Ex-spy Pollard would have imprisoned hostage members if necessary
In Israel, he is celebrated as a national hero by the right-wing camp, but now former spy Jonathan Pollard is causing horror with his statements about the families of Hamas hostages. They should have "kept their mouths shut" so that Israel could wage a "total war" against its enemies undisturbed.
Former Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard has sharply criticized the country's government for what he sees as its lax treatment of the families of the Hamas hostages. Israel should have silenced the hostages' relatives and even imprisoned some of them to avoid public pressure to make a deal with the terrorist group.
When Israel declared war on Hamas on October 7, "the first thing the government should have done was to declare a national emergency and tell all the hostage relatives: 'You shut up or we will shut you up! You will not interfere in the conduct of this war. You will not be used as a weapon against us by the international community or by our own leftists (...),'" Pollard said in an online conversation with Rabbi David Bar-Hayim, who heads an educational center in Jerusalem. The Israeli television station Channel 14 showed an excerpt of the conversation. "And if that means imprisoning and silencing certain members of the hostages' families, then so be it. We are in a state of war," he added.
Pollard, who comes from a Jewish family in Texas, was arrested in the USA in 1985 and sentenced to life imprisonment for espionage in 1987. During his work as a civilian naval analyst, he had transmitted top-secret documents to Israel on several occasions. He was released in November 2015 after 30 years in prison. At the end of December 2020, he emigrated to Israel, of which he has been a citizen since 1996. Pollard and his wife Esther were personally received at the airport near Tel Aviv by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In his new home, Pollard is celebrated as a national hero, especially by the national-religious and the radicals in the Jewish settler movement.
Pollard has now criticized Netanyahu for agreeing to the hostage agreement with Hamas. According to a report in the newspaper "The Times of Israel", the ex-spy is in favor of continuing the war without an agreement, even at the cost of killing many Israeli hostages.
"I was strongly against releasing all these posters of the kidnapped and all these pictures of these poor people who were kidnapped," Pollard said in the video. "Why? Because every single one of them was a poison dart to our ability to wage total war against our enemies."
In response to the ongoing Israel war, Pollard suggested that the government should have taken measures to silence the hostages' families, even if that meant imprisoning some of them, to prevent public pressure from interfering with the conflict. During his time in the USA, Pollard was convicted of espionage for providing top-secret documents to Israel. Upon his release in 2015 and becoming an Israeli citizen, he was warmly welcomed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who views him as a national hero among certain factions.
Source: www.ntv.de
