Message to Israel: ‘No Exceptions’ : Jewish Americans--All Americans--Want Spy Rules Followed

The government of Israel has scarcely begun to answer for the employment of an American citizen, Jonathan Jay Pollard, late of the Department of the Navy and now under sentence of life imprisonment, for the commission of acts of treason against the United States.

As the enormity of this espionage scandal between the United States and Israel grows in evidence, people in both countries are in danger of drawing superfluous conclusions.

In the United States, the fact that Pollard is a Jew is irrelevant to the fact of espionage, yet it inevitably provokes crude fears that American Jews in sensitive government positions could be potentially disloyal--despite all the logic and evidence to the contrary.

In running the Pollard operation, the agents of Israel have managed to rekindle the ugly charges of “dual loyalties.” The threat of divided allegiance between a Jewish state and the United States had plagued the American Jewish community since the time of Louis D. Brandeis in the 1920s, and then had faded almost away on the evidence of the decades after the creation of Israel in 1948.

In Israel, angry public reaction is directed at the government for failing to protect an agent who apparently provided important security intelligence. Anger would be more legitimately directed at the deliberate and systematic penetration of an ally’s intelligence programs, as if Israel and the United States were not already intimately engaged in cooperative intelligence ventures.

Did the responsible Israeli officers believe that the rewards of the Pollard operation justified putting the two countries’ entire working relationship at risk? Or, more likely, did the officers simply reckon that they could get away with it, that American Jews would never dare to criticize Israel, and that no elected politician in this country would want to point a finger of blame?

Good will on all sides could heal the double injury to Israeli-American relations--the professional breach between the government services, the psychological affront to American Jewry. So far, on neither count has the Israeli response been encouraging.

The veteran intelligence manager who headed the Pollard operation, Rafael Eitan, was hurried out of the civil service once he was publicly identified. But he was rewarded with a lucrative executive job in one of Israel’s largest state-run industries.

The officer who actually recruited Pollard and set up his operation, Col. Aviem Sella, has just been promoted to brigadier general and named commander of Israel’s second-largest air base, where the U.S. Air Force has longstanding strategic missions. Sella was indicted in Washington last week for espionage, meaning that he is liable to arrest if he ever again sets foot in the United States. Since American military personnel were promptly ordered to shun contact with him, his tenure in an important command post threatens all strategic cooperation between the United States and Israel.

For their part, American Jews express their grievance more privately than do governments, and, indeed, their sophisticated Israeli friends are acutely sensitive to the “dual-loyalty” threat. Other, less worldly, segments of Israeli society, however, show neither appreciation nor tolerance for the concerns of Jews who live outside Israel. The American Jewish community’s leaders will have a hard time eliciting sympathy from the military and security Establishment of Israel, which may not understand the psychological cloud cast by the hiring of an American Jew to steal his government’s intelligence data to help Israel.

A word about the notion of “spying on friends”: As a matter of principle among allies it should not be necessary, yet it would be naive to imagine that it never happens. But intelligence professionals draw a sharp distinction between so-called passive surveillance--electronic or other remote sensing techniques, for instance--and the active recruitment of citizens to conduct espionage against their own governments, complete with code names, secret payments and dead drops--and the threat of imprisonment or execution if they are caught.

This is the threshold of behavior that Pollard’s Israeli operators crossed. (And, considering the complexity of running such an agent, to say nothing of the evident dissemination through the military leadership of the sensitive material that he supplied, the Israeli government cannot make the case credible that Pollard’s was just a “rogue operation.”)

Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, on his recent visit to the United States, firmly turned away questions on the Pollard affair, as he did on Israel’s clandestine arms sales to Iran, saying only, “There are rules to be observed, and there are exceptions to those rules.”

Americans who care about the future of the relationship between the United States and Israel have reason to be troubled; they are sending meaningful signals to Israel that its responsible agents cannot blithely get away with “exceptions” to established rules of cooperation.