Jonathan Pollack’s stand in court follows the footsteps of a Zionist hero

On April 23rd, 1946, a Hungarian immigrant named Dov Gruner participated in an Irgun attack on the fortress where the Ramat Gan police station still resides. The purpose was acquiring weaponry. During the attack, Gruner was wounded and captured. He was indicted according to Emergency Acts of 1945, which his commander, prime minister-to-be Menachem Begin, would in time describe as an abomination not even Nazi Germany would enact; and yet they are still the law in Israel. Gruner was, unsurprisingly, found guilty.

There was a twist: Gruner refused to acknowledge the court’s legitimacy, and refused to answer the charges, refused an attorney, refused to defend himself; he demanded to be treated as a prisoner of war. In a circus more delirious even the practice of Israeli court of accepting “secret material” against which the defendant has no recourse, Gruner was then represented by the prosecutor. British police inspector John Dunnley, who was a prosecution witness against Gruner but who became his friend, later described the proceedings as a “show”. Naturally, Gruner was sentenced to death.

This, however, was only the first part of the play. The British Empire was fading fast – it went bankrupt in 1944 and in 1947, it would finally give up its crown jewel, India – and it desperately needed American aid. Large segments of the American public – at the time, being anti-colonialist was a title many Americans wore with pride – opposed the execution. The British, therefore, put heavy pressure on Gruner to ask for a pardon; were he to make such a request, he was informed through back channels, it would be granted. His life would be spared. The end of Mandatory Palestine could almost be seen.

Gruner wavered. He wrote a request for clemency, then destroyed it. Such a request would be a recognition of the British regime: The only power capable of granting a pardon is the sovereign. International pressure on the British was high, as were their fears: they made a series of frightened changes in the Emergency Acts. On April 16th 1947, without prior warning and contrary to custom, Gruner and three other freedom fighters – Mordechai Alqakhi, Yechiel Drezner, and Eliezer Qashani – were secretly put to death in the Acre Prison.

International response was harsh. American pastors held memorials to the victims. Dov Gruner did his part to smash a bit of the legitimacy of the British regime. Seven months after British officials hanged him, Britain would not oppose the end of its Palestine mandate.

* * * *
About ten days ago, Jonathan Pollack went to prison. In his own way, he too does his part to smash the legitimacy of the Zionist regime. He was imprisoned because he rode slowly on a bicycle and slowed traffic down, as a protest of the massacre Israel carried out during Operation Cast Lead. He was not alone, but only he was arrested. Judge Yizhak Yizhak rejected Pollack’s abuse of process claims, and activated his suspended sentence for “forbidden crowding”. Then Pollack decided to stop playing the rigged game. He refused to appeal, and refrained from accepting Yizhak’s offer to trade his jail sentence for community service. He argued that “I don’t think what I did was wrong, and I have no intention of cooperating with my punishment. If I have to go to prison, I’ll go; and the day I come out I’ll continue doing the same thing”.

It ought to be said that the Israeli justice system is more legitimate than that of the Mandate, and it certainly is not a “regime of gallows”, as Begin described the latter. But, throughout its history, it was a tool and fig leaf for the security system – beginning with the installation of the Emergency Acts in Israeli law.

The Israeli justice system needed more than three years to prohibit the use of Palestinians as human shields by IDF soldiers (an action termed by the IDF as “Neighbor rule”); it approved in the late 1980s the use of torture (“mild physical pressure”) and took a decade to forbid it; it legalized the vanishing of people, Israeli citizens included (Marcus Klingberg, Motti Keidar) and the detaining of Israeli citizens for long periods without recourse to legal counsel (Haim Perlman, David Sitbon, ‘Amir Makhoul, ‘Omar Said – all of them in 2010 alone) – which provides the security apparatus precious torture time. In the 1980s and the 1990s, it routinely approved the exiling of Palestinians, culminating in the exile to Lebanon of 400 people claimed by the IDF to be Hamas activists; it approved – with no exception! – every order for the demolishing of houses, which is an act of collective punishment; and in the last few days, the SCJ approved (Hebrew) the reopening of Facility 1391, a secret internment and interrogation facility, which will be a prison for people not residing in Israel or the occupied territories. The same justice system oversees the administrative detentions and the curtailing of civil right by military order – and not just in the territories.

Israeli jurists, without whom the occupation regime would either collapse or be exposed as the evil it is, serve as the regime’s fig leave. See, they say, this isn’t Burma or China; we have a legal system here.

Jonathan Pollack, coming as he does from the heart of the Jewish establishment, exposes – of his own free will and while paying the price – the nakedness of this lie. He does not climb the gallows, but, like Gruner, he does his bit for the destroying of the legitimization of an unjust regime. If a better regime is ever to arise here, Pollack would be one of its creators.