Pollard release a time of self-examination for Israel
November 30, 2015This month saw an event that the Jewish world has been fighting for for thirty years: the release of Jonathan Pollard. While this may come as a surprise to Arutz Sheva readers, other media outlets in the Israeli press, while covering the story, often left it to get lost, or left it un-featured – favoring other stories as headlines.
Arutz Sheva spoke to Eliyahu Yosef, a well known activist for Jonathan Pollard and one of the founders of The Committee to Free Pollard to discover why the Israeli and international media let the story fall to the sidelines of the news pages.
“I am just like everyone else in Israel, and the Jewish nation around the world,” said Yosef, “I am happy that Jonathan is finally free. But I am also saddened that he spent so much time in prison and didn’t get to live his life as he would have wanted,” Yosef added.
Pollard’s release wasn’t one hundred percent. Even though he was finally released from prison, he still cannot leave the United States, nor is he allowed to talk to the press. “His incarceration in a way, still continues,” said Yosef.
Yosef believes that the punishment of Jonathan Pollard, was a punishment imposed upon the Jewish nation by the United States “to humiliate us.”
“Israel needs to self-examine itself from a moral standpoint,” said Yosef. “We need to ask ourselves: how did we let a person stay in prison for so long, when he was acting according to his conscience?”
“Whatever your beliefs about what he, as an individual did, Israel is also responsible. The nation of Israel wasn’t forced to accept the information he provided, we wanted it. And we accepted it. We have to take responsibility for that,” said Yosef.
Yosef would like to see Israel finally take responsibility for the full release of Pollard.
“What we need is for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to sit with President Obama and explain the entire story to him from a moralistic standpoint. We need to take responsibility for it, as we have a responsibility to Jonathan to get him a full release, as well as to ourselves to come to terms with the situation.”
When asked why he thought the story of Pollard’s release wasn’t more widely spread in the news, Yosef responded by saying that it was due to the outlook and the way that the media has always treated the Pollard story.
“The whole Pollard story is ‘Kullios’, taboo. It is a strange story. The press always treated him that way. Even the Israeli media never really put his story as ‘the’ headline. It wasn’t something the press saw as “our problem” it was always something to keep lower down in a person’s conscious, but something they had to relate to none the less.”
Yosef said that we still haven’t learned from the story. “There are a number of other issues, current issues that I am trying to bring to the forefront of the media and public knowledge. Things that we shouldn’t be quiet about. Things that cannot sit well on our moral conscience as a nation. And yet they are happening.”
“But whenever I or someone else succeeds at getting these stories out in the open, the press removes or deletes them. They get covered up because people don’t want to know about them, or they don’t want to deal with them,” he said.
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