Benjamin Netanyahu Orders No Celebration of Jonathan Pollard’s Release
Still Fighting: At 101, Joe Newman is still fighting for what he thinks is right. Even he knows Election Night is going to be an early one — his write-in candidacy for a Florida Congressional seat was doomed from the start.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has instructed Israeli officials to keep low-key about Friday’s scheduled release by the United States of Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard, a cabinet minister said.
The former U.S. Navy analyst’s espionage for Israel in the 1980s remains a strain on ties with Washington and his parole terms dictate that he stay in the United States for five years.
Pollard, sentenced to life in prison after being convicted in 1987 of passing reams of classified information to Israel, has been behind bars since his arrest in 1985.
Now 60, he has said he wants to immigrate to Israel where his second wife lives and where he can expect to receive substantial Israeli government back-pay. He was granted Israeli citizenship while in prison.
Israeli officials are concerned that too warm a celebration over his release might hurt efforts to persuade the U.S. government to let him leave for Israel sooner.
Asked whether Netanyahu had issued his ministers with instructions regarding public statements on Pollard, Education Minister Naftali Bennett told Israel’s Army Radio on Thursday: “We were asked not to speak expansively.”
Bennett, who heads a far-right party, described Pollard as “an emissary of the State of Israel, for better or worse.”
Successive U.S. administrations had resisted Israeli calls to show the unrepentant Pollard clemency, though Washington did, at times, consider early release as part of its efforts to revive talks on Palestinian statehood.
Pollard’s legal team has called on U.S. President Barack Obama to allow him to go to Israel immediately after release from federal prison in North Carolina, but have noted that he has a job and a place to live in the United States.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
