There is no greater freedom than in Zion: Welcome home, Jonathan Pollard

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Three times during my journalistic life I was moved to tears. For the first time in 1991 during Operation Solomon, when I saw my brother, an Ethiopian Jew, kissing the ground as they got off the Hercules plane, perhaps the last to return from the operation.

The second time, a few months later in the city of Reida in Yemen, when I saw my brother, a Yemenite Jew with the wigs, inside the market, and a few years later come to Israel secretly through Jordan, and kiss the ground again. And for the third time yesterday, when a Jewish brother after 35 years of nerve-racking makes an aliyah, and he too kisses the ground.

Prime Minister Netanyahu welcomed Jonathan Pollard to Israel

For us, the sabras, this land is taken for granted, but not so for every Jew, all the more so for one who had to make an effort to connect to it. This is called gratitude.

Exactly the same gratitude connects me to the tears that accompanied me when I covered for the “Israel Today” website the secret flight that brought Pollard home.

What was not said about the man, including fringe cynics who defined him as a spy that Lumiel or even greedy.

Most of us see Pollard as a warm Jew, a Zionist who has the good of the state in front of his eyes. And an expensive price he paid for it.

He spent most of his years in prison, and the thousands of books he read during his long stay in his cell did not ease the great anguish.

Jonathan – sorry, Jonathan – was set free and there is no greater freedom for a Jew than to live in Zion.

Pollard and Prime Minister Netanyahu after landing

For that to happen, it needed a triangle that included an American president who was unfriendly and empathetic to the State of Israel, an Israeli prime minister committed to bringing Pollard, and the mobilization of good Jews, whom I know little, that made the dream come true.

And there have been attempts in the past: there were already a member president and good Jews who pressed, but there was also a prime minister who did not want so much. Netanyahu, in one of the most challenging years of his tenure, also wanted to run.

From the book in the store – to Ben Gurion Airport

A week ago, in a Tel Aviv bookstore near my parents’ house, I was looking for a book for the weekend, and I caught a book about Pollard.

I knew that in a few days, at the end of his wife Esther’s series of treatments, he would arrive. I looked at his picture in the book, and imagined how his character comes out of the book to walk with the big dome on the streets of Jerusalem.

But 2020 is a roller coaster, a year of illusions. Pollard did leave the book – but went into isolation. But what is ten-day solitary confinement for someone who has been in prison for 30 years.

Jonathan Come Home Became Jonathan Come, and I, the Sabra, got up this morning with one desire to kiss the magical land we tread on, like my Ethiopian Jewish brothers, like my Yemenite Jewish brothers, and like my brother Pollard.

We have been waiting for you for a long time. welcome home.

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