To Many Israelis, Convicted Spy Pollard Is a Maligned Hero

JERUSALEM —  As far as Sam Turecki is concerned, Jonathan Jay Pollard, the former U.S. Navy intelligence analyst who was sentenced last week in Washington to life imprisonment as an Israeli spy, is a hero.

Turecki, who lives in the Tel Aviv suburb of Raanana, wrote Pollard in care of the U.S. Embassy to tell him how he feels. And in a letter to the Jerusalem Post published Thursday, he urged his fellow Israelis to thank Pollard “for his service to the state of Israel by providing us with information that our supposed ‘friends’ should have supplied.”

U.S. Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger said that information Pollard gave the Israelis was of such “breadth . . . critical importance . . . and . . . high sensitivity” that “it is difficult for me to conceive of a greater harm to national security than that caused by” Pollard.

Heroes Not Forgotten

But Turecki advised his countrymen that “right now (Pollard) needs to know that the people of Israel don’t forget their heroes, and hopefully, when the dust has settled, he will be welcomed here.”

Turecki is symptomatic of a second and in some ways conflicting current of public opinion here that runs beneath the government’s efforts to appease an angry America over the Pollard case.

It is a current composed of far-reaching sympathy for Pollard tinged at times with deep-seated resentment at what is seen as the humiliating price of Israel’s economic and political dependence on the United States.

Yehoshua Gelbard, a Tel Aviv lawyer and one of four founding members of a “Citizens for Pollard” group organized to collect money to help cover the legal expenses of Pollard and his wife, said Thursday that he has been “very surprised” by the response.

Expects to Meet $250,000 Goal

Gelbard said exact figures are not yet available but that “tens of thousands of dollars” were collected in the first day after the group advertised in Israel’s national newspapers. He said that each of the four founding members is getting at least 30 to 40 phone calls a day. And he predicted that the committee will reach its goal of $250,000 to $300,000 within two weeks.

In some cases, perhaps most, sympathy for the Pollards is based on a belief that they have been abandoned by the Israeli authorities. And there is a belief that while Pollard faces a life sentence and his wife five years in prison, none of the Israelis involved in what the government insists was an unauthorized operation has been punished.

Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir was seen earlier this week to be washing his hands of the couple when he said: “The State of Israel has no connection with Pollard or his family. The state of Israel did not hire him and did not assign him espionage missions. Therefore, the situation of this family may be a humane problem, or a moral problem, (but it is) not a problem with which the state, as such, has to concern itself.”

Negative Public Reaction

Stung by negative public reaction to the comment, Shamir’s aides quickly put out the word that his disclaimer was based on an assessment that any official Israeli support for the couple would only be seen as a damaging admission that the two had spied at the government’s behest.

Some Israelis are convinced that this is exactly what happened and that the government is lying to protect senior political figures. Even if it was a “rogue” effort, others say, the country has a moral debt to the Pollards.

“There is a feeling among Israelis that Israel was wrong,” a government official said. The Pollards are “two Jews who wanted to help Israel, and we should help them,” he added.

A turning point came the night before their sentencing, when Israel television aired a special report on the case featuring an extensive interview with Anne Henderson-Pollard. She and her husband, she said, had acted on behalf of Israel, motivated by a deep love of the country and the feeling that the United States was withholding intelligence information vital to the Jewish state.

Weeping Before Cameras

The program ended with her weeping before the cameras over what she called Israel’s abandonment of them.

That night, the government official said, “2.5 million Israelis were watching TV. They saw the tears of this young woman. That got their sympathy--very simple.”

Gelbard stressed that his group is acting solely on humanitarian grounds.

“We can understand the feelings of the Americans, and many of us feel the same way,” he said. “Many of us reject what Pollard did. But we believe he had a basis for believing he was doing good for Israel. And we cannot accept that he, his family and his wife’s family should have to fund the defense.”

But there is another and more troubling element in this popular reaction to the Pollard case.

‘Something Beneath the Surface’

“There is something beneath the surface there that people like Sharon (Ariel Sharon, the hard-line minister of trade and industry) have been very successful in tapping,” the Israeli representative of an American Jewish group said. He was referring to Sharon’s statement early this week that the government should stand firm against American pressure to punish Israelis implicated in the affair.

Sharon, a former defense minister, said that Israel has given America more information than it has received in many fields and that the United States did not always supply all the intelligence it should have given its Middle East ally.

One longtime analyst of the complex American-Israeli relationship described Sharon’s statement and the favorable public response to it as a defensive reaction to Israeli dependence on American financial and political support. He described this attitude as “Sure, we take the $3 billion (in annual American aid), but we give back to you in kind.”

However it is characterized, this analyst said, there is an ambivalence here about the United States that “cuts deep.”

Many Think Affair Inflated

Daniel Elazar, director of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, said that many Israelis think Americans are inflating the Pollard affair.

“They are convinced,” he said, “that Americans have also been known to spy on their friends, after all, which makes this moralism a little hard to take.”

There has been speculation in the Israeli news media that the Reagan Administration is deliberately making a major case out of Pollard in order to distract attention from disclosures about clandestine U.S. sales of arms to Iran and the diversion of funds to Nicaraguan guerrillas.

Others here are convinced that there is a significant group of Americans out to “get” Israel and that the group has found in the Pollard case a golden opportunity, Elazar said.

Shifra Hoffman, who runs the “Museum of the Future Holocaust” here, said that American anti-Semites are using the Pollard case to give respectability to their views. The museum is loosely affiliated with Israel’s right-wing Rabbi Meir Kahane, whose political party, Kach, advocates the expulsion of all Arabs from Israel and the occupied West Bank.

Critical Public Line

American Jewish groups have taken a strongly critical public line toward Israel’s handling of the Pollard affair, and this has clearly annoyed Israelis, both official and non-official.

An editorial this week in the Hebrew-language newspaper Maariv said pointedly that “since they have chosen not to live among us and their children do not serve in the (Israeli military), the ideological and practical partnership between us is limited.”

Some Israelis accuse American Jews of overreacting because Pollard is Jewish. They see them as consciously or unconsciously trying to prove that they are loyal Americans even though Pollard was not.

That view was expressed in a surprisingly biting open letter to American Jews published in the Jerusalem Post last Tuesday. The author was Shlomo Avineri, a Hebrew University political scientist and former director general of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, who is usually considered sympathetic to the American Jewish community.

Refuses to ‘Mince Words’

“Let me not mince words,” Avineri wrote. “Some of the responses of American Jewish leaders after Pollard’s sentencing remind me of the way in which Jewish leaders in Egypt under Nasser (the late President Gamal Abdel Nasser) and in Iran under (the Ayatollah Ruhollah) Khomeini ran for cover when members of their respective Jewish communities were caught spying for Israel.”

In Avineri’s view, their reaction reveals that despite their claims to being fully accepted, American Jews are really insecure in their status.

“The test of really belonging and real equality is when the going is tough,” he wrote. “And when the going got tough, your leaders reacted like trembling Israelites in the shtetl (a term for Jewish villages in Eastern Europe), not like the proud and mighty citizens of a free democratic society.”

For all its achievements and promise, Avineri concluded, “America, it now evidently appears, may not be your Promised Land.”

Burton Levinson, Los Angeles-based national chairman of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, rejected Avineri’s arguments, saying he had come to Israel to warn Israeli leaders of a potentially damaging “mood change” in the United States, not “because of concern over my status as an American Jew.”

He said he told Israeli officials that American Jewish leaders “have a particular responsibility to bring this information to you. Who else is going to tell you about the implications?”