The State of Israel decided this week to compensate Jonathan Pollard, now serving his seventeenth year of imprisonment out of a life sentence in a United States federal penitentiary, with a one-time grant of $1 million to "correct an injustice that has been done to him for many years." The grant does not apparently signal any progress in the diplomatic realm to achieve Pollard's release from prison. Recent legal efforts in the American court system have also been unsuccessful.

An official statement issued by Esther and Jonathan Pollard announced that they have categorically rejected the State of Israel's offer of compensation. Instead they suggested that Israel should honor its commitment to them by insisting that the United States release Pollard from prison. "Jonathan did not request such a payment. We will not accept it," Esther Pollard said in the statement.

A special committee operating out of the Prime Minister's Office decided to grant the compensation to Pollard, 47, at the urging of Minister without portfolio Danny Naveh (Likud), coordinator of the government's connection with the Pollard case. Naveh, who was instrumental in having Israel formally recognize Pollard as an Israeli agent in 1998, was reportedly convinced that the State could not ignore the desperate needs of a man who had served the country.

According to media reports, Pollard had previously called on Israel to provide him, in recognition of his service to the country, with a monthly expense allowance. Funds were desperately needed by Pollard and his wife Esther to cover legal representation in their ongoing battle to secure Pollard's release from prison and repatriation to Israel. According to media reports, Esther's regular visits to Israel included fund-raising efforts among supporters and friends, a claim categorically denied by representatives of the Pollards.

According to media reports, it is not yet clear whether Pollard will be granted the funds in a lump sum or if a trustee would be appointed by the State to oversee disbursement or use of the money.

Pollards: Many to blame for Jonathan's continued imprisonment
Esther Pollard assigns blame to many for her husband's continued incarceration. In an interview with Philadelphia-based WNWR Radio in July, she said that "it is an unfortunate fact that the apathy of the American Jewish community and the callousness of the Jewish leadership is now as responsible for Jonathan's continued incarceration as the moral indecency of the Israeli government that willfully abandoned its agent leaving him to rot in an American prison for nearly 17 years."

Jonathan Pollard directs his anger at Prime Minister Ariel Sharon for doing nothing on his behalf. "Thank you for being so blatantly obvious about your intention to have me die in prison before you do anything to assist me," Pollard wrote to Sharon earlier this month. "I wonder if your 'indirect involvement' in my operation 'inconveniences your relationship with the U.S.' and causes you to behave so shabbily towards me, an Israeli agent," he wrote.

According to Esther, Israel received a formal commitment from the American government to release Pollard as part of the Wye River Summit accords in 1998. "President Clinton committed in the name of the United States to then Prime Minister Netanyahu to release Jonathan," she said, adding that the commitment was not between two leaders, but between two countries.

Esther believes that this commitment would be a strong point with which the American Jewish leadership could lobby for Pollard's release. But "American Jewish organizations make no secret of their indifference to the fate of Jonathan Pollard," she charges.

According to Esther, her husband is very ill. "He has been in prison for nearly 17 years. He is the only one who was held for seven years in solitary confinement in the harshest of conditions. Because of the kinds of brutality in incarceration that Jonathan has been subject to over long periods of time, his immune system is shot. What this means is that he is sick all of the time. He no longer has the immunity to fight off even the slightest infections or illnesses. He is suffering from a host of very serious medical problems."

No progress in Pollard's legal battle
Earlier this month, United States District Judge Norma Holloway Johnson dismissed, on procedural grounds, a motion for re-sentencing filed in September 2000 by Pollard's new attorneys, Eliot Lauer and Jacques Semmelman. The motion claimed that Pollard had "ineffective assistance of counsel before, during and immediately after [he] was sentenced to life in prison on March 4, 1987." Lauer and Semmelman said Pollard's then-attorney "failed to object that the government was breaching its plea agreement when it demanded a life sentence after it had promised not to do so."

The Court dismissed the attorneys' motion on procedural grounds. The Court reportedly did not rule on "whether prior counsel had acted effectively, and did not address either the propriety of the government's conduct at sentencing or the appropriateness of the life sentence."

In a separate ruling this month, Pollard's motion for the Court's "reconsideration of its refusal in January 2001 to permit his new attorneys, both of whom have 'top secret' security clearance from the U.S. Department of Justice, to gain access to approximately 35 to 40 pages of classified documents in the court's docket, submitted by both sides prior to sentencing." These documents reportedly include portions of a declaration submitted in January 1987 by then-Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger. None of Pollard's attorneys have been permitted to see these documents since his sentencing in March 1987.

Mr. Pollard's attorneys intend to challenge these rulings via the appeal process.

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