly, doomed to failure and which, secondly, has nothing to do with him.

After 29 years, the continued incarceration of Jonathan Pollard can no longer be justified. At this stage it is motivated by little more than malicious victimization coupled with President Barak Obama’s antipathy towards Israel. It is hard to view it in any other way.