As my colleague Isabel Kershner explained they would, Israeli politicians have taken turns this week pressing President Obama to release Jonathan Pollard, a former United States Navy intelligence analyst serving a life term in a North Carolina prison for spying for Israel.
Immediately after his arrival at Tel Aviv’s Ben-Gurion Airport on Wednesday, Mr. Obama was introduced to Israel’s new housing minister, Uri Ariel, who shook the president’s hand and said, “Please free Pollard.†Video of the brief exchange showed Mr. Obama nodding and saying just “Good to see you†in reply before moving on. When it was her turn to shake the president’s hand, the culture and sports minister Limor Livnat â€" who once called his administration “awful†â€" said, “On behalf of the citizens of Israel, I ask you not to forget our brother Jonathan Pollard.â€
At least three more people Mr. Obama was scheduled to meet reportedly planned to raise Mr. Pollard’s case: the leader of the opposition Labor Party, the mother of two men killed during service in the Israel Defense Forces and the Ethiopian-born former soldier just named Miss Israel. The beauty queen, Yityish Aynaw, emigrated to Israel at the age of 12 and was crowned last month. She said in an interview with Israel’s Channel 2 that she intended to tell Mr. Obama at Thursday night’s state dinner that he was a role model for her and “that he should free Pollard.â€
If Ms. Aynaw does manage to raise the subject, she will be following in the footsteps of Israel’s most senior leaders, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Shimon Peres, who have repeatedly called on American presidents to free the convicted spy. After Mr. Pollard was arrested in 1985, Israel initially claimed that he was an actor in a rogue operation. But he was granted Israeli citizenship during Mr. Netanyahu’s first term in office in the late 1990s, when Israel officially recognized that Mr. Pollard had “acted as an Israeli agent†when he passed on classified information on Arab countries.
An online petition calling for Mr. Pollard’s freedom has garnered more than 175,000 signatures. His wife, Esther, visited Mr. Netanyahu’s office last week and recorded a personal appeal to Mr. Obama broadcast on Israeli television in which she asked the president to “let Jonathan come home†to Israel.
Petitioners for Mr. Pollard’s release have complained that he is being treated more harshly than others convicted of spying for American allies, but sympathy for his case is not universal among supporters of Israel in the United States. Last year, Martin Peretz, the former editor-in-chief of The New Republic, wrote:
It is not the business of Israel, although it seems to be the business of the politicians of Israel, to hector and harass President Obama about the release of Jonathan Pollard, who served as a certified espionage agent of the Jewish state in and against its one truly reliable ally, the United States of America. Maybe Pollard’s sentence was a bit harsher than it should have been. But I don’t even concede that. In any case, there are probably hundreds of thousands of convicts now in jail who can argue that their prison sentence was not equable or even just in the first place. Of course, that’s what the Pollard enthusiasts are saying. Frankly, I find it disgusting that so many Israelis and so many American Jews, too, have the chutzpah to besiege Obama with urgent demands to release Pollard now.
