We welcome your comments to this and any other CIJR publication. Please address your response to: Rob Coles, Publications Chairman, Canadian Institute for Jewish Research, PO Box 175, Station H, Montreal QC H3G 2K7 – Tel: (514) 486-5544 – Fax:(514) 486-8284; E-mail: rob@isranet.wpsitie.com
Disastrous Outcome of the 'Peace Negotiations': Isi Leibler, Israel Hayom, Apr. 3, 2014— As anticipated, the Obama administration's efforts to impose a peace settlement have proved to be a disastrous failure.
Israeli Author on the Futility of U.S.-Led Peace Talks and Hope For a Two State Solution: Daniel Gordis, National Post, Apr. 1, 2014 — News that U.S. President Barack Obama may free Jonathan Pollard, an American convicted of spying for Israel in 1987, as a gesture of good faith has injected new hope into the Mideast peace talks.
Why President Obama Must Commute Pollard's Sentence: Alan Dershowitz & Irwin Cotler, Jerusalem Post, Apr. 1, 2014 — Reports are circulating that the Obama Administration is considering releasing Jonathan Pollard, as part of an effort to encourage Israel to release Arab prisoners
The Operational Fiasco at the Heart of the Pollard Affair: Mitch Ginsberg, Times of Israel, Apr. 3, 2014— It’s unclear whether Jonathan Jay Pollard will be released before Passover this April.
The Peace Process Blame Game: Jonathan S. Tobin, Commentary, Apr. 3, 2014
Kerry’s Folly, Chapter 3: Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post, Apr. 3, 2014
How Abbas Gets Away With It: Moshe Phillips & Benyamin Korn, Jewish Tribune, Mar. 27, 2014
The Israeli Solution by Caroline Glick (Book Review): Spengler, Asia Times, Mar. 31, 2014
90 Reasons Not to Create a Palestinian State: Moshe Phillips & Benyamin Korn, Jerusalem Post, Mar. 23, 2014
American Chorus Against Pollard Release: Michael Wilner, Jerusalem Post, Apr. 3, 2014
DISASTROUS OUTCOME OF THE 'PEACE NEGOTIATIONS'
Isi Leibler
Israel Hayom, Apr. 3, 2014
As anticipated, the Obama administration's efforts to impose a peace settlement have proved to be a disastrous failure. It is immaterial whether the negotiations formally break down or a face-saving formula is adopted which is nonbinding and incorporates sufficient reservations to make it meaningless. Regrettably, the U.S. intervention has only exacerbated the situation and even undermined the chances of low-profile interim progress and economic cooperation. The peace settlements between Israel and Egypt and Jordan were achieved because both parties sought to come to an accommodation. The U.S. did not then seek to impose solutions. It only became involved as a facilitator and honest broker after both parties had taken the initial steps and invited them.
The flawed initiatives by the Obama administration have resulted in the standing of the U.S. in both Israel and the Arab world plummeting to its lowest level. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has blustered and zigzagged between intimidating and occasionally placating Israel. The pressure was exerted overwhelmingly toward Israel while the Palestinians, who were treated with kid gloves, refused to make a single meaningful compromise. This generated enormous frustration and resentment of the U.S. among Israelis.
The positive memories of U.S. President Barack Obama's visit to Israel and the ongoing defense support and cooperation — now at an all-time high — were overshadowed by Israeli anger against the U.S. for bullying its government into releasing brutal mass murderers who were subsequently glorified as heroes by the Palestinian Authority. The PA demanded this as a prerequisite even to agreeing to negotiate. An uninformed observer would assume that Israel was the supplicant and would be unaware that the territories were acquired only after Israel vanquished an Arab conglomerate that had initiated a war to annihilate it.
American and European leaders still delude themselves that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict relates to two hostile people fighting over real estate. They seem unaware that both Yassir Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas rejected Israeli offers of 95% of territories over the Green Line, without even making counteroffers. By now, they should recognize that the objective of the Palestinian leaders is not the acquisition of land, but the end of Jewish sovereignty in the region. This explains their adamant refusal to recognize Israel as a Jewish state. The U.S. administration ignores the reality that the corrupt and duplicitous PA chairman, Abbas, even if he desired, has no mandate to make any concession and if he deviated, would likely be assassinated. The persistent pressure on Israel to make unilateral concessions without reciprocity has merely empowered the Palestinian extremists who smugly demonstrate that intransigence pays off.
The U.S. policymakers also fail to appreciate that the differences between the PA and openly genocidal Hamas are primarily tactical. The PA believes that their strategy of diplomacy and the dismantling of Israel in stages is a far more effective tactic than terrorism (to which they repeatedly threaten to revert). But both the PA and Hamas share the same goal — the elimination of Israel. It is now time for the Obama administration to accept the reality that the PA has evolved into a criminal society. How else to define a regime which brainwashes kindergarten age children into believing that Israel and the Jews are evil parasites and continuously calls for the elimination of the Jewish state? This demonization of Israel is reinforced daily by the mullahs in the mosques and the PA-controlled media. In addition, terrorists are sanctified, treated as heroes and awarded state pensions. There are obvious similarities between the Nazi brainwashing of the German people and what Arafat and now Abbas have imposed on the Palestinians.
Due to Obama's initial personal intervention, the settlements — a mere 3-4% of territories over the Green Line — have now become a central issue. While Israelis differ over the role of settlements in remote areas, they are frustrated that home constructions in Jewish suburbs of east Jerusalem and within the settlement blocs that will remain in Israel generate infinitely greater global condemnation than the mass slaughter in Syria. Yet despite all the efforts and concessions Israel has made, there are signals that the Obama administration will cast the blame on us for the failure of negotiations, which we realized from the outset were doomed as a hopeless charade. The recent histrionic U.S. attacks against Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon for expressing concerns with aspects of American foreign policy impacting on Israel testify to this.
That Israel is again being pressured over prisoner releases is scandalous. The government was bludgeoned by the U.S. into releasing these mass murderers on the clear understanding that the four phases of release would only be fulfilled if there was progress in the negotiations. Abbas has made it abundantly clear that he will not compromise on anything and yet the Americans persist in exerting pressure. To further muddy the waters, in order to induce Israel to concede to further Palestinian demands including the release of more prisoners and the imposition of a form of construction freeze on settlements, Kerry offered to free Jonathan Pollard. There were outraged protests in the U.S. as well as in Israel condemning this trade-off between freeing Pollard (who by any benchmark should have been released a long time ago) and mass murderers. For the time being it is no longer on the agenda. Should it proceed, it will be scandalous for Israel to have agreed and represents an obscene lapse in morality on the part of the Obama administration…
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link –Ed.]
ISRAELI AUTHOR ON THE FUTILITY OF U.S.-LED
PEACE TALKS AND HOPE FOR A TWO STATE SOLUTION
Daniel Gordis
National Post, Apr. 1, 2014
News that U.S. President Barack Obama may free Jonathan Pollard, an American convicted of spying for Israel in 1987, as a gesture of good faith has injected new hope into the Mideast peace talks. But hope has risen before, to little effect. As U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry travels to Jerusalem, perhaps the time has come to acknowledge the futility of these negotiations and the current impossibility of a two-state solution. This, at least, is the view of Daniel Gordis, senior vice president and Koret Distinguished Fellow at Shalem College in Jerusalem, Israel’s first liberal arts college and author of the new biography Menachem Begin: The Battle For Israel’s Soul. He spoke with the National Post‘s Joseph Brean.
Q: How is this view not just throwing up your hands in despair?
A: It’s not throwing your hands up as long as you continue to insist that Israel has to constantly be looking for a way to solve this. It’s not to say there’s no deal to be had now so, forget it, everybody go back to their bunker… That’s a mistake. But there’s got to be a middle of the road, where you don’t say that it’s possible now and you don’t say it’s never going to be possible. You say it’s not possible now, I’d like it to become possible, what are the conditions that have to be put in place for there to be progress. My own take is that what the West is doing is pressuring the wrong side… If at a certain point these talks fail and the international community feels that it was Israel that tanked them, then you could have a quick resurgence of the legitimacy of the idea of boycotting. I think the framework is there. I think that what happens on college campuses with [the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement] is more PR than anything. But I’m very worried about Israel’s isolation.
Q: You say Palestinians understand time is on their side, which is a disincentive to make a deal. Why?
A: You have a situation in which last week [Palestinian President Mahmoud] Abbas went to Obama once again and said even if the negotiations go through I’m not going to declare an end to the conflict, and I’m not going to give up on the right of Palestinians to return to Israel, and of course I’m not going to recognize Israel as Jewish state… It’s not peace, it’s just a signed declaration of nothingness. In other words, it just projects the conflict into a different generation. So Israelis are saying if it’s not going to be the end of the conflict, why would we possibly give up the land that serves as a buffer? What’s hard for Israelis to understand is why Kerry and Obama can’t see this for what it is.
Q: Is Mr. Abbas the obstacle, then? On Tuesday, he vowed to push for statehood at the United Nations, causing Mr. Kerry to cancel his Ramallah visit.
A: I think Abbas could be switched tomorrow and the Palestinians would be more or less in the same place. The Arab League just came out last week and said that they’re never going to recognize Israel as a Jewish state. I mean, what do they care? If the conflict is really between the Israelis and the Palestinians, and there’s peace with Egypt, and peace with Jordan, and Syria’s in no position and Lebanon’s not really a country anymore, why does the Arab League come out and say: we also are opposed to calling Israel a Jewish state? … [Mr. Abbas] is reflective of his street. And his street is extremely problematic. I do not think the two state solution is impossible in theory. In fact, that’s what I would hope, and as an Israeli citizen would vote for very significant territorial concessions in order to make a two state solution possible. They just have to say end of conflict, and they have to recognize our being legitimate in the region.
Q: Is America a credible broker?
A: Why would you bet on these guys? These guys, who can’t hold the line in Syria, can’t hold the line in Iran, can’t do anything about Crimea, these are the guys who are saying to Israel, we’ve got your backs, give up all this buffer territory, and if anything goes wrong we’re going to be there for you? I mean Israelis are now laughing.
Alan Dershowitz & Irwin Cotler
Jerusalem Post, Apr. 1, 2014
Reports are circulating that the Obama Administration is considering releasing Jonathan Pollard, as part of an effort to encourage Israel to release Arab prisoners. Justice demands that Pollard be released without regard to what Israel decides to do. A case for Pollard’s release is based on both legal and humanitarian considerations. Although many former government officials who were involved in Pollard’s prosecution now favor commutation, some continue to insist that he should serve his complete life term. In opposing Pollard’s release now, these former officials are violating the spirit, if not the intent, of the contract our government made with Pollard 28 years ago.
Jonathan Pollard entered into a plea bargain with the United States government after he was found with unauthorized, classified material in his possession. He could have exercised his right to trial by jury and he might have been acquitted of the most serious charges, because there was little admissible evidence that he was spying for a foreign country. Instead, he confessed to spying for Israel, a close American ally, and agreed to plead guilty and cooperate in full with the government’s investigation and damage assessment. In exchange, for giving up his important constitutional rights, Pollard was promised that the US would not seek the maximum sentence of life imprisonment. In other words, our government agreed that a sentence of years less than life imprisonment was sufficient to satisfy the needs of justice for Pollard, in light of who he spied for, how extensively he cooperated with the investigation, and how much time, money and risk he saved the government by pleading guilty. A sentence of years, less than life imprisonment was sufficient, the government agreed, to deter others from spying for allies. That was the “quid” for Pollard’s “quo” in pleading guilty: The government’s solemn agreement that a sentence of less than life was enough!
The prosecution then violated the plea bargain by submitting an official affidavit from the then Secretary of Defense, Casper Weinberger, who, according to Lawrence Korb, assistant Secretary of Defense under Weinberger, was motivated by “a lack of sympathy for Israel” – an understatement considering Weinberger’s long history of animosity toward the nation-state of the Jewish people. In his affidavit, Weinberger erroneously characterized Pollard’s crime as “treason”, exaggerated the harm done, and demanded a sentence of life imprisonment. By submitting this demand, which was inconsistent with its agreement not to ask for a life sentence, the prosecution violated the spirit if not the letter of their plea bargain.
There is no way any competent lawyer would have advised Pollard to give up his right to a trial, after which, if he were convicted, he could receive at most life imprisonment, in exchange for an agreement that included the submission of an affidavit from the Secretary of Defense demanding the maximum sentence of life imprisonment. For a lawyer to agree to such a “lose-lose” deal would have constituted ineffective assistance of counsel. The sentencing judge, relying on the impermissible and exaggerated Weinberg affidavit imposed a sentence in excess of what the plea bargain contemplated and what the prosecution agreed would be sufficient: He sentenced Pollard to life imprisonment. The sentence was and remains, the harshest one ever imposed on an American who pleaded guilty to spying for an ally. The usual sentence for such crimes is in the single digits.
Prosecutors not only broke their plea bargain back at sentencing, but some of those former prosecutors continue to break it now by insisting that Pollard’s sentence not be commuted to a term of years consistent with what they agreed to recommend in 1986. Nothing has changed for the worse over the 28 years Pollard has been in prison. Pollard has been a model prisoner; he has apologized for his crime; consequences falsely attributed to his actions by Weinberger and others now have been correctly attributed to Aldrich Ames and others who spied for America’s enemies; Pollard is seriously ill and getting old.
The time has come for the US government to keep its word and reaffirm what it agreed to tell the judge back in 1986: namely, that a sentence of years, 28 plus years, rather than a sentence of life imprisonment is enough to satisfy the demands of justice for Jonathan Pollard. Even if prosecutors refuse to comply with their plea bargain, the president – who has the exclusive authority to pardon or commute – should do the right thing and commute Pollard’s sentence to the long time he has already served.
Mitch Ginsberg
Times of Israel, Apr. 3, 2014
It’s unclear whether Jonathan Jay Pollard will be released before Passover this April. It’s unclear whether he has been held for so long in such difficult conditions in the United States because of a misunderstanding or disagreement about the nature and ultimate destination of the intelligence he passed on to Israel, or vindictiveness, or, even, as Pollard has claimed, an institutional anti-Semitism within the corridors of the defense community in Washington DC. But it is abundantly clear, and well worth remembering in Israel as the Obama administration ponders a commutation for the former US Navy intelligence analyst, that, operationally speaking, the manner in which Pollard was run was a fiasco. Depending on one’s perspective – and Pollard will surely have his say on the matter when he is released – his handlers were either amateurishly irresponsible or cruelly negligent. The distinction hinges on whether his handlers from Lakam, the Defense Ministry’s Office of Science Liaison, saw him as a combatant – a Jew doing ideological work for the state of Israel – or an asset that could be used and discarded. The evidence, sadly, would seem to suggest the latter.
Pollard, known to his friends and colleagues as Jay, was raised in South Bend, Indiana, where, according to de-classified CIA documents, he lived a childhood “marked by material sufficiency, strong intellectual stimulation within a closely knit family and some bruising experiences as a member of the Jewish-American minority growing up in middle-America.” The Klan, he told Wolf Blitzer in the latter’s enduringly excellent “Territory of Lies,” “was well organized in my city.” A trip to Dachau, followed by a summer in Israel at a science camp at the Weizmann Institute, cemented in his mind a commitment to Israel’s security. The commitment, though, while genuine, was not rooted in entirely solid ground. In college, at Stanford University, he claimed to work for the Mossad. On one occasion, he waved a pistol in the air “and screamed that everyone was out to get him,” according to the CIA papers. The CIA described him as “a capable – if eccentric – scholar,” the son of a world renowned microbiologist whose “personal and employment history is replete with incidents of irresponsible behavior that point to significant emotional instability.” In November 1985, as the noose of suspicion cinched around Pollard’s neck, Lanny McCullah, the Navy’s top counterintelligence official, is depicted in the 1989 “Territory of Lies” as saying of the Israeli agents running him, “Are they really that stupid that they would hire Jay, of all people?”
Some of this should have been evident to Col. (ret) Aviem Sella – as it was to AIPAC employees, who deemed him “strange” and refused to hire him in 1981. But Sella, a brilliant aviator and war hero, a fighter pilot who downed a Soviet-flown Mig-21 in 1970 and participated in the attack against Saddam Hussein’s nuclear reactor 11 years later (as an F-15 pilot on the periphery of the strike), knew nothing about espionage. He was in the US to complete a doctorate at NYU. Occasionally he gave talks at the NYSE, trying to drum up interest in Israel Bonds. When one of those stockbrokers, awed by his presentation, contacted Sella and said he had a family friend who worked as an intelligence analyst in the US Navy and wanted to meet him, Sella, already being considered as a future IAF commander, had a sense of what might be afoot. He sent word back to Tel Aviv.
The Mossad, keenly aware of the standing prohibition against using US nationals as spies within the US – especially if they were Jewish – said “we have no interest in meeting him,” according to Blitzer’s account.Lakam commander Rafi Eitan did not follow suit. In the first interview he ever gave about the Pollard affair, Eitan, a former senior Mossad and Shin Bet officer who commanded the team that nabbed Adolf Eichmann in Argentina in 1960, told Yedioth Ahronoth in 2006 that “in intelligence [work], as in war, you go to battle, and when you go to battle you also make mistakes.”
But what transpired from May 29, 1984, when Pollard and Sella first met at a corner table of a café in the Washington DC Hilton Hotel, until November 21, 1985, when Jonathan and Anne Pollard were thrown out of the Israeli embassy grounds and into the waiting arms of FBI agents, was more than just a few unavoidable mistakes. It was, at best, the product of a series of callous miscalculations…
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link –Ed.]
CIJR wishes all its friends and supporters Shabbat Shalom!
The Peace Process Blame Game: Jonathan S. Tobin, Commentary, Apr. 3, 2014 —It was to be expected that the Obama administration would seek to cast blame yesterday for the apparent collapse of the Middle East peace process championed by Secretary of State John Kerry on both Israel and the Palestinians.
Kerry’s Folly, Chapter 3: Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post, Apr. 3, 2014 —When has a secretary of state been involved in so many disastrous, self-initiated negotiations?
How Abbas Gets Away With It: Moshe Phillips & Benyamin Korn, Jewish Tribune, Mar. 27, 2014 —Welcoming Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas to the White House on March 17, President Obama declared that "He has been somebody who has consistently renounced violence."
The Israeli Solution by Caroline Glick (Book Review): Spengler, Asia Times, Mar. 31, 2014 —By any standard, the Palestinian problem involves the strangest criteria in modern history.
90 Reasons Not to Create a Palestinian State: Moshe Phillips & Benyamin Korn, Jerusalem Post, Mar. 23, 2014 —Welcoming Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas to the White House on March 17, President Obama declared that "He has been somebody who has consistently renounced violence."
American Chorus Against Pollard Release: Michael Wilner, Jerusalem Post, Apr. 3, 2014— Reaction to the prospect of an early release from prison for Jonathan Pollard, an American convicted of spying for Israel in the 1980s, has been uniform: his freedom should not be conflated with the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians.
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