Israeli Cabinet Accepts Blame for Pollard Affair

The Israeli government Wednesday accepted collective responsibility for what two investigative committees described as Israel’s mishandling of the Jonathan Jay Pollard spy scandal, but Foreign Minister Shimon Peres dismissed criticism of his role in the affair, saying he sees “no reason to apologize” to anyone.

The Israeli Cabinet, called into special session, voted to adopt the findings of a government-appointed panel, which recommended that the government as a whole assume responsibility for the Pollard affair and the strains it caused in U.S.-Israeli relations.

Pollard, a 32-year-old American Jew, was sentenced by a Washington court to life imprisonment in March for having passed hundreds of top-secret documents to Israeli agents.

Leadership Faulted

The government-appointed panel, headed by Tel Aviv attorney Joshua Rotenstreich, issued a still partly secret report Tuesday concluding that no senior officials knew of the Pollard affair until after the former U.S. Navy analyst was arrested in the United States last November.

While it faulted the country’s leadership both for not knowing about Pollard’s recruitment and for the seemingly careless way in which it handled the ensuing scandal, the panel said that no particular member of the Cabinet should be singled out for blame.

This recommendation, and its subsequent adoption by the Cabinet on a 14-3 vote with four absentions, was seen as a way of ensuring that no one in the government will come under pressure to resign because of his role in the Pollard affair.

This was later confirmed by Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, who replied with an emphatic “No” when asked by an Israeli television reporter if there would be any changes in the government as a result of the panel’s findings.

“There will be no shake-up,” said Shamir, who added that he hopes the Pollard affair will finally be put to rest.

A political controversy appeared to be building, however, over the findings of a second committee--this one established by the Knesset, Israel’s Parliament--which also concluded its investigation into the Pollard affair Tuesday.

While reaching essentially the same conclusions as the Rotenstreich panel, the seven-member parliamentary committee, headed by former Foreign Minister Abba Eban, focused the blame more sharply on Peres, Shamir, Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin and former Defense Minister Moshe Arens, now a minister without portfolio.

The Eban committee said that Arens and Rabin bore a major responsibility for the affair because Lekem, the obscure intelligence agency that recruited Pollard to spy for Israel in 1984, was under the aegis of their ministry. The committee said they were guilty of negligence for failing to supervise Lekem’s activities more closely and for not becoming informed about Pollard’s activities at the time.

Similarly, Eban’s panel criticized Peres and Shamir for failing to fulfill the specific commitments made to the United States after Pollard’s arrest to help clear up the affair so as to avoid serious damage to U.S.-Israeli relations.

Peres Rejects Criticism

However, while faulting all four men, the committee’s report said “the extra margin of responsibility” fell upon Peres because he was prime minister at the time of Pollard’s recruitment.

Peres denounced the Eban committee’s findings as “political” and angrily rejected the criticism.

“I acted the way I should have,” he told Israel’s Armed Forces radio. “I have no reason to apologize, and I have no regrets.”

Asked by another interviewer if he thought the results of the two investigations would satisfy the United States, Peres said: “We don’t have to satisfy the Americans. We have to satisfy Israelis.”

In Washington, State Department spokeswoman Phyllis Oakley would not comment specifically on the two Israeli reports but issued a sharp reminder that the United States wants the Israelis involved in the case brought to account as promised by the Israeli government, Reuters news agency reported.

“We have always said we are concerned about the treatment of the individuals involved in Pollard’s espionage and that the government of Israel undertook to call such persons to account,” Oakley said.

But the Israeli electorate is likely to be even harder to mollify than the Americans, according to several political analysts and Parliament members interviewed for their reactions to the committees’ findings.

While no one sees the Pollard affair as an issue over which the coalition government is likely to fall, the way in which it was mishandled, combined with the refusal of senior officials to accept responsibility for it, is likely to deepen Israelis’ sense of disillusionment with their leadership, these analysts said.

Over the past year, the government has been involved in a series of scandals that have either been hastily covered up or mismanaged. As a result, editorial writers and political commentators have begun to openly question the government’s moral character and political competence.

Such questions were raised in the Israeli media last year in the wake of what many saw as a clumsy cover-up of a scandal involving the slaying of two Palestinian bus hijackers who were beaten to death following their capture by members of the Shin Bet, the Israeli security service.

The questions resurfaced over Israel’s role in the secret U.S. sale of arms to Iran and, more recently, in a new Shin Bet scandal involving the wrongful imprisonment of an Israeli army officer who was convicted of treason in 1981 on the basis of evidence fabricated by security officials.

Now they are being raised again in the Pollard affair.

Minister without Portfolio Yitzhak Modai, who was one of the three Cabinet members voting against accepting collective responsibility for the Pollard affair, said: “The attempt to say all are guilty means that no one is guilty and no one will be brought to account.

“Because some of our colleagues are pressed, we are obliged to take responsibility for issues that were not brought to our attention,” Modai said. “That is unfair and illogical.”

Modai’s remarks were echoed by the English-language Jerusalem Post, which noted that the Rotenstreich report assigned blame for the Pollard affair to “everybody and nobody.”

The major daily newspaper Haaretz, in an editorial Wednesday, summed up this mood. “Shamir and Peres should not be surprised,” the paper said, “if, when the time comes, the voters of Israel have the impression that none of their leaders are worthy of trust.”