 
Pardons for Americans Who Broke Laws to Help Israel?
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By Dr. Rafael Medoff
Published on Wednesday, December 31, 2008 -
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Among those who have been pardoned by President Bush in his final days in office is a man whose crime involved helping Israel. Alarmed by the deadly threats facing the Jewish state and the international community’s tepid response to Israel’s plight, this idealistic young American broke his country’s laws and went to prison for giving Israel assistance that the U.S. was withholding.
Supporters of Jonathan Pollard are hoping to soon read the above lines about him, but for the moment those lines refer only to the late Charles Winters of Miami, who last week received a posthumous presidential pardon for the crime he committed in 1948: smuggling B-17 bombers to newborn Israel, in violation of U.S. law.
Sending weapons to Israel was illegal because, despite quickly extending diplomatic recognition to the new Jewish state, President Harry Truman had clamped an arms embargo on the Middle East. Members of Congress from his own party—including Thomas D’Alesandro, Jr., father of future House Speaker Nancy Pelosi—publicly criticized the embargo, but Truman refused to budge. At the 1948 Democratic Party convention, Brooklyn Congressman Emanuel Celler was defeated in his attempt to insert a plank supporting military aid for Israel.
Watching Israel fight for its life against five invading Arab armies, Charles Winters decided that the Truman administration’s policy was so unconscionable that it justified his breaking the law. He joined an underground network which provided weapons that helped save Israel from destruction. The B-17s—one of which Winters himself piloted— became the core of Israel’s fledgling air force.
Winters was not alone. Numerous Americans, Jews and non-Jews alike, took part in the illegal campaign to save Israel in 1948.
Morticians in the Bronx organized fake funerals, with teary-eyed pall bearers carrying gun-filled coffins that were shipped for “burial in the Holy Land.”
Shopkeepers in Brooklyn’s East New York neighborhood hid weapons inside large rolls of linoleum until they were sent to Israel in containers marked “Farm Equipment.”
Eight young men were arrested when a crate of Israel-bound dynamite they were loading at the Jersey City pier broke open, but they were set free by an Irish-American judge who recognized the moral value of their actions. “I do not regard you men as criminals,” Judge Sylvester Ryan told them, “since you were trying to provide means of defense to an otherwise helpless people.”
Over the years, I have had the opportunity to interview a number of those who were involved in such activities. None of them harbored any doubts as to the moral legitimacy of what they had done, even though their deeds were against the law. They had watched the world turn a blind eye to the slaughter of six million European Jews. They were determined to help prevent the massacre of three million Israeli Jews. They were trying to pre-empt genocide.
The military strength of contemporary Israel is, of course, light years ahead of what it was in 1948. But the military strength of Israel’s adversaries today is also far beyond what it was back then. Because the threat to the safety—perhaps even the existence—of Israel persists in our own time, there are those who, like Charles Winters, have responded in ways that landed them on the wrong side of the law.
U.S. Navy intelligence analyst Jonathan Pollard gave Israel classified data, which the Reagan administration had been withholding from the Israelis, concerning Arab and Muslim regimes developing weapons of mass destruction for use against the Jewish state. Pollard was arrested in 1986 and sentenced to life in prison.
Former AIPAC staff members Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman were arrested last year and are now on trial for allegedly giving Israel classified U.S. documents concerning Iran’s development of nuclear weapons.
Supporters of Pollard, Rosen, and Weissman are hoping for pardons from President Bush—not symbolic, posthumous pardons as in the case of Charles Winters, but actual pardons that will give them the chance to start a new life.
Such pardons do not constitute an endorsement of the crimes committed. They affirm only that the convict merits clemency because, for example, his punishment was disproportionate to his crime, or because he was essentially a good citizen aside from the crime in question. Judged by those criteria, advocates for Pollard, Rosen, and Weissman may reasonably conclude that those three have more than a little in common with Charles Winters and the other lawbreakers who came to Israel’s aid in 1948.
Dr. Medoff is coauthor, with Chaim I. Waxman, of the Historical Dictionary of Zionism, which has just been reissued by Scarecrow Press. ♦
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