Michael Oren sees a US alliance in tatters, and Israel ‘on our own’
Asked whether people might look back on this period as the last days before Israel was wiped out, the MK-diplomat-historian responds: ‘It’s happened before in history, hasn’t it?’
By David Horovitz June 18, 2015, 10:55 am 27
Michael Oren, Israel’s ambassador to the United States from 2009 to 2013, chose to give his book on that period in Washington the catchy title “Ally”. But this new memoir — an unprecedented case of a former public servant so quickly writing up sometimes intimate revelations on acutely sensitive core issues — does not describe an alliance at all.
The US-born former diplomat, who is now a Knesset member for the Kulanu party, notes in his foreword that the Hebrew term for “ally” is ben brit — literally “the son of the covenant.” And what he documents is actually the breaching of a covenant, the collapse of an alliance — an accumulated arc of abandonment by the Obama administration, and most especially the president himself, of Israel.
It’s a charge, unsurprisingly, that the administration has rushed to deny, and, rather more surprisingly, that Oren’s own party chief Moshe Kahlon has hurried to dissociate Kulanu from.
Oren’s style is not excitable or melodramatic. In fact, he writes in generally understated tone, with the measured sense of perspective you’d expect from a best-selling historian. So when he notes, as he does near the very end of the book, that last summer’s Israel-Hamas war left “aspects of the US-Israeli alliance in tatters,” you take him seriously, and you worry.
And when you read that Washington worked relentlessly to quash any military option for Israel, most especially in 2012 — arguably the last moment at which Israel could have intervened effectively to thwart Iran’s drive to the bomb (though Oren does not confirm this) — you sense that he has exposed the emptiness of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s endless assertions that Israel will stand alone if necessary to stop a nuclear Iran. And you register, with all its grim repercussions, the realpolitik of a broken relationship with our key defender — the rupture that now leaves Israel vulnerable to an increasingly bold Islamist regime that avowedly seeks our annihilation.
For an hour in his Knesset office on Monday, Oren discussed his book with The Times of Israel, elaborating in several key areas, and often rendering his depiction of relations with the Obama administration, and the implications for Israel in its battle for survival, still more disconcerting. So much so that I found myself asking Oren, “Are people going to look back in a few years’ time and say, This is what they were talking about in Israel as Iran closed in on the bomb and they were wiped out?”
His bleak reply? “It’s happened before in history, hasn’t it?”
Oren then laughed rather bitterly, and remarked, “The whole conversation is very down here.”
And how.
The Times of Israel: You call the book “Ally,” but its central theme is the incredibly problematic Obama presidency, to put it mildly, on Israel.
The central theme of the book is about someone who grows up in America, loves America, but has an abiding passion for Israel and the Jewish people, and dreams of someday being the bridge between these two countries that he loves, gets to actually do it, but does it during a period of almost unprecedented challenge in those relationships.
Obama is one challenge. The press is another challenge. The American Jewish community is another challenge. What isn’t a challenge? There are objective challenges. There is America that is starting 2009 in the depths of the worst financial crisis since the Depression. There is America that is bogged down in political polarization such as they’ve never experienced. Nothing can get done. There is America that is traumatized by two wars in the Middle East, exhausted. It doesn’t like to hear about the Middle East. It’s sick of us, wants to go home. That kind of challenge. To say nothing of what was going on here. Then the entire Middle East unravels. Egypt has not one, but two violent revolutions. Syria and Iraq cease to exist. The peace process is dead in the water. Abbas won’t talk to us for most of the period. All that’s going on, plus other issues: Women of the Wall, people spitting at women. All these things are happening in a very short period of time.
You took notes every night?
I’m not a diarist, but when I got into this job my wife Sally got me a really nice diary. She said, You might want to jot down a few things. And I came back from my first meeting with Obama in May 2009, and I thought, “Wow, that was interesting. Let me start jotting down a few things.” Then it became an actual diary. I never wrote anything secret in it, but I wrote discussions and observations. Some of them are very funny. When (the then White House chief of staff) Rahm Emanuel calls me at 2 o’clock in the morning and says, “I don’t like this bleep shit,” and I have nothing else to say to him other than “I don’t like this bleep shit either” and it goes on like that, I would then turn around and write this. I thought it was so funny. So interesting. But it’s also very revealing.
There’s a tendency to put this book in black and white terms and it wasn’t like that. I had excellent relationships with a lot of people in the administration. Many people in the administration were dear friends of the State of Israel. Someone like Tom Nides, the deputy secretary of state, Jewish guy, very funny guy and I quote him in the book: After UNESCO recognizes a Palestinian state (in 2011), he calls me and he says, the way they do in Washington, you know, “You don’t want to bleep defund UNESCO. They bleep teach the bleep Holocaust.” Because that’s the way they talk in Washington. That’s been quoted as an example of an anti-Israel bent for Tom Nides. It’s not like that. That’s the way they talk. We had an issue about UNESCO. We had a serious issue about UNESCO. I’d come back and say, that was a funny conversation. Let me write that down.
Is there a precedent for a book by an ambassador coming out this close to the end of his term?
No. I also urged Random House to bring it out in June. They wanted to bring it out much later. Listen, we’re at a crucial juncture. We’re at a crucial juncture now with the Iran issue, and it’s very important to set certain records straight as we go into what could be a fateful period for the State of Israel.
Was material taken out when it was reviewed here by the various official bodies?
It went through numerous reviews. In addition to all these different reviews, you need approval of the “inter-ministerial committee,” which is actually an office in the Prime Minister’s Office. The problem is that when the government collapsed, there were no ministers, so there’s no ministers on the inter-ministerial committee and I had a June deadline that I wanted to make and it was very difficult. In the end that committee was terrific. Everybody I worked with — the military censor, the Defense Ministry, the Foreign Ministry, the Mossad — were terrific. There were things that they took out, but everything they took out had a reason — which I didn’t necessarily understand until I actually sat down with them. And then there were things that I was able to persuade them to keep in.
You say early on that these allies are in danger of drifting apart and you believe you can help prevent that. But the arc of the book is this accumulation of dismay and anguish over the administration and the president and their treatment of Israel. You call the book “Ally,” but you’re documenting the failure of an alliance, hopefully not forever. That’s what it is. That’s how it reads. After only a year in the job, you’re gasping at the absurdity of Rahm Emanuel telling Charlie Rose that Obama and Netanyahu are “friends” who have a very good honest constructive relationship. That’s only a year in, and you already know that that’s absurd.
I was taken aback (Laughs).
Yes, that’s my point. After a mere year, you’re already gasping at how at odds that assertion is with your knowledge of how things really are. And it just gets worse from there. Only a year in, you are already amazed that anyone could be asserting that. Right?
Umm hmm. (Laughs). Is that a question?
It’s a really worrying book. You’re documenting — you’re describing it; you’re the ambassador — a presidency that is so wrong and so increasingly problematic on Israel. You talk about an America that wants to pull out of the Middle East. I think the worst criticism is the line about the administration negotiating with Iran in secret on an issue of existential importance to Israel… (Oren writes in the book: “Most disturbing for me personally was the realization that our closest ally had entreated with our deadliest enemy on an existential issue without so much as informing us.”)
For seven months behind our back.
Again, the book is called “Ally,”
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http://www.timesofisrael.com/michael-oren-sees-a-us-alliance-in-tatters-and-israel-on-our-own/
