The Time Is Right-Free Jonathan Pollard

Has anyone ever heard of Major Yosef Amit or Andrey Kielcyneski (also known as Joseph Barak)? They were Israelis who spied for the United States.
How about these Americans: Michael Schwartz who admitted to spying for Saudi Arabia and was discharged from the Navy but received no jail time. Or Samuel Morrison who was convicted of spying for Great Britain and sentenced to two years in prison and only served three months. Or Abdul Kader Hehy, who served only 2 years of a four-year sentence for spying for Egypt. Let’s not forget Robert Kim, convicted of spying for South Korea. He at least served 7 years of a nine-year sentence. And there are many more similar examples.
Yesterday, Jonathan Pollard began his 21st year of a life sentence, convicted of spying for Israel. Justice has been served. It is time to commute his sentence.
Now don’t get me wrong. What Pollard did was inexcusable. He broke his oath and betrayed his loyalty to the United States by spying for a foreign nation. He deserved to be punished and to serve jail time. However, the punishment must equal the crime. According to U.S. law the maximum sentence for offences like Pollard’s is ten years. The average sentence is 2 to 4 years.
It is time for Pollard to be released. Nothing is served by further incarceration. In fact it is unconstitutional for prison time to outweigh the crime. This is exactly what is happening in this case.
I was living in Washington D.C. at the time of Pollard’s arrest, trial and conviction. I was embarrassed as an American Jew, as a Zionist that he had done what he did, but I was also shocked at the harshness of the sentence. The Walkers, who had spied for the Soviet Union hadn’t received like sentences. I thought it was a bit bizarre.
Over the years, like many American Jews (and Israelis-I now live in Israel), Pollard has largely dropped from my radar, only to occasionally rise. Now is such a time, when this man has entered his third decade of incarceration that we must call for his release. The American Jewish community, after so many years of silence, needs to once again, loud and clear, start a campaign to free Jonathan Pollard. Israel must exert diplomatic pressure on the United States to free this man who was awarded Israeli citizenship.
According to U.S. law, treason is defined as levying war against the U.S. and giving aid and comfort to the enemy. Pollard broke the law; he did not commit treason. Israel is an ally of the United States. Allies routinely spy on each other, in legal and illegal ways. The United States included. Countless examples can be cited.
One of the only reasons that I believe Pollard is still incarcerated is because members of the intelligence community are still angry at Pollard for the way he easily compromised their intelligence efforts and probably for the sheer amount of information that he passed over to the Israelis. Perhaps it is also to serve as a warning to Israel. Maybe even a warning to the American Jewish community against dual loyalty. Pollard therefore is a scapegoat, an example.
It is shameful.
Jonathan Pollard has paid overtime for the crime he committed.
The time has come for him to be set free.

Thoughts Surrounding Rabin Assasination


Up until Saturday night I was under the impression that nothing had really changed in Israel since the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. We still had the same horribly contentious political discourse. Our culture and political elites were more interested in delegitimizing the opposition instead of actually engaging in legitimate political debate. However, two things happened this weekend to change this opinion. On Saturday night I was watching on television the rally commemorating Rabin’s death. Tzipi Livni, the right wing representative was scheduled to speak. I was very interested in how she would be received by the crowd. True, she is not tainted like Netanyahu or Sharon with partial responsibility for the hateful atmosphere leading up to Rabin’s assassination; and true, she is a Minister of Justice in a government that has recently pulled out of Gaza; however, the annual commemoration of Rabin’s assassination is generally considered a left wing affair. Their view was that only they have the right to mourn Rabin’s death.
I was pleasantly surprised. Livni was welcomed to the podium with applause not less (or more) than previous speakers and what she had to say was also well received. No boos were heard whatsoever. She declared that she did not vote for Rabin and was against the Oslo Accords, but she stated that Rabin was the elected prime minister of her country. Furthermore, that when he was murdered, it didn’t matter that she was in the political opposition, the elected prime minister of her country had been murdered and that was an event which struck people on all sides of the political spectrum. She completed her speech and left the podium to even more applause.
I was relieved to see that a right wing government minister could speak and have her words appreciated. It reinforced what had happened the night before. I was at a friend’s house for Shabbat dinner. During a conversation regarding the tenth anniversary of Rabin’s assassination my host stated that he thought that the right hadn’t learned anything from it. Nothing has changed I thought. Here was another involved, aware, intelligent person who was convinced that only the right had had to change the way it conducted itself in the wake of Rabin’s death. I was saddened because I was again confronted with the belief that the left was blameless when it came to charged atmosphere prior to Rabin’s assassination. I wanted to remind him that an atmosphere of political discourse, whether polite or contentious is created by more than one participant and one point of view. But then a curious thing happened. He acknowledged that the leaders of the settler movement had managed to avoid the violence during the disengagement that so many thought the right wing were capable of doing. He was stating that there had been a change. At least the political debate, as contentious as it is, had managed to hold itself back, to adhere to some red lines.
So what did it mean? Well, preconceptions and ingrained prejudice about the “other side” still remained, however, even though my host wasn’t able to intuitively acknowledge it-things had changed.
And Tzipi Livni, got up in front of a crowd of 200,000. Not the elite, not the press, not government ministers, but the citizenship of Israel, and spoke, and was applauded. This was a good thing. Perhaps things are changing.

Who Is the Victor?

Almost three months since the removal of the settlements from Gaza and the Northern West Bank and I’m still puzzling over who exactly is the winner here. The mysterious ways and means of international politics and Israel’s domestic politics are very Byzantine. I am constantly trying to unravel them.

Certainly the Settler Movement is not the victor. Their praying for divine intervention and fervent resolve that God would not let them down and would arrange a miracle to save their homes did not happen. The Greater Israel Movement has been dealt a deathblow. And perhaps rightly so. Something had to happen to shatter their ideological/political/religious belief that we were destined to rule over all of ancient Eretz Yisrael. I hope, and this seems to be the case for many of them, that they will redirect their energies positively to settling in the Negev and/or the Galilee. Their incredible resolve, overwhelming idealism and love of Zion, encouraged and directed properly will be only good for the State. Hopefully, the media and history will allow us to remember that half of the Gaza settlers left before the deadline and that the majority of those who stayed after the deadline left peaceably. It is the job of the settler movement to dispel the negative images that left such a bad taste in our mouths, such as the line of teenage girls with Jewish stars on their clothes, arms raised, crying, walking in a line, as if they were prisoners of some foreign army. The connotation to which foreign army is all too clear. Or especially most disturbing for me was the campaign to get soldiers to sign petitions stating that they would not participate in the disengagement. This blatantly oversteps the bounds of protest in a civil society-encouraging dissension and mutiny within the armed forces.

I know that parts of the left consider this a victory, but as the Gaza Strip so quickly succumbs to anarchy, and as Hamas plans to export their style of “resistance” to the West Bank, I’m not so sure. As Amos Oz’s recent article in Haaretz so gleefully pointed out, the settlers were the problem in our midst. The left seem oblivious to the fact that this unilateral withdrawal just might cause a lot more bloodshed. The fact that so many Palestinians consider this a victory and a result of their “resistance” does not bode well. It seems to me that some of the left, whose hatred for the settlers borders on the irrational, wanted to deal a blow to the settler movement, regardless of what the consequences might be. The debate over whether or not to withdraw from Gaza, was typically put into an us verses them, correct peaceful thinking people verses warmongering hateful people, rational secular verses crazy irrational religious, frame of reference. It seems that Israel has been forever trapped in this hateful back and forth.
Ephraim Sneh, a former Health Minister and current Labor member of Knesset published an editorial last spring in a Hebrew daily newspaper basically calling for civil war against the religious settler movement in Israel. One expects that to come from the fringe, not from someone who is supposed to be a respected legislator. Reprehensible as the piece was, what was even more disturbing and unconscionable was that it created not a stir or words of protest from the establishment or the Knesset. But it gives you some idea of the hateful rhetoric coming out of the left.

The Palestinian citizens of the Gaza Strip are not the victors. There is every chance that they will be torn asunder by different warlords competing for power. Just as we abrogated our responsibility to them 12 years ago when we let Arafat in to set up his Fatahland, condemning the Palestinians of much of the West Bank and Gaza to a brutal, corrupt regime, so we have repeated ourselves and done the same yet again, in all of Gaza. We have turned to the Palestinian Authority and said to them, prove that you can rule. Well, haven’t they spent the last 10 years proving that they are really not capable of ruling, not able to initiate and run the basic elements of society and national responsibility? Why would be expect that they would be able to do anything different now?

Is Zionism the victor? Well, a mainstay of Zionist ideology was that having our own sovereign nation would normalize our relations with the world, including our Arab neighbors. Withdrawing from territory and uprooting Jews from their homes, homes they had been encouraged to settle by Labor, Likud and National Unity Governments, without benefit of any type of agreement between us and our Palestinian neighbors runs contrary to this notion. In fact, Palestinians, despite our best efforts to spin it otherwise, have correctly interpreted our unilateral withdrawal and destruction of 22 Jewish villages as victories, both political and military.

It is sad that it has come to this. Zionism is in retreat. We have lost our dignity. Perhaps, the whole settlement enterprise in Gaza (and most of the West Bank) was a shortsighted policy that ended up biting us in the ass. And, yes, perhaps we need to make an exit, but what about statesmanship? What about conducting ourselves as a mature nation with sound policies that conducts a measured campaign of international diplomacy? What about the fact that, as much as we pretend otherwise, we are in a war with the Palestinians. And in war, you don’t just pull out; you don’t give up territory without something concrete in return. You don’t give the adversary an opportunity to claim victory. A state should only be magnanimous in victory. It seems to me that the decision to withdraw from Gaza came out of the innate Jewish instinct to operate in survival mode.

Let’s just hope something good can come out of this.
One can always still hope.

So let’s do that. Let’s hope that, despite signs that the Gaza Strip has sunk into anarchy and warlord conflict, that Abbas stops pleading weakness and asking for international support (hmmmm, sounds strangely familiar) and starts doing something to establish some semblance of a civil society. He has 30,000 men in uniform. Use them. Let’s hope that the Pakistani handshake with our foreign minister and the accolades that Sharon received at the UN in September will benefit Israel diplomatically in the long run and for the long term. Let’s hope that the US will stop pressuring Israel for more concessions, will stand by its letter of April, 2004 and will, instead of giving the Palestinian Authority more and more money (such as the $50 million recent donation), will pressure the Palestinians to become serious about governance and disarming the terrorists. Let us hope that the citizens of the Gaza Strip, will soon get so sick and tired of the fighting between Hamas and the other groups that they will refuse to send their sons and daughters to fight, to be suicide bombers, to build Kasam rockets. Let’s hope that their desire for asupersedeife will supercede the call to Jihad and the destruction of Israel. A call, which has only served to bring them more hardship, death, destruction and injury. And let us hope that Hamas fails in its attempt to import its style of resistance to the West Bank.
Who knows? It all might work out. Stranger things have happened. There are some signs that Europe is showing a least a little less tolerance for the Palestinians excesses and excuses. The UN actually passed an Israel sponsored resolution and on establishing a world Holocaust Remembrance Day no less. Annan cancelled his trip to Iran after the president of that country openly called for Israel’s destruction. Hmm…are we actually moving on up?
Also, sometimes conflicts just exhaust themselves. Let's hope this happens soon. Boy am I tired.

Kibbutz Life:
(Every once and a while I will be writing about our kibbutz experience: the good, the bad and the ugly.)
When we lived in Miami we held on to our child's hand tightly whenever we went out. As soon as they were old enough we taught them to hold Mommy or Daddy's hand and to always keep us in sight and to never ever wander off.
All playtime was supervised. If you took your child to a park or a playground, you watched them diligently. You stood guard. The rule was you didn't let your child out of your line of sight, and if for a moment you did happen to get distracted and you couldn't see your child - you immediately subdued that instant rise of panic and fear - you got up and walked around, trying to locate him by line of sight before resorting to calling his name in an ever rising worried voice.
So it was quite a shock when we arrived at kibbutz to see how much freedom, even the three, four, five year olds had, and how much freedom the parents gave them. There were children everywhere: riding bicycles, running, shouting, playing soccer, basketball, going in and out of peoples houses. Both my wife and I were quite taken aback and yet my children, 3 and 4 year old boys (at the time), took to it immediately. Almost too easily.
It was far easier for them to let go of our hands then it was for us to let go of theirs. For several weeks after our arrival I would feel that old sense of panic if I didn't know where they were or if I couldn't see them. We could feel in a way, them escaping from our hold. At dinner idininginning hall we would be lucky if we could get one or two bites into them because they were in such a hurry to leave the table and go outside and play. Even after being on kibbutz for three years we still had that problem.
We knew that we had entered a brand new culture of children's freedom, and of having to teach our children new boundaries and acceptable behavior when one morning, just a day or two after our arrival, our oldest son Adar got up before everyone else, put on his clothes, and walked to the row of houses in front of ours and entered the house of a four year old boy he had met a couple of days before. The other boy's mother later told us that Adar walked to her son's room, saw that he was still asleep so Adar went into the living room and sat down. The Mother, who was in the bathroom at the time, heard a bit of commotion, and called out hello. Adar answered: "I'm here."
In the meantime, I had woken up and went in to look at our children and saw that Adar wasn't there. Kibbutz houses are very small so it only took a few seconds to see that he wasn't anywhere in our house. I felt that rising panic, uncontrollable and irrational and came to the immediate (rational) conclusion that he had been kidnapped. Somebody came into our house in the middle of the night and took our oldest boy. Then something told me to stop, go outside and check at Omer's house, Adar's new friend, and sure enough there he was, sitting on the couch, thumb in his mouth.
It probably took a good half-year before we became more settled with their new freedom and they became used to it also. Confined to the limitations of apartment living in Miami, our children had burst forth, becoming bundles of energy racing around the kibbutz, tiny rockets that couldn't be stopped. Although at times frustrating when we had to try and rein them in, I loved the fact that they were able to run around so much.
Although it still bothered me the few times that I couldn't find them. In fact, it became one of the major criticisms I had of the kibbutz-yes the children had much more freedom there. Yes, it was much safer when compared to living in the city. However, kibbutz was still not a 100% safe environment and there definitely was an atmosphere of complacency and at times neglect by the parents there when it came to the safety and welfare of the children.
I suppose protected environments have a tendency to do that. That is why I am pleased with our decision to move to Reut. It is a community of duplex houses with sidewalks, paths, and green areas, and, at least, some quiet streets. Our children already have many friends and have as active or just as active a social life as they did on kibbutz. As time passes and they learn how to conduct themselves in the city, we will give them more and more freedom. Adar and Nadav, now aged 7 and 6, go to friend's houses that are one to two blocks away. As they get older, their territory will, of course, expand. I , of course, will remain main ever vigilent about their safety and welfare.

Welcome to my blog. I suppose that is the correct thing to say.
I also want to welcome you all to the public entry point into my aliyah part 3.
Entries in this blog will deal primarily with my struggling relationship to Israel and my efforts to come to terms with it. For 23 years I have alternated between love, frustration, anger, disbelief, appreciation, respect, disrespect, admiration, and a myriad of other states of emotional highs and lows in regard to Israel. I have moved back and forth between Israel and the United States attempting to balance my love for both countries and desire to be a part of both of them.
How can I achieve both the American and Israeli dream? Why is the pull of being a Jew in Israel so strong? Why am I not satisfied with living the life of a Jew in America?

So I am going to use this forum to examine my relationship to Israel, the US, and the world. To share some of my adventures in life, both past and present, and to indulge in some commentary about politics and life in Israel, the situation in the Middle East, the US, the world.

I invite all comments both positive and negative.

Aliyah Part 3:

Why Aliyah part 3.
Well...Aliyah part 1: I first made aliyah July of 1991 and headed straight for Ulpan Eztion in Jerusalem. I was 27, single, with hardly a nickel in my pocket but I was in Jerusalem living my Zionist Dream. I think for many singles who make aliyah those first few years are kind of like play time. We are searching, trying to find our way, and mainly I think looking for a significant other. But we spent plenty of time partying. The Terminal Bar on Bezalel Street in Jerusalem was a perennial favorite. It was off the beaten track-meaning all of the year program crowds had not discovered it. It was one of the few places in Jerusalem that we found where there were mostly Israelis.
Anyway, five years later, I found myself with barely a penny in my pocket, just married and both my brand new wife (her name is Joyce) and I at a career crossroads. Soooo, we lit off for the fabled mythical city of Miami Beach, Florida, where we sojourned for six years. (Some blog entries will deal with our time there) Of course it didn't hurt that all of my family was there also.

Aliyah part 2: We returned to Israel August, 2002 and headed down to Kibbutz Ketura in the Arava Desert. What was meant to be a one year stay turned into three years as we entered the membership process and attempted to become desert dwelling socialist pioneers. (There will be much much more on this experience in future blogs).

Aliyah part 3: And now we come to the present. July, 2005: we move from Ketura to Reut, Israel (a part of the Modiin municipality-in the center of the country). This is my third attempt to permantly settle in Israel and live my Zionist Dream. My third attempt to discover if this is actually possible.

I am 41 years old (yes, I'm over 40 and I don't want to talk about it).
Married for 9 1/2 years to Joyce-my Dutch girl.
And we have three wonderful, beautiful children: Adar-7, Nadav-6 and Zoe-2.

We have absolutely no idea what it is like to live in Israel as an immigrant family, (kibbutz was a completely different experience) but we are learning fast. This really is like making aliyah, yet again.

Stay tuned...more missives and musings are on the way...

Danny Reed