Leverage: How U.S. Presidents Use the American Jewish Community
to Pressure Israel
A case study of the US-American Jewish-Israel triad
by Elliot Jager
Decades ago policymakers realized that they could not force Israel back to the '49 lines if the American Jewish community stood in the way. It would just be too messy.
Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide
By Michael B. Oren
Random House, 2015
$30
In Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide, Michael
Oren has written a
personal memoir that foremost chronicles his tenure from July 2009 to September
2013 as Israel's ambassador in Washington.
If being lambasted by political allies and opponents alike is
good book publicity, than Oren has gotten more than his fair share. Besides
being supposedly pilloried by Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon, leader of his own
Kulanu Party, http://www.timesofisrael.com/adl-demands-michael-oren-walk-back-unjustified-attack-on-obama/ Oren has been
denounced by the voluble outgoing ADL chief Abe Foxman and Yediot Aharanot's populist left-leaning columnist Nahum Barnea.
It all began with a Wall Street Journal http://www.wsj.com/articles/how-obama-abandoned-israel-1434409772 op-ed in which Oren
-- a recently-elected member of the Knesset -- argued that President Barack Obama
"deliberately" torpedoed U.S.-Israel relations. "From the moment
he entered office, Mr. Obama promoted an agenda of championing the Palestinian
cause and achieving a nuclear accord with Iran," Oren wrote.
As soon as Obama arrived in the White House, writes Oren in Ally,
he reversed "a masterpiece of diplomacy" -- the April 2004 memorandum
from president George W. Bush to premier Ariel Sharon http://www.haaretz.com/news/ariel-sharon-and-george-w-bush-s-letters-in-full-1.277418 encapsulating the 1967-plus formula: In any peace deal
between Israel and the Palestinians, strategic settlement blocs and Jewish
Jerusalem neighborhoods would remain part of Israel.
In Ally and in his follow-up op-eds, Oren offers a
bill of particulars against Obama – from his "revolutionary" http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/04/us/politics/04obama.text.html?pagewanted=all 2009 Cairo speech channeling
the Arab narrative to holding nuclear talks with Iran behind Israel's back. In
a Foreign Policy http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/06/19/barack-obama-muslim-world-outreach-consequences-israel-ambassador-michael-oren/ piece labeling Obama's
policies toward Islam naïve, Oren wrote that Obama had been unduly influenced
by the late Palestinian scholar Edward Said. And in a Los Angeles Times
op-ed, http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-oren-iran-is-not-a-rational-state-20150619-story.html he argued that
Obama was mistaken in calculating that Iran could be a "rational"
nuclear power.
Beyond its headline-making aspects, I found Oren's efforts in
Ally to psychoanalyze
Obama insightful. They are reminiscent of political scientist James David
Barber's classic Presidential Character.
Likewise, his reminiscences of occasional run-ins with
anti-Semitic bullies while growing up in West Orange, New Jersey: "And after each incident, my
father took me down to our basement. There, in a cubbyhole behind the
stairwell, he secreted a musty album that his brother, another veteran, had
brought home from World War II. Inside were yellowing photographs of
concentration camps, piles of incinerated corpses, and snickering Nazis. 'This
is why we must be strong,' my father reminded me. 'This is why we need Israel.'"
Nonetheless, when it came time to give up his U.S.
citizenship in order to serve as Israeli ambassador, Oren devotes practically
an entire chapter to expressing his mixed feelings.
He first came to Israel at age 15 in 1970 shortly after
meeting Israel's then-ambassador to the U.S. Yitzhak Rabin. Like other American
Jews who made aliya, Oren describes having led a bifurcated life – loving the
U.S. while being smitten by Israel. He moved to the Jewish state in 1979 and married
Sally Edelstein in 1981. Oren saw
combat during the early stages of the 1982 Lebanon War. Later, he went back to
the U.S. to pursue a PhD at Princeton.
It was his 2008 book Power, Faith, and Fantasy tracing the spiritual-like relationship
between America and Israel that led an impressed Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu to offer Oren the ambassador's spot. Within the Foreign Ministry, Oren
tells us, he had no real relationship with minister Avigdor Lieberman.
Oren had to douse diplomatic fires from the get-go – for
instance, when the Haaretz viewspaper claimed
that Israeli policymakers were referring to Obama's coterie of dovish advisers
as "self-hating
Jews."
He describes his fateful first meeting with Daniel Shapiro in
2008. "Dan, who,
the bookishness of his clipped Vandyke beard and pea-shaped glasses
notwithstanding, could react temperamentally" was "an early Obama
acolyte" who "fervidly embraced Oslo." No surprise then that Shapiro, who in 2011
became U.S. ambassador in Tel Aviv, has been leading a full-court press against
Oren's book.
Oren writes about the shockingly hostile reception https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdtafcbqrE he met on February
8, 2010 when he lectured at the
University of California, Irvine. "One of the protesters, strategically
placed mid-row to prevent his rapid removal, stood and shouted, 'Michael Oren,
murderer of children!'"
Ally also describes the prosaic challenges Oren faced. While in
Washington, his mother-in-law was dying of cancer back in Israel, his youngest
boy was in the army, and two other children were at college. He found the
embassy building run down and the ambassador's residence dilapidated.
He
did get to have a little fun, though, whenever president Shimon Peres came to
the U.S. and Oren would accompany him around the country.
I
caught up with Oren by phone in New York where he is on a book tour. Here is an
edited version of our conversation.
You
wrote that the job of an Israeli ambassador to the U.S. is misunderstood. Set
us straight.
In
the Middle Ages, an ambassador's one job was to keep his ears open around court;
try to get close to the king and then send dispatches back home. In the 21st
century kings, presidents, and prime ministers can simply pick up the phone and
call one another. Some think the ambassador's role has been rendered obsolete.
In fact, exactly the opposite is the case.
Technology
allows the ambassador to reach out beyond the court. He can not only interact
with the king and his entourage, he can interact with the people.
And
that also becomes the ambassador's duty: to be a communicator.
That
was the way Abba Eban used to see the role.
He
was a great influence on me. I worked for him. He did not live in the age of the
24-hour news cycle. The challenge for me was that I could communicate through
innovative channels, but Israel could also be criticized through them. It
rendered the ambassadorial role all the more complex and difficult.
Writing
as an historian you garnered bipartisan praise. How does it feel to now draw
across-the-board opprobrium?
It's
the first time in my life I've written in the first person.
This
is the first time I've written not about other people's role in history but about
my own role in what I believe to be a very crucial time for Israel and the
Jewish people. I knew it would be controversial. It was not an easy decision.
The
criticism has been overwhelmingly ad hominem. I've been called a liar, a
money-grubbing politician – some very serious charges have been made about me
personally. What you notice is that almost nobody is taking down the book.
Whose
message is…
That
this alliance between the US and Israel is vital not just for the two
countries' security but also for maintaining what remains of Middle East
stability. This alliance has suffered blows the past five years and is in dire
need of restoration. Part of the book talks about how we can get this alliance
back on its feet.
Were
you surprised by the way Moshe Kahlon reacted to the book?
The
book was written before I went into politics. I added a few lines at the last
minute about becoming a politician. My whole political career merits about a
paragraph.
His
reaction to the book was that it was written before I went into politics. Which
was fine. It was spun http://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Politics-And-Diplomacy/Kahlon-sends-letter-of-apology-to-US-officials-for-party-mate-Orens-Obama-comments-406355 into something different. He never apologized.
He said the obvious – that the book, written before I went into politics,
doesn't pretend to represent the party's position.
Still,
his letter to Ambassador Shapiro distancing himself from your criticism of
Obama was not helpful. Do you know why he did it?
You're
going to have to ask him.
You write that Obama pointedly ignored Israeli aid to
earthquake-devastated Haiti. Would you say that this was symptomatic of the
administration's psychological warfare against Netanyahu?
I don't think it was about Netanyahu. It had to do with a
worldview. It's a worldview of outreach to Iran, unprecedented support for the
Palestinians. The Cairo speech was the foundational document, a key tool in
understanding how Obama was going to react to the Middle East. I also talk
about the abandonment of the 'principle of daylight' or diplomatic distance
between Israel and the United States.
Was this effort to create distance intended to weaken support
in the U.S. Jewish community and make it easier to lean on Israel? The message
being: You can be pro-Israel, but that doesn't mean you have to support the
Netanyahu government.
You are quoting the president. He said that.
The president was candid about his position. The approach of
the administration that I discuss in the book is to distinguish between two
types of daylight. Diplomatic daylight and security daylight. The U.S. wanted
to publicly show that it was pressuring Israel on settlements and Jerusalem. By
showing less daylight on security it could show more daylight on diplomacy.
That was the formula. My strong feeling is that this didn't
work.
When there is more daylight on diplomatic issues, Israelis
feel less secure – irrespective of how much money you give to Iron Dome. Israelis
make concessions when they feel secure, not when they feel insecure. Secondly,
there is no distinction between types of daylight in the Mideast -- locals don't
know if it's security daylight or diplomatic daylight. The policy was too cerebral.
Based on her performance as secretary of state while you were
ambassador, is there daylight between Hillary Clinton's positions and Obama's?
Well, she says there is. She's written in her memoirs that
she thought open pressure on Israel over settlements was not a good idea. What
she did, she did on instructions from the president – reluctantly. Mahmoud
Abbas said Obama pushed him up the tree, not Clinton.
You write extensively about Jonathan Pollard and offer some
ideas about his continued incarceration.
For the American intelligence community, he remains a
traitor. He has to pay a very high price. The more prosaic and tragic reason is
that he's become a card in the diplomatic process, to be traded off for a
certain prize. I brought a letter from the prime minister to the president beseeching
him to show clemency on humanitarian grounds. As far as I know, I was the last
Israeli official to visit him.
You quoted former Democratic House member Gary Ackerman as
describing J Street's leadership as being so open-minded that their brains fell
out. How invested is the White House in leveraging J Street?
My working assumption was that J Street saw itself — and to a
certain degree was seen by the administration — as the administration's arm in the
American Jewish community. For that reason I sought to engage J Street on
several levels. J Street attracts a lot of young people and this was an
opportunity to engage them— it was their last stop— before they left the
pro-Israel camp. J Street says it is pro-Israel.
You write about media hostility toward the Zionist narrative.
Isn't part of the problem that Israel
doesn't have a harmonious message.
In the book I talk about how impressed I was by the Obama
administration's messaging. You can go to 20 different offices and get the same
message – uncannily, the same wording. In Israel, you go to 20 different
offices, you get 20 different messages. Our democratic system just doesn't lend
itself to disciplined messaging.
To what extent has Israel's rabbinate contributed to the
diminishing sense of connection between Israel and U.S. Jewry?
It doesn't help. American Jewry is a strategic asset. We
claim to be the nation state of the Jewish people. One of my initiatives was to
create tishes – tables – around which Jews from different movements could
meet. Israeli embassies and consulates were considered neutral turf where Orthodox
rabbis could sit with Reform and Conservatives rabbis. They agreed on just
about nothing. One of the few things they agreed on was their opposition to the
rabbinate. For the Orthodox rabbis it was a case of their conversions not being
recognized.
You have a chapter that asks whether "We Are One?"
There is no one community – there are many communities, but
the Jewish people is a rambunctious tribe.
Your publisher wanted this book to come out in the Fall.
I wanted it to come out now before the monumental decision on
Iran. There may be very significant developments in the Palestinian arena as
well. The timing of the book was very intentional. I wanted to shout "Stop!" and have a
moment of introspection and reflection and not jeopardize this alliance
which is vital not just for the United States and Israel but for the world. I
want the book to get people to think about where we've been and where we have
to go. If I achieved the job of starting that conversation, the personal
attacks will all have been worth it.
