Jonathan Pollard Slams Israel’s Response To Terror, Stating: ‘We Are Leading Ourselves To Disaster”

JERUSALEM (VINnews) — In an article initially published in English in the Jerusalem Post on Independence Day and subsequently modified in the wake of the Elad terror attack and published in Hebrew Monday, former Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard lambasts the Israeli government which is “too scared to do what is required to eradicate the terrorist threat.”

Pollard published the Hebrew article in Yediot Aharonot and it was translated by Israeli news site Arutz Sheva. The following is a synopsis of the article:

After all the years I spent [in jail], the natural inclination is to try to focus on rebuilding my life. That is what my beloved wife Esther and I tried to do during that one year of grace we were given together here, and that is what I am trying to do now after I lost her.

But the clear knowledge of the disaster that we are leading ourselves to, with the images of the past few months, and in particular the gut-wrenching massacre in Elad, leave me no peace.

I simply cannot remain silent any longer.

For decades, Esther went in my stead to be with the families of fallen IDF soldiers and terror victims during their most difficult moments. I don’t understand how she was able to stand it. Ever since her passing, I have been trying to follow in her footsteps, but I am haunted by the faces of relatives who have lost everything, and a trembling handshake and hug at a funeral sears my soul, especially since, like them and like everyone else, I cannot ignore the knowledge that this loss could have been prevented.

During the 30 years I was in prison, I lived with incredible fear and concern for my life. I had to have eyes in the back of my head. I couldn’t sleep at night, concerned that someone would enter my room and stab either me or my roommate to death. I had to always carry a knife and be prepared to use it without hesitation. I constantly had to witness the horrible deaths of other people and especially my friends which occurred suddenly and without warning. In prison, the most frustrating thing of all had to do with the fact that the officials in charge of protecting us, were basically scared of the violent prisoners and accommodated their behavior as much as possible.

Put plainly, our administrators wanted peace at any cost, even if it meant that innocent people were murdered without serious consequences to those who attacked them.

We couldn’t even rely upon the guards to protect us because they didn’t want a violent inmate injured by them taking them to court. I quickly learned that we didn’t have a right to self-defense under any circumstances. People can’t believe me when I tell them that we were always wrong if we tried to defend ourselves. And those who did were always punished excessively in order to make the point that they were no better than their assailants. It was total insanity.

I prayed that when I came home, I wouldn’t have to live this way. I was wrong. Indeed, given what I’ve seen over the past year, it’s even worse now for me because this time it’s not about one or two people getting randomly killed, but about an entire nation being traumatized by an army of cold-blooded anti-Semitic psychopaths, who the authorities are afraid of “provoking”. I’ve been in this movie before, and it never ends well.

In prison, I had one or two good friends who watched my back and I watched theirs, and I lived under G-d’s grace and tried to remember that you fear no one but G-d, and strike first. Here, incredibly, I’m living with a whole country that is either scared to death or in denial.

We are all suffering due to the policies of political and judicial elites who have an infinite capacity to tolerate the suffering of our citizens, all the while insinuating that we are somehow responsible for all the violence we are experiencing. We are dealing with a system which insists on forcing our soldiers to manage a military campaign with the tools used against criminal elements, we have legal advisors and courts coming between the tank barrels and their targets, and due to a skewed commitment to irrelevant ethical codes which our enemies despise and laugh to see us embracing, we are prevented from defeating the murderers of our women and children.

I see the faces of the captured terrorists after their carried out the terrible massacre in Elad, and I see clearly how they aren’t afraid of prison. They know that they will get conditions many times better than what any common criminal would face as well as a stipend from the Palestinian Authority in honor of the murders they committed, etc.

I know perfectly well what a prison designed to deprive a prisoner of his will to live looks like. But here, the conditions for the jailed, despicable murderers only encourage more terrorists to join the club. How can we let this situation continue for even a minute longer?

I’m tired of this. I’m tired of seeing our so-called leaders taking our flag, and washing out the blue, leaving only the white of surrender. I’m waiting for somebody, a leader, a true Jewish leader, to come forward and put the blue stripes and the Magen-David back on our flag.

I’m waiting for a leader that will put the fear of G-d into our enemies. I’m waiting for a leader who will act without any concern about what anybody else outside our country thinks. Whether it be the United States or the European Union, the UN, or anybody else who believes they can tell us how to live or how we are to defend ourselves.

We know why we are here. G-d gave us this land; not the British Empire, the League of Nations, Washington, or the UN. But despite this fact, it is sad for me to realize that our holy mission of reestablishing the Third Jewish Commonwealth is not even halfway done. And this is because of our own fear and trepidation, not the result of our enemies’ actions.

We still don’t have our land back. We don’t have our self-respect back, we don’t have our independence back the way we should have after 2000 years of pogroms, crusades, inquisitions, and genocidal attempts to eliminate our people. I’ve spent 30 years in prison hoping and praying that I would come home to a state that would defend me. Was I wrong? It certainly feels that way!

I see time after time how my brothers and sisters are forced to defend themselves and those around them not just from the enemy but from our governments who are afraid to do what is necessary to uproot the scourge of terror. This situation is utterly unacceptable..

We desperately need to get rid of this ‘galut’ mentality that prioritizes the need to ‘understand’ our enemies over the security of our people. We simply can’t think like the ten spies, who attributed to others what they felt about themselves – namely, that they were like grasshoppers. Well, I’m not a grasshopper, and neither are my brothers and sisters in this country.

We are the descendants of proud and noble warriors, who feared only G-d and never hesitated to defend our land from some of the greatest empires the world has ever seen. But over many years our leaders have relentlessly tried to have us forget this fact in favor of our adopting a more liberal post-modernist approach, where we ‘share’ our land with those who openly seek to destroy us. No more! We must reject this type of cynical defeatism before it kills us.

It is time for us to regain both our individual and collective self-respect. It’s time for our nation to demand that our leaders care about us rather than their foreign masters. It’s time for our elected representatives to finally eliminate once and for all those groups and countries who seek to destroy us. Lastly, we want the army high command to wake up and stop pretending that ‘managing the enemy’ is an acceptable strategic doctrine. It isn’t. It’s a form of appeasement that preserves our opponents while making us look weak and stupid.

I know we can enact these essential reforms. If we actually want to be an independent country, we have no other choice. Indeed, these goals should be seen as sacred obligations we must embrace not only for our sake, but also for the sake of our future generations. May G-d grant us the wisdom and strength to do so.