Even Hadassah Women Are Worried : Spy Case Strains Alliance Between Israel, U.S. Jews

As Hyman Bookbinder took the hotel elevator down for breakfast Tuesday, he overheard a conversation between two American Jewish women in town for the 75th anniversary meeting of Hadassah, the women’s Zionist organization.

The women were discussing an address to their group by Israeli Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

“You know, I’m not satisfied with Rabin’s explanation of the Pollard affair,” one of the women said, according to Bookbinder, who is special representative in Washington for the American Jewish Committee.

“Neither am I,” her companion agreed.

Bookbinder later cited the incident to illustrate the damage that the Pollard spy case has done not only to Israel’s relations with America, but also to the ties between the Jewish state and the world’s largest Jewish community outside Israel.

“If Hadassah ladies continue to feel that way . . . , “ he commented, stating an obvious message without completing his sentence.

The Pollard case has caused what Bookbinder and other American Jewish leaders--who have inundated Jerusalem in recent days for a conference--call one of the most serious breaches ever in the normally united public front between Israel and America’s 6 million Jews.

These leaders were quick to add Tuesday that the long-term interests of both sides ensure that the basic relationship will remain close. And they praised the Israeli government’s decision to name an investigating committee into the Pollard affair as an important step in the right direction.

At the same time, however, public recriminations continued to fly between Israeli and American Jews over two issues.

The first is the promotion of two Israeli principals in what the government has insisted was the “rogue” unit that recruited and supervised Jonathan Jay Pollard, a former U.S. Navy intelligence analyst who was sentenced to life imprisonment on March 4 as a confessed spy for Israel.

While Israeli officials apologized for the incident and said the unit was disbanded, its former head, Rafael Eitan, was subsequently named chairman of the state-owned Israel Chemicals concern. And Col. Aviem Sella, who was allegedly Pollard’s first “handler,” was reassigned on Feb. 27 to the prestigious command of Israel’s second largest air base.

At a press conference Tuesday to open the Israeli visit of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, Chairman Morris B. Abram assailed the Sella appointment, which came just four days before Pollard’s sentencing, as “serious and, I might add, irresponsible.” Eitan’s promotion, he added, was also damaging to Israel’s credibility.

Last week, Burton Levinson, national chairman of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, called for the two officials to be suspended pending the outcome of the Israeli committee’s investigation.

‘Area Needs Correction’

While other officials stopped short of specifically endorsing that call here Tuesday, Bookbinder said that “any action of that kind . . . would be most welcome and would be most helpful in relieving the tensions.” He added that the status of the two men “is the area that needs correction.”

A second issue that has emerged from the Pollard affair is likely to resonate in American Jews’ relations with Israel long after details of the case have been forgotten.

It involves a charge by some influential Israelis that their American supporters have “panicked” because Pollard is Jewish.

In this view, the unusually outspoken American Jewish criticism of the Israeli government betrays an unacknowledged fear that they are not really accepted as Americans. This causes American Jewish leaders to overreact in order to “prove” their loyalty by distancing themselves from the confessed spy.

‘Ran for Cover’

“Let me not mince words,” Shlomo Avineri, a Hebrew University political scientist and former director general of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, wrote last week in the Jerusalem Post.

“Some of the responses of American Jewish leaders after Pollard’s sentencing remind me of the way in which Jewish leaders in Egypt under (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,” Avineri wrote.

When the going got tough, he added, these leaders “reacted like trembling Israelites in the shtetl (East European Jewish ghetto-village), not like the proud and mighty citizens of a free democratic society.”

Avineri’s comments were the most widely discussed such attack on American Jews.

Strong Language

American Jewish leaders denounced his theory here Tuesday in some of the strongest language they have ever directed at their Israeli counterparts.

Abram, who was a focal point of Israeli criticism because of his public statements endorsing Pollard’s life sentence, flatly rejected Avineri’s premise and stressed that “we come as secure and confident members of a vital, pluralistic American democracy.”

Regarding Pollard’s sentence, he commented: “I am not here to state anything that is vengeful about anybody. As a Jew, I believe ‘the quality of mercy is not strained.’ However, the Pollard act showed no mercy toward the United States. And his conduct since has not in my judgment shown any deep concern . . . for anyone other than himself.”

Abram was apparently referring to interviews that Pollard has granted from jail and his pre-sentencing plea, in which he claimed to have acted out of love for Israel and complained that he was abandoned by the country that he tried to help.

Bookbinder called Avineri’s charges “unworthy,” “absurd” and “a bum rap,” and he added that “I deeply resent” them.

In another response to Avineri, published in the Jerusalem Post on Tuesday, Abraham H. Foxman, associate national director of the Anti-Defamation League, accused Avineri of a “cheap shot” unworthy of his talents.

“For someone who has spent so much time visiting and lecturing in the United States, your misreading of American Jewry is astonishing,” Foxman wrote.

It was not out of fear of an anti-Semitic backlash that American Jewish leaders reacted, he said, but “because Jonathan Pollard violated American law purportedly on behalf of an ideal we cherish--love of Israel. . . . What we reject is the inference that support of Israel legitimizes criminal action against the United States.”

Foxman accused Israeli leaders of treating the Pollard affair “in a cavalier and equivocating manner that borders on contempt for American sensibilities.”

And he added, “It is the monumental stupidity and breach of faith that so disturbs us, and not the religion or ideology of the American spy.”

If there is any soul-searching to be done, Foxman concluded, it is not among American Jews but in Israel.

In Los Angeles, the B’nai B’rith Messenger joined in the criticism by publishing an editorial saying that for the first time since the founding of Israel, “we American Jews feel affronted” and that “for the first time Israel has involved us in an unworthy incident.” The newspaper said the Israeli government should give assurances that “this can never happen again.”

Another Jewish publication in Los Angeles, Heritage, said that “of all spy cases, Pollard’s was the most futile and foolish and least worthy,” and it concluded, “We are ashamed.”