From Hope To Higher Ground?

Not much can shock a 48-year-old who has been to prison twice, but even I was thrown by the revelation that in July, off the books but in the Embassy, Mike Huckabee had met Jonathan Pollard, who now campaigns in support of Itamar Ben-Gvir and for the resettlement of Gaza by the relocation of its inhabitants to Ireland.

Pollard's life sentence was not draconian. On the contrary, it was his reward for having pleaded guilty to a non-capital charge. Had he not done that, then he would have been charged with treason, he would have been convicted, and he would have been executed. The avoidance of a trial meant that the full extent of his treachery was never put on the public record. But what we do know is more than bad enough.

Pollard sold his services to countries other than Israel, including Pakistan. He passed on classified information about China to his first wife in furtherance of her private business interests. And he remains unrepentant at having killed at least 40 American agents in the Soviet Union after Israel swapped the American intelligence that he had sold it to fund his cocaine habit, for the often questionably Jewish Russians who are now such a hardline racist force in Israel. Pollard has called Donald Trump "a madman". If Trump puts up with this, then he is.