Daniel Winston is an American-Israeli therapist, lecturer and author. He volunteers in the IDF reserves, as an MDA medic, in ZAKA, and in the Israel Police Search and Rescue Team.
I grew up in a house that lived and breathed Jonathan Pollard. My parents, Manny and Gail Winston z"l, threw themselves into his case from the day of the travesty, the day Israel abandoned him and the Americans arrested him, and they did not stop for decades. It was not a cause they supported. It was the weather in our home, night and day, for years on end.
One of the most formative memories of my early life is reading the extensive correspondence between Pollard and my father. I was young, and I understood perhaps half of what was on those pages, but two things came through the paper with a force I have never forgotten. The first was the unnatural breadth and depth of Pollard’s knowledge across a seemingly endless range of subjects, and the sheer brilliance of his analysis. The second mattered more. It was his total and unwavering dedication to Am Yisrael, which never dimmed, not once, not even in the darkness of a cell where dimming would have been forgivable.
It is because of those letters, and not in spite of them, that I write what follows.
Every intelligence officer is trained to recognize the moment an operation has been compromised. Not the moment it fails, but the earlier moment, the one that requires honesty rather than courage, when the numbers stop supporting the objective and the only professional decision left is to pull out.
Jonathan Pollard is one of the heroes in Israel who paid full price for an operation that went wrong. He has until nine o’clock Tuesday night to make sure he does not pay a second price, and this time to make the rest of us pay it with him.
The arithmetic is not in dispute and it is not a matter of spirit or will. Israel’s electoral threshold is 3.25 percent of valid votes. With roughly 6.8 million eligible voters, a party needs something on the order of 150,000 ballots to enter the Knesset, which is to say the weight of four seats. Israel First, the party Sharren Haskel founded in July and that Pollard joined at the Kotel on August 23, has been polling at 0.5 to 0.6 percent. A recent Maariv survey in mid-August put it at 0.6. Nothing since has moved it. That is under a fifth of what is required, with seven weeks to close a gap that campaigns do not close.
And every vote cast for a list that finishes below the line is discarded outright. It does not transfer, it does not shade the coalition math, it does not register as a protest. It is deleted.
We have watched this movie before, and we have watched it in Hebrew.
-In April 2019 the New Right took 138,598 votes and finished roughly 1,400 short.
-Zehut took 118,031.
-Otzma Yehudit took 83,609.
Close to 340,000 nationalist votes, the weight of eight Knesset seats, evaporated in a single night because three men each believed his own voice was indispensable.
Israel went back to the ballot box twice more. In 2022 some 417,000 votes, about nine percent of everything cast, went to lists that never crossed. Ayelet Shaked’s Jewish Home collected 56,775 of them and delivered exactly nothing to the camp she claimed to serve.
There is no ideological content to these numbers. They are the price of vanity, and the people who pay it are never the candidates.
What makes this cycle more dangerous than 2019 or 2022 is what sits on the other side of the ledger. The blocs are effectively tied. Gadi Eisenkot’s Yashar has been trading first place with Likud, the Bennett-Lapid list is running in the mid-teens, and the Arab parties have consolidated into a single Joint List. In that configuration, a single small party falling short does not shift a seat, it decides who receives the mandate.
And the government that emerges will inherit the file that matters most: the postwar pressure from Washington and Europe to convert Gaza’s reconstruction into a 'political horizon', which is the current euphemism for a Palestinian state, and the accompanying pressure on the communities of Judea and Samaria. Bezalel Smotrich warned this week that an Eisenkot government would evacuate those communities. One can argue about the forecast. One cannot argue that the twenty-eight thousand votes Israel First is currently projected to attract will do anything to prevent it.
In fact, Arutz Sheva reported the opposite on September 6: "Former Shin Bet chief Yoram Cohen, No. 2 on Gadi Eisenkot's political slate, already called during an appearance on Channel 12 News for the evacuation of some of the farms and communities that Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich established in Judea and Samaria without a government decision authorizing their establishment." That's for starters.
But Sharren Haskel, number one on the slate on which Pollard is number two, says she is continuing to run anyway. Haskel’s answer is the third bloc theory: a party positioned so that neither side can govern without it. It is an elegant idea and it has already collapsed around her. Gilad Erdan and Yuli Edelstein withdrew their Unity party on Saturday night, with Erdan saying plainly that the support was not there and that the mergers were not materializing. Chili Tropper and Yoaz Hendel announced they were going separate ways. Smotrich has folded Zehut into Religious Zionism.
The consolidation is happening in every direction at once, and Israel First is being left standing in the road explaining that it intends to be the hinge. You cannot be a kingmaker from outside the palace. A list at 0.6 percent is not a hinge on the door. It is a hole below the waterline, and the ship it sinks is ours, not hers.
Nor will the surplus-vote agreements save it. Those pacts, which must be filed by October 16, only redistribute leftover votes among lists that have already crossed the electoral threshold. They are a tool for winning a marginal seat, not a life raft for a party polling at a sixth of the threshold.
Tuesday at nine is the real deadline. After that the ballot slips are printed and the decision belongs to arithmetic rather than to men.
Pollard has done the honest thing before, and it should be said in his favor rather than held against him. He endorsed Ayelet Shaked’s Zionist Spirit in 2022 and withdrew the endorsement within hours when he understood what he had lent his name to. He launched a slate with Nissim Louk this year and stepped back from it. That is not fickleness. That is the reflex of a man who checks whether the mission still serves the objective, which is precisely the reflex that has been missing from Israeli politics for twenty years. He has one more opportunity to use it, and this time the stakes are not his reputation.
Here is the part that is genuinely painful to write. Jonathan Pollard’s voice belongs in the Knesset. His argument, that on October 7 the entire country experienced what he experienced alone for thirty years, the discovery that the institutions you served will abandon you and then explain why the abandonment was reasonable, is the sharpest indictment anyone has offered of Israel’s governing class.
Pollard earned the right to make it in the plenum. He will not get to make it there. The voters have rendered their verdict in poll after poll, and no amount of moral standing converts into ballots at this stage of a campaign. The tragedy is real. It is also irrelevant to what he should do by Tuesday night.
He gave thirty years of his life for Am Yisrael in a federal prison, and he gave them without knowing whether anyone would ever come for him. What is being asked now is smaller by orders of magnitude. Withdraw the list, or fold it into a slate that will cross, and tell the people who believe in him exactly where to put their ballots so that their votes are counted rather than shredded.
Give up the seat, not the years. Then spend the next seven weeks doing what he does better than any politician on that slate, which is telling Israelis the truth about what abandonment costs.
My father spent much of his life arguing that Jonathan Pollard’s devotion to the Jewish people was the whole measure of the man, and that everything else was commentary. I have no prophecy and I claim none. But I have no doubt whatsoever about what Manny Winston would be saying this week, and he would be saying it to Jonathan directly, in a letter, with the same respect he always showed him. Pull out. Do the right thing one more time.
It is one more mission, and it is the kind nobody decorates you for. Those are usually the ones that matter.