Jonathan Pollard said Tuesday he is entering politics ahead of Israel’s upcoming election and joining Orot HaShachar, a new party, while calling for Israel to annex the Gaza Strip. The former U.S. Navy intelligence analyst, who spent 30 years in prison for spying for Israel, also told Channel 13 that he supports the forced transfer of all Gazans and the repopulation of Gaza by Israel.
Pollard was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1987 after pleading guilty to providing Israel with top-secret classified information. He was released on parole in 2015, remained in the United States until 2020 and then immigrated to Israel, where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave him a hero’s welcome on arrival. Since then, he has become one of Netanyahu’s sharpest critics.
He said the decision to enter politics was driven by the October 7 massacre, which he said made him realize that the government and the military had abandoned the country. Pollard said his most important principle is military self-sufficiency and that everyone in Israel, including Arabs and Jews on the Right and Left, should serve mandatory national service of their choice. He also said the current government must be replaced in the election.
The move puts Pollard squarely into the right-wing fight over who should lead Israel next, but he drew one line around that fight: if Netanyahu is returned through the democratic process, he said, he would have to be supported. Pollard said his immediate goal is to unify the Right, and he said he would have no issue serving in a government with Yisrael Beytenu chairman Avigdor Liberman. He spoke strongly against sitting in a government with former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett.
Orot HaShachar has also drawn in Nissim Louk, whose daughter Shani Louk was murdered at the Supernova music festival during the October 7 massacre and whose body was abducted by Hamas terrorists before being recovered by the IDF. Pollard’s entry gives the party a name recognition that few new movements can match, but it also ties it to one of the most explosive debates in Israeli politics: how far the country should go after October 7, and who gets to define security in the election that follows.