After years of staying out of the issue, the National Jewish Communal Relations Advisory Council passed its first resolution regarding clemency for Jonathan Pollard this week, just hours after revelations that a veteran CIA officer spied for Russia catapulted espionage back into the news.
By a 2-to-1 margin, the umbrella Jewish group voted Tuesday to send President Clinton a letter indicating that some in the Jewish community believe Pollard was unjustly sentenced, but falling short of actually recommending clemency for the former Navy analyst who was convicted of spying for Israel.
NJCRAC thereby because one of the last Jewish communal organizations to weigh in on the Polled case.
The vote was described by NJCRAC Executive Vice Chairman Lawrence Rubin as an effort to “move the issue beyond us.”
The group had long been vilified by some Pollard advocates because it was a task force meeting under NJCRAC auspices that first set the tone among Jewish organizations that Polled was not a matter for their advocacy.
There was no small irony in the fact that NJCRAC’s vote on Pollard coincided with file pictures of Pollard being used on television and in newspapers to accompany reports about Aldrich Ames, the CIA officer charged Tuesday with conspiracy to commit espionage.
And in an even greater irony, commentary in the wake of Ames’ arrest appeared to signal that a key distinction made by Pollard supporters between spying for Israel, a putative ally, and spying for the Soviet Union, an enemy, seems to have evaporated with the end of the Cold War.
Now the question swirling around the case of a man arrested for spying first for the former Soviet Union and then for Russia echo those that surrounded Polled at the time of his arrest in 1985: How can the Russians claim to be our friends while continuing to run spies against us? How will this incident affect U.S. aid to them?
All this comes as Attorney General Janet Reno is reviewing the Pollard case and considering whether to recommend clemency. It had been expected that Reno would make her recommendation to the president in December, but the file has yet to make its way to the desk of President Clinton, who promised as a candidate to review the sentence.
According to a report in Newsweek magazine, the resignation of Deputy Attorney General Philip Heymann reflected in part a clash over the Pollard issue, with Heymann favoring some form of clemency.
When, or if, Clinton does review Pollard’s case, he will find the letter addressed to him by NJCRAC, as approved Tuesday, thin gruel for decision- making.
The letter, whose exact wording may be modified, does not assert the injustice of Pollard’s sentence, as have some of NJCRAC’s 13 national and 117 community member agencies. Nor does the letter plead for mercy for a man who has already served more than 8 years of a life sentence, as have other NJCRAC constituents.
Instead, the umbrella policy-making body for the organized American Jewish community wrote, that “substantial elements of the community …express great concern with respect to the fairness and the prospect of the sentence.”
And it adds that if Clinton does find Pollard’s sentence improper, that he consider reducing the sentence to time served.
Unstated but implicit in the wording is that if Clinton finds nothing wrong with the sentence, that he then do nothing. The letter was a classic example of NJCRAC’s consensus-oriented approach.
The purpose of the proposal, said outgoing NJCRAC Chair Maynard Wishner, was to counter suggestions that NJCRAC’s silence on Pollard constituted opposition to clemency.
While the NJCRAC ad hoc Pollard committee established and continued to reassert that the case did not reflect anti-Semitism, support for Pollard began to spread through Jewish organizations beginning in 1991.
By last year, even organizations not sympathetic to Pollard had adopted the neutral language of the current NJCRAC letter, if only to escape the pressure of Pollard supporters.
But NJCRAC failed to approve such a measure last year, in part because of the unwillingness of Pollard advocates to adopt the bland consensus language, and in part because of deep-felt anger among many delegates toward some Pollard advocates.
This year, however, both sides were less emotional.
Pollard advocates have received several blows recently., even as more and more of NJCRAC’s constituents came on board the cause.
As the case was being considered in the Justice Department late last year, opponents of Pollard’s release in the intelligence community went to the press, leaking details of the damage assessment and charging that Pollard had included classified information in his correspondence from jail.
At the same time, Pollard supporters engaged in a public debate over whether the spy had really meant a sentence in a letter he had signed, in which he declared his actions “repugnant” to God, Torah and natural law.
While this debate surfaced in the deliberations prior to the NJCRAC vote, the discussion focused less on the question of what Pollard did than on how NJCRAC would be perceived.
Alan Ronkin, of the Seattle Jewish Community Relations Council, argued that the NJCRAC letter was a mistake.
“We will have left a wrong impression that last year our silence meant something,” he said. “We will leave a wrong impression this year that our letter favors something. This form of a letter, saying to the president, `do the right thing,’ is obviously gratuitous.”
Another delegate agreed that “the proposition has meaning to us only because we’re invested in the matter. It’s not something that will mean anything to the president.”
But this delegate argued that “voting for the proposition is the right thing for us to do because (the people) want us to. We keep forgetting that this is not a constituency of chairmen; we are a constituency of members, and amcha (the grass roots) has spoken.”
While this delegate personally opposed an appeal or clemency, “when my federation considered the case, they commanded me to support commutation. Therefore, if we should vote, better we should vote for it now and get it behind us.”
This point was echoed by NJCRAC official Rubin, in the final statement before the vote.
“Last year we debated and voted about Jonathan Pollard. This year we have a debate about the Jewish community, and the ability of this instrument to reflect that constituency,” said Rubin.
“Subsequent to last year’s conference, your communities voted. What happened in NJCRAC last year put us in a very awkward position. The president does not need us, but the Jewish community does,” said Rubin.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
