secretary subsequently apologized to
Israel's ambassador.
"Always in the back of my mind
is that he was executive vice presi-
dent of Bechtel Corporation, which
has the largest set of contracts with
Saudi Arabia," Dr. Pollard muses.
"His exaggeration of the severity of
the damage throws doubt on the ac-
curacy of anything that he says."
(Secretary of State George Shultz, a
noted friend of Israel, was also an of-
ficer at Bechtel.)
Vivid in the Pollards' minds is the
image of their son, on the eve of his
arrest, being denied asylum at
Israel's Washington embassy, an
event which points to Israeli duplici-
ty in the affair and calls into question
the application of Israel's Law of
Return, which offers Jews a haven
from persecution.
"Jay was told to come to the em-
bassy," Dr. Pollard declares. "He got
to the front door and was denied ad-
mission. The question is: who ordered
him to be denied? This runs contrary
to the principle of return."
"They thanked him for what he
did in Tunis," Mrs. Pollard added pas-
sionately, referring to information
Jay passed to the Israelis which great-
ly eased their Oct. 1, 1985 air strike
on the PLO headquarters there.
That top Israelis praised Jay one
minute and abandoned him the next
greatly incenses the Pollards. "The
(Israeli) government lacked guts,"
says Dr. Pollard, "and it still lacks
guts!' .
lily 4 marks 120 days since
Jay's sentencing, and is the
day he is eligible for a sentence-
reduction hearing. It is a sad irony
that on Independence Day Pollard
may be re-condemned to serving his
full life sentence. The Pollards are
hopeful, but pessimistic, about the
outcome of the hearing, which will be
presided over by Judge Robinson, the
same judge who sentenced Pollard in
the first place.
"We're all hoping for a reduction
of the sentence consistent with other
sentences that have involved non-
enemies of the United States," ex-
plains Prof. Alan Dershowitz who
recently joined Pollard's legal defense.
A professor of law at Harvard,
Dershowitz successfully defended
socialite Klaus Von Bulow against
charges that he murdered his wife.
"Dershowitz feels that there is
something terribly wrong," Dr.
Pollard says, "that there are some
people in Washington wanting to
discredit Israel:'
Dershowitz also lays the blame at •
the feet of Secretary Weinberger.
"Pollard received the maximum
sentence allowable. If the Secretary of
Defense had had his way, it would
have gone beyond . . . and they would
have hanged Pollard."
"(Weinberger's) credibility has
been undermined by his recent
statements," Dershowitz claims. "(His
behavior) is better understood on a
psychological basis, rather than a
legal one."
The Pollards approached Prof.
Dershowitz after they became
dissatisfied with their own attorneys.
"There were great mistakes made:'
Dr. Pollard charges. "Our attorneys
failed to challenge unsubstantiated
allegations."
Are the Pollards merely paranoid
when they charge that the military
and the Defense and Justice depart-
"Weinberger's behavior
is better understood
on a psychological basis,
rather than a legal one."
ments are rife with anti-Semitism?
Are they exaggerating when they
speak of attempts at character
assasination? Prof. Dershowitz
answers no. "The Pollard case has
brought out a considerable amount of
closet anti-Semitism in the U.S.
government. If there's any paranoia,
it's on the other side." He affirmed the
existence of "sources who seemed to
be engaged in a deliberate act of
character assasination."
Although many Jews his age have
gone through their lives without ex-
periencing anti-Semitism, Jew-hatred
seems to have dogged Jay Pollard
thoughout many of his 32 years.
Born in Galveston, Texas, he was
six when the family moved to South
Bend. From the beginning, the
Pollards sought to insulate
themselves as much as they could
from the overwhelming Catholic in-
fluence of Notre Dame University in
a town with only 1,200 Jewish
families.
"We built a house on the south
end of the city because we wanted to
be far from the Catholic environ-
ment," Dr. Pollard recalls. That deci-
sion turned out to be a disastrous
mistake. "We found the environment
at the university was elegant and
very liberal." Their own
neighborhood, however, was heavily
WASP, "very prejudiced" and filled
with Ku Klux Klan supporters.
At the local elementary school
Jay was "harassed continuously"
ej
because he was a Jew, so much so that
his parents transferred him to a
private school. "This was an eman-
cipation for him," says his father, and
allowed Jay to develop his intellectual
abilities.
Rose Zar, a Hebrew teacher in
South Bend, says that the young Jay
Pollard "loved history with a pas-
sion," and that he was "very verbal"
in class discussions.
He developed a passion for ar-
cheology, and this became his first
link with Israel, a link which he
feared would be severed in June 1967
as the Six-Day War broke out.
"We were listening to the radio,"
Molly Pollard recalls. "He was fran-
tic he would never get to see Israel,
the antiquities, Masada. My answer
was, 'The good Lord would never let
Israel go down!
"In the morning I woke him to
hear the news: Israel still stands. You
should have heard him yell!"
Three years later, Jay was in
Israel to participate in a slimmer high
school science program sponsored by
the Weizmann Institute. "He was
reluctant to come home," Dr. Pollard
says now. His son had found a sense
of freedom in the Jewish State. Dr.
and Mrs. Pollard visited Jay that sum-
mer, their first and only trip to Israel.
"We advised- him to complete his
education and then go bacIcto Israel?'
Jay attended Stanford University,
and received a B.A. degree in history
and economics. While at Stanford he
participated in the Atlantic Tnstitute,
the NATO think-tank in Paris. Prof.
Peter Walshe, director of African
studies at Notre Dame, taught a sum-
mer course on southern Africa in
which Jay was enrolled. Prof. Walshe
describes Jay as "one of the best
(students) I had. It was pretty clear to
me at that stage that he was in-
terested in security matters."
orst Thing To Happen To
The Country In 200 Years"
was how the South Bend
Tribune announced the uncovering of
the Pollard Affair, according to Dr.
and Mrs. Pollard. Television news
crews camped out on the Pollards'
front lawn. Constant calls from the
media forced the couple to change
their phone number.
The hoopla has long since died
down and the Pollards now look back
on the local reaction to the affair as
generally sympathetic. "The reaction
at the university was more than sym-
pathetic," Dr. Pollard says. The
university, for instance, held a prayer
service the night before Jay was
sentenced. "A couple of priests took
me by the arm and said, 'We're pray-
ing for you: "
Among South Bend's Jewish com-
munity, "Orthodox Jews in town have
been sympathetic, but Reform Jews
couldn't care less:' Dr. Pollard com-
plains. "In many respects people don't
know what to say. It's an item,
perhaps, that they feel we don't want
to talk about.
W
Spring 1987: Israelis rally to Pollard's defense. Israeli citizens raised $150,000 to
pay for legal fees.
Continued on next page
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