Fickle Fachler

Jonathan Pollard is not championed in this op-ed - published in Haaretz, of course, 

Israel should apologize to U.S. Jews for Pollard

David Fachler thinks that

The spy saga's critical lesson has still not been learnt: Israel can't take Diaspora Jews for granted while trampling on their rights when convenient.

He asserts that

...many American Jews, some staunchly Zionist, failed to understand how Israel could use one of their own to spy on an ally. Did Israel not realize that many Americans would equate its actions with those of the Jewish community? Did the Jewish state not realize that it was opening the organized Jewry to the charge of dual loyalty? Many were furious at what they viewed as a betrayal by Jerusalem and publicized their anger in American and Israeli broadsheets and in meetings with Israeli officials.

That is surely a consideration when one reviews the situation but given American engagement in secret surveillance, things are to be viewed in a slightly different perspective.

Fachler is being fickled by 

...the reaction of academic and one-time director general of the Foreign Ministry, Shlomo Avineri. Instead of empathizing with his American co-religionists he accused them of “reacting with a degree of nervousness, insecurity, and even cringing like trembling Israelites in the shtetl." Israel, he argued had no reason to regret their actions, rather it was the American Jews who “had to be free from Galut." Thus like a guilty school bully who had just beaten up his weaker classmate Israel reprimanded its closest ally in the Diaspora for being hypersensitive.

And gets dangerously close to adopting anti-Semitic buzz terms:

...his words did not come in a vacuum; they were the product of an unrepentant "Israel First" Zionism, which blames the Diaspora for problems that it itself inflicted. Indeed for the Jewish state there is only one interest that counts, and that is its own...To secure the invaluable assistance of American Jewry, not only should it ask for Pollard the individual to be let go, but it should also beg the Jewish community to forgive its transgressions in perpetrating the Pollard affair. This may not bring us any closer to peace, but it is the right thing to do.

I am not at all sure what "peace" is doing there since American Jewry and Israel, except for a Peter beinart here and a few others there, are not in battle, unless Fachler thinks otherwise, or wants otherwise.

Israel let down Pollard.  And the American Jewish community let him down even more because American justice was not served.

If Fachler doesn't grasp that and can only vent his almost-anti-Zionism, I suggest he review not only the facts of the Pollard case but also the needs and requirments of Israel as well as America's behavior in the affair.

^