Israeli spy released from prison, but Jonathan Pollard saga not over

The USA previous year hinted at freeing Pollard early as an incentive for Israel to continue negotiating with Palestinians.

His lawyers asked the USA federal court in Manhattan to overturn “invasive Global Positioning System monitoring”, curfew and travel restrictions and “career-impairing monitoring of his computer use”.

Two NY congressmen have asked the USA attorney general, Loretta Lynch, to allow Pollard to renounce his U.S. citizenship and move to Israel immediately.

But Pollard and his lawyers are challenging the conditions of his parole in a federal court in NY, calling them “unreasonable and unlawful”, according to a statement released Friday. He has reportedly ordered his cabinet ministers to tamp down their enthusiasm and not talk publicly about Pollard so as not to irritate President Obama while seeking permission for Pollard to come to Israel.

The White House has said that it has no intention of altering the conditions of Pollard’s parole, and even friends and supporters say they don’t know exactly what’s next for him.

Pollard said that he acted out of his love for Israel and that the United States was not sharing a few crucial intelligence with its ally about countries in the Arab world.

Pollard’s release earlier today, nearly three decades to the day since he was locked away, marks an end to a long-running dispute between the USA and Israeli government over his sentence. In recent years, support in the US political establishment has grown for his release, although the security community remained adamantly opposed, saying the breadth of his spying fully merited his life sentence.

A handful of Jewish organizations welcomed the release of Pollard, an American Jew and a former Navy intelligence analyst who pleaded guilty in 1987 to sharing classified information with Israel.

As a Navy analyst with an advanced security clearance, Pollard had access to top secret information. He has been serving a life sentence but was granted parole this year under sentencing rules at the time of his prosecution.

“As the Conservative Movement has iterated many times in the past, including in Rabbinical Assembly resolutions in 1992, 1994, 1995 and 2011, Jonathan Pollard was handed a remarkably unfair sentence”, said Rabbi William Gershon, the assembly’s president.

Prosecutors told the USA judge that presided over Pollard’s case that the Israeli spy admitted to selling Israel “a volume of classified documents ten feet by six feet by six feet” if gathered together, according to a history of the Pollard case in Every Spy a Prince by journalists Dan Raviv and Yossi Melman.

The Pollard saga still has at least one more chapter to play out.

“The State of Israel owes him a moral debt and I intend to ensure it makes good on it”, Bitan said.

Now, the lobbying will switch to asking that Jonathan Pollard’s parole be altered to allow him to leave the United States and live in Israel.

Lawyers Jacques Semmelman and Eliot Lauer said Pollard had been a “model prisoner” and that there was no reason to fear he might commit acts of violence or reveal further USA intelligence that by now, in any case, would be so outdated as to be meaningless.

The Justice Department hasn’t responded to the request, and it appears more likely that he will have to serve a five-year term of probation in the U.S.

The head of the Free Pollard campaign, Effi Lahav, said the day is bittersweet, because Pollard suffered through “10,956 black days” in prison.

He made contact in June 1984 with an Israeli colonel, Aviem Sella, who was studying in NY, and offered to provide him with classified information.