Pollard Letter To Sharansky:
If You are Serious, You Must Act

To: Natan and Avital Sharansky
FAX: 02-677-3719

Date: February 19, 2004
No. of Pages (incl. this one): 2

From: Jonathan Pollard 09185-016
FCI Butner, POB 1000
Butner North Carolina
USA 27509-1000

Toronto Phone: 416-781-3571
FAX: 416-781-3166
Email: pollard@jonathanpollard.org
Web: jonathanpollard.org

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Message:

Dear Natan and Avital,

This is a follow-up to my fax to you yesterday (18/02/04). With your permission, I should like to speak plainly and from the heart.

It is with an overwhelming sense of weariness and a deep sense of sadness that I must tell you that Esther and I have had too many years of experience not to recognize the signs that we are seeing, or not to understand their meaning. Without realizing it, Natan and Avital, since you returned to Israel you appear to have been seduced into the usual establishment pattern of all talk, no action. After 20 years, we know only too well how it goes. The urgency to act, to take a position, to do what is needed, which you clearly understood while we were together has been replaced by delay, excuses, and futile proposals.

Natan, and Avital, let us be honest. I have made 3 reasonable requests for immediate implementation to facilitate your efforts to secure my release. These requests: a meeting with the Ambassador; a formal Government policy on my case; and formal clarification of my status as a captive, are so simple that they could be accomplished overnight. These requests are not new. They have been pending for many years. They are the sine qua non of any serious effort to free me. They have never been acted upon before because until now no one has ever really been serious about securing my release.

If you are serious about securing my release- and we believe you are - then you must act at once upon these 3 initiatives, and you will not take no for an answer. If you are resolute and determined you can have all 3 things wrapped up and finalized within a week. If in the space of a week you cannot succeed in obtaining these 3 very minimal things from the Government (an immediate meeting with the Ambassador; a written Government policy including the points I outlined; and formal clarification of my captive status) then it is obvious that the "mandate" to seek my release which Sharon gave you is a farce. If that is so, you will have to decide whether to play along with this farce or to challenge it publicly, while you privately go about seeking my release.

Please understand, Natan and Avital: there is no in between. If the PM is going to support you, you will get these 3 minimums overnight -- or at least within days. If not, you have to be prepared to act decisively, intensively and immediately, on your own.

Esther and I are prepared to wait one more week, no longer, to see how this plays out. If you go to the mat with the PM for these 3 basic things, even if you should lose, publicly you will win. If you are not prepared to go to the mat with the PM, then Esther and I will be forced to accept that you are never get the vehicle into first gear; you will never get it out of the garage; much less out onto the speedway; and you will have no chance of reaching the goal.

Thus, within a week, Esther and I expect that our own position will be clear. As you surely understand, we cannot and will not endorse the politics of silence and prevarication for even a moment longer. Every single day is an eternity for us. Please do not let another day go without results.

Stay well.
Jonathan

cc Larry Dub
Eli Joseph