Locked Up between a Rock and a Hard Place

Jonathan Pollard has become a political pawn in the U.S. It’s not for nothing that the vice president picked the house of a Jewish congressman to announce that he won’t be released.

Once upon a time, and not so long ago, there was a Jewish congressman named Ron Klein. He sat it the House of Representatives for four years — since the 2006 elections, when the Democratic Party beat its Republican rival after six grueling years of the Bush administration, till 2010, when the Republican Party struck its Democratic rival after three exhausting years of the Obama administration.

A year ago, the voters sent Klein home and put in his place Congressman Allen West. A Republican, a tea party movement fan and black. Blunt. Only a month ago, on return from a brief visit in Israel, West compared President Obama’s policy vis-à-vis the Arabs, to that of Neville Chamberlain’s toward Hitler and the Nazis.

“[America is so severely lacking this type of leadership], which is why the enemy is making its move now. The enemy knows that America has a Chamberlain, not a Churchill at the helm,” put West. An interesting representative for the district planned specifically for the vote to bypass quite a few polling stations that service a primarily black community; many of its voters are Jewish — according to several assessments, around 20 percent of the electorate.

Fireproof

Ron Klein’s house is the scene where Vice President Joe Biden was a guest when he shared his strong opposition to the release of the “traitor” Jonathan Pollard with a group of rabbis. Here’s the indispensable context: the host’s house is the home of a dismissed Jewish member of Congress.

The district of the host is Florida’s 22nd district, 14th in the list of the “most Jewish” districts in America (incidentally, the neighboring district, Florida’s 19th, is “the most Jewish” one — which gained Florida its exaggerated reputation as a state where Jewish voters decide the fate of elections held in it).

A district where a very conservative congressman, scrappy and media-savvy guy sits. According to one index, West is the most interviewed and quoted member of Congress on American TV networks. In these interviews, as it could be easily surmised, he’s not full of praise for the U.S. president.

Pay attention to what West has said — as stated above, the congressman from the district Biden visited — on the question of Pollard’s release. He did this in a letter to President Obama which he sent in the spring of this year.

By the way, West was a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army; that is, he can’t be accused of a lack of patriotism. He is fireproof. And so he wrote to Obama: “If [the U.S.] can consent to the release by the British of the Lockerbie bomber back to Libya due to health concerns, how can we justify keeping Mr. Pollard behind bars when his crimes were clearly not as serious as a terrorist who murdered hundreds of Americans?”

The Preliminary Approach to Obama Is to Suspect Him

Here, Pollard turns into a political pawn in the Republicans’ hands against the Obama administration. After some prominent right-wing hawks in the matters of defense and security, including Senator John McCain, called for Pollard to be freed, the Obama administration faces a problem. It was not Obama who jailed Pollard, and it was not Obama who determined the severity of his actions and allotted his sentence.

It was, instead, President Bush who denied time and again petitions for pardon by the prime minister of Israel and by Pollard himself; Bush never found himself under a publicity attack that Obama is open to at the moment. And no one, of course, conceived to use Pollard as evidence, proof that Bush was not friendly enough to Israel.

In other words: Obama is exposed politically on the Pollard issue, because Obama is preliminarily taken as a suspect. What they couldn’t say about Bush, they can say about him. Anyway, in comes his deputy, Joe Biden, who protects him — in hope that the credit he accumulated as a friend of Israel, as well as one who doesn’t hesitate to loudly express his opinion, will allow him to neutralize the political damage inherent in the Pollard case. Damage that will be reflected, among other things, in the battle over Florida’s 22nd district, and what 75,000 elderly Jews are going to vote on.