On Sinai's lofty Mountain

By Sidney Du Broff

Photo by Sidney Du Broff

The media world-wide exploded with the name Jonathan Pollard, the man who spied for Israel, and who was serving life in prison for his efforts.

The Israeli Prime Minister, at an historic conference, tried, but failed in the end, to bring about his release.

ON SINAI'S LOFTY MOUNTAIN, by Sidney Du Broff, is the story of Jonathan Pollard, the man who saved Israel. It is also the story of Anne Henderson Pollard, Jonathan's wife, sentenced to five years as an accessory.

Pollard, employed by US Naval Intelligence (as a civilian) discovered that Iraq was almost a nuclear power, that Iraq possessed large amounts of biological and chemical weaponry meant for the elimination of Israel. This information had been deliberately withheld from Israel, despite an agreement to the contrary, but which Jonathan Pollard supplied. For him, the implications were unmistakably clear: the United States considered Israel expendable.

The Pollards, having fled to the Israeli Embassy in Washington, where they had been promised asylum, were, instead, ejected from there, into the waiting arms of the FBI. Succeeding Israeli Prime Ministers (with the exception of Benjamin Netanyahu) have offered no more than lip-service requests for Pollard's release, having, from the start, repudiated him, and, lacking in gratitude, found it politically expedient to remain indifferent.

The then Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, offered her help; that her efforts failed to bring about Pollard's release will make it apparent how strongly the US Administration felt about the retention of this man, incarcerated as a Jew, and held as a political prisoner.

ON SINAI'S LOFTY MOUNTAIN is presented as a work of fiction, in the same vein as Schindler's Ark, by Thomas Kenneally, from which Stephen Spielberg made Schindler's List. In both cases it allows a flexibility that would otherwise be denied in a straightforward telling of these events. It also allows the introduction of characters whose presence, once created, forwards the story, and, at the same time, permits them to tell their own, which has its own relevance.

This is also a love story: the story of a woman's love - Anne Pollard - for her husband, for her people: she fights for both of them. Not just a Jewish princess, but a Jewish queen.

Interwoven is the story of Sandy Spaulding, and her husband Mark and son David, who thought they were a Jewish family. Sandy said her husband's people were her people and that her son belonged to them, too. Until one day she is asked to make it official, to convert formally to Judaism. Reluctant to make a commitment to a people not her own, she wonders about her own true feelings, wonders if her involvement is only on the surface. Nevertheless, she works with deepest commitment to bring about the release of the Bradys (Pollards), and fosters a special involvement with Leah (Anne) as her legal representative and close friend. We also see the past - the Russian origins of the Spaulding family, their settlement and success in America, participation in World War II, and later, the involvement in the creation of Israel.

Talk about serious fiction - this is serious. It is reminiscent of Emile Zola, and his fight to exonerate Alfred Dreyfus.

ON SINAI'S LOFTY MOUNTAIN will make you laugh a little, but you will probably cry more. Most of the rest of the time you will feel a lump in your throat, as the events unfurl before your eyes, much of it in deeply meaningful dialogue.

The Pollard situation is, in its own way, a shoah, a holocaust, a holocaust of the spirit - a psychological holocaust, in which one man, engendered as a political prisoner, is meant to serve as a warning to all the rest.

Then the illegal becomes legal. The United States Supreme Court said that the Pollards had a fair trial - and that justice has been done. It is all legal, the American Government will tell you. Everything they did was legal - just like the Nazis. Everything they did was legal, too.

As his wife Leah says: "Israel betrayed us. They used Alan and when they didn't think he was going to be of any more use, they threw him - and me - out of the Embassy, into the waiting arms of the FBI. They told Alan we had passports at the Embassy - we were Israeli citizens."

Alan is committed to the notorious Marion Prison in southern Illinois. Leah gets five years as an accessory. She is chained to her bed. She is asleep now. It is the sleep of the tortured, of the tormented, in this "correctional" institution. This place, this chain, on this woman, is meant as coercion: Name names, tell us of the other Jewish traitors - there is a long list; just pick them out. And if you won't, we'll torture you until you do.

An excerpt: Mark Spaulding, a lawyer, partner in the United States Center for World Study think-tank, sits with his colleagues in a Washington, D.C. restaurant, where they have just finished lunch, when George Warton bursts in. Warton, filled with anger, holds up the newspaper which has obviously just appeared. The headline screams: ALAN BRADY CAUGHT SPYING FOR ISRAEL.
"He's that rotten little Jew-bastard over at Naval Intelligence," Warton says in a rage. "All those rotten Jews are traitors. They'll sell out to Israel every day of the week. Too bad Hitler didn't get them all!"
Slowly, deliberately, Mark stands up, a big man in his early forties, and confronts Warton, about the same age, not quite as big, known to Mark, if only superficially as someone fairly high up in the Defense Department. Mark gathers up Warton by the shirt front with his left hand, and smashes him hard in the face with his right hand.
Warton falls against the not-yet-cleared table opposite, blood spurting from an obviously broken nose. He looks up at Mark, who is standing over him, with a mixture of terror and hatred, too frightened to move, too frightened to offer a defense. "I'll get you," Warton says. "I'll get you if it's the last thing I ever do."

ON SINAI'S LOFTY MOUNTAIN was a book waiting to be written, and nobody is better qualified to do it than Sidney Du Broff, who has been involved in the real-life, live spy drama from the beginning, and who provides some startling insights.

In 1991, during the Gulf War, he, along with his wife Nedra, went to Israel, where they shared their first Iraqi Scud attack with Anne Pollard, then in a Tel Aviv hospital, where she was a patient. She was receiving treatment for the severe medical problem which she had developed as a result of the abuse - and neglect - she had suffered while in prison in the United States.

Much of the historical data has, as its source, the Left. But it is the Left that has reacted to this book as if struck with an axe. While they are unable to deny the truth of what has been written, that doesn't meant they have to like it. They've gone silent, unable and unwilling to join in the debate - too shocked and too frightened to come out and fight.

However, Lady Valerie Cocks, former Director, Labour Friends of Israel, an honest and courageous observer, put things in perspective when she said: "This is not a book that any Zionist can just read and then criticise. One dives into the book and swims in it, sinks, flounders, and finishes it in one piece, if one is lucky."

From this, it should not be implied that Du Broff is a "Right-wing writer" or that he is on the Right wing at all. He is in fact appalled by some of the concepts promulgated by the Right. He started life on the Left, and ultimately found that some of their concepts were not too easy to digest. As an author, he looks for objectivity and truth, and hopes that he both speaks it and writes it. He does not like Left-wing fascists any more than Right-wing ones. He discovers that it is often the Right who are the liberal ones, while there are those on the Left who find it difficult not to adopt Stalin's practices. He, and we, in the process of promoting his book, have found precisely that - from the BBC to the so-called Left-leaning press.

Letter from the Israeli Prime Minister to Sidney Du Broff. Click to enlarge. Use your browsers BACK button to return.

Dr Michael Rosen, at the time Principal of the Yakar Study Centre in London (now of Yakar, Jerusalem) a (very) Left-wing Orthodox Rabbi (can there be such a thing?) was the first to offer support and active assistance to the Jonathan and Anne Pollard Committee. He had this to say, in part,about ON SINAI'S LOFTY MOUNTAIN:

"So dear Sidney, I find your political views dangerous and over-the-top, but I still love you. If you ask me to help Jonathan Pollard I'm your man; if you ask me to support his political views I'm not. Number one deserves my support and number two my opposition."

We have had favourable endorsements from former U.S. President Jimmy Carter; former Israeli Prime Minster Benjamin Netanyahu's office (from Bobby Brown, his adviser on Diaspora affairs). General Ariel Sharon, currently Head of the Likud Party in Israel said: "I'm sure (ON SINAI'S LOFTY MOUNTAIN) is going to be a 'good ambassador' to justify our causes, means, and our existence as well." Rabbi Jacqueline Tabick, former Chairman, Council of Reform and Liberal Rabbis, said, in part, "...in some ways what I found even more interesting was the way in which the author described the challenges, tensions and possibilities within inter-faith marriages. It was a book that I very much wanted to read to the end." Peter Hasler, formerly of the Institute of Historical Research, London University, had this to say: "My word, what a tour de force, what a blend of history and creative imagination. I little knew that you had this time bomb waiting for me. Nothing detracts from this enthralling book, which illuminates so much of the troubled history of the Middle East. I look forward to ON GALILEE'S SACRED HILL" (the second book of Du Broff's trilogy, due out later).

The Rt Hon. Sir George Young, Bt, MP, former Conservative Minister of Transport, outstanding Parliamentarian and Cabinet Minister, was asked for his help in bringing about the release of Jonathan Pollard. He met personally with Dr. and Mrs. Pollard, Jonathan's parents, at the home of author Du Broff, and listened with deepest interest to this story of gross injustice. Without a moment's hesitation, he offered that help, and, in due course, brought the plight of the Pollards to the attention of Margaret Thatcher. He has this to say about Du Broff's book: "As your Member of Parliament, I got an insight into some of the issues raised in the book, and the ingredients should certainly make a most readable work."

This is what Angela Winner, an Essex housewife, mother of three, said: "The part that I enjoyed the most was at the Bar Mitzvah, at the Wailing Wall. I thought it was so true to life it brought tears to my eyes - it was very touching. I just found the whole book absolutely fantastic."

Du Broff's women are all strong and determined characters, which motivated Dr. Marcia Leventhal, a psychologist in southern California, to call Du Broff a feminist writer, and SINAI, a feminist novel. Perhaps. It is a badge Du Broff will wear with honour.

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