As with many of the other posts that I have included on this blog, this passage will be rather short. I have comparably few things to say about Jonathan Pollard, and I know very little about his case or the classified information that he apparently provided to Israel before his apprehension, indictment, and imprisonment on espionage charges in 1987. From the details that appear available, he seems to have provided communications security information at least in some way comparable to the information provided to news media sources by Edward Snowden, in addition to materials regarding various U.S. intelligence data collection on foreign (Arab, Iranian, Soviet, etc.) military capabilities not otherwise available to or verified by Israeli intelligence sources. I have placed two separate posts on this blog concerning the espionage committed by Edward Snowden, which I consider, at least to some extent, to have provided a valuable service to the broader American public in revealing the substantial extent to which the National Security Administration and other U.S. intelligence agencies have been engaged in collecting information on the American public. The Pollard case is of an entirely different character. In this regard, the problematic character of the Espionage Act of 1917 concerns me much less here than it does with regard to Snowden. The information Pollard passed to Israel and the particular manner in which it was passed ensured that it would unambiguously be used by a foreign intelligence service and foreign military entities, even if those entities were, at the time as presently, allied to the U.S. Considering the country to which the information was passed and its peculiar relation to the U.S., in relation to the rest of the world, I think Pollard's circumstances demand further attention.
Notably, I would hope that Pollard is not released in anticipation of repatriation by Israel, as an expression of the fidelity of the Obama administration toward our ally Israel in anticipation of the Jewish Passover. More fundamentally, the idea that Pollard would be released to Israel in an effort to bring the Likud government of Netanyahu back to the peace process or to restrain Israel from continuing to authorize the construction of settlements in West Bank territories outside Israel's pre-1968 boundaries disgusts me, when over $3 billion of tax money collected from U.S. tax payers flows annually to bankroll Israeli military operations!
In a further sense, I think that the indictment and imprisonment of Pollard raises questions concerning the boundaries that the American polity should be willing to accept in the dispersal of sensitive information to allied militaries and intelligence services. Perhaps Pollard was right to have supplies Israel with information that it needed to more effectively undertake defense planning against Arab and other states in its region in the early 1980s. Emphatically, I do not know all of the issues involved in Pollard's case because I do not know all of what he supplied or where it fit into the broader structure of Israeli defense planning or why U.S. Naval and other intelligence sources were not being more forthcoming to an ally in supplying this information in the first place. Having said all that, U.S. military and civilian intelligence agencies must be capable of engaging in the collection and maintenance of sensitive information without the interference or disclosure to non-U.S. entities. For the same reasons that Snowden's disclosures over the last year have raised legitimate issues in violation of espionage laws, notwithstanding the potential long term benefits of these disclosures, Pollard's disclosures to Israel merit the sentence that he received and that he should serve.
As a final point, I am intrigued by the notion that as an American Jew, Pollard was somehow more entitled to serve the interests of Israel in the provision of sensitive U.S. governmental/military/intelligence information. Perhaps "entitled" is not the right word to apply here, but I am searching for an appropriate concept to capture the broader nexus of positionalities applicable to an American Jew as a Jew, wholly welcomed to partake of Israel through the official governmental/constitutional policy of the state as an ethno-cultural homeland for all Jews, as an official of the U.S. federal government, and particularly its intelligence services, tasked by the American people to act in a manner that supports and defends the U.S. Constitution, and as an American citizen, attempting to act in a manner that Pollard conceivably thought would serve the best interests of his country, his family, and all his neighbors in his community. As in many other circumstances, this raises questions for me about nationality, within the broader evolutionary stream of liberal (and Marxist) globalist thought. Pollard is obviously entitled, in every sense of the word to place his identification with Judaism, as a requisite of identifying with the Zionist (a term I use in a historical rather than in a prejorative sense) project of Israel, above his identification with the American (liberal constitutionalist) project. Fundamentally, I see these two projects (i.e. Zionism and the Enlightenment, as the wellspring of ethical and juridical principles embodied in the foundations of the U.S.) as incommensurably at odds. I need to commit a larger post or set of posts to an explanation of this, but, in a most basic sense, I have to concede that I neither support the existence of Israel, as the outcome of the Zionist project, nor do I see anything in Israel's existence that supports the project of the Enlightenment, a project founded on secular, multi-ethnic principles that contradict the notion of ethno-cultural Jewish state. In this regard, I find the notion that Pollard would have understood some equivalence between these two ends troubling.
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