Ask Not What Israel Can Do For America…
By Grant F. Smith
Diving into historian Michael Oren’s Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide—his first-ever book written as a personal narrative—initially seems to be an investment with huge potential payoffs. How does Israel’s former ambassador to the U.S. define the mutual commitments that underpin what he dubs—92 times!—“the alliance?” What value does Israel have as a U.S. ally that warrants its observably massive and constant command over the U.S. government’s resources, including but not limited to the lion’s share of foreign aid, diplomatic support in global arenas, and vast amounts of time and attention from our otherwise busy president and thousands of federal employees? If anyone knows, it surely must be Oren, who “crossed the divide” between the two countries and served as the diplomatic intermediary between America and Israel’s top political leaders.
Born Michael Scott Bornstein to American parents in 1955, Oren claims to have suffered anti-Semitic incidents growing up in West Orange, New Jersey. After scraping together enough money, Oren went to work on a kibbutz in Israel at age 15. He became an elite paratrooper after joining the IDF and participated in Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon. After leaving the IDF he went on undercover missions in the Soviet Union to establish contact and work with dissident Zionist groups. Relying on his U.S. passport for protection and assuming cover as a photojournalist, Oren hints he joined Israel’s intelligence service. “Israelis who served in combat units and who held two passports were especially sought after for these missions,” he writes. Whenever Oren got in trouble with the KGB, it was the U.S. ambassador—not the Israeli—that he demanded to see. After high-profile teaching and writing stints in America, Oren reluctantly relinquished his U.S. citizenship in 2009—three decades after he emigrated to Israel—in order to become Israel’s ambassador to the land of his birth.
In the first pages of his memoir Oren claims “ally” is a “deceptively straightforward” word, but then only attempts to translate its meaning in Hebrew as a religious covenant. The attributes most political scientists would use are “a sovereign or state associated with another by treaty or league.” Perhaps Oren avoids such definitions because no such mutual defense treaty between the U.S. and Israel exists, although congressional mandates declare Israel to be a “major non-NATO ally” (1990) and “major strategic partner” (2014). While Oren’s book effectively categorizes America’s benefactor role toward Israel, he struggles to clarify precisely what—if anything—the U.S. receives in return for its largesse.
Does Ally provide valuable insights? Yes, although probably not ones the author intended. It does confirm that an Israeli ambassador—like an Israeli prime minister—enjoys unlimited access to elite U.S. media, at the most crucial times, and can even dictate program format and with whom he will appear. One choice sample provided was Oren’s refusal to appear on a split screen with the bombastic John Bolton. This earned him a rebuke outside Fox News studios by the walrus-mustachioed former U.N. ambassador. NBC’s Andrea Mitchell is on the cell phone, available for any important opportunity, while The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg awaits his next scoop. Oren’s own unstoppable stream of output to The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, and interviews with a legion of friendly top television and print pundits, left this reader convinced that far more deserving voices, particularly during Israel’s attacks on Gaza, must be drowned off the Oren-saturated bandwidth.
Though benefitting from a massive network of Israel affinity organizations in America, Oren mostly downplays the Israel lobby as the principal enabler of the U.S.-Israel “special relationship.” After even New York Times columnist Tom Friedman finally admitted that Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s 28 standing ovations in Congress were “bought and paid for by the Israel lobby,” Oren told him, “You’ve confirmed the worst anti-Semitic stereotype, that Jews purchase seats in Congress.”
Oren similarly dismissed Profs. John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt and their findings about the foundations of the relationship as “a conspiracy thesis of undue Jewish influence on Congress and the media.” Despite his objections, however, Oren’s own recitation of endless meetings with influential members of Congress during daily trips to Capitol Hill provides far more support for Mearsheimer and Walt’s thesis than his own thinly sourced claims of Israel’s intrinsic value to America. Oren’s most repetitive justifications are purely symbolic, such as Israel being “the only true democracy in the Middle East.”
In his final chapter Oren seems to resign himself to the Mearsheimer and Walt conclusion when he reveals what is now demanded by America’s “ally” and why. President Barack Obama’s 2009 Cairo speech to Arab youth condemning Israeli settlements, references to pre-1967 lines as a basis for peace negotiations and terrifying “daylight” policy on diplomacy generated major trauma for the Israeli diplomat. Obama told a gathering of Israel affinity group leaders that “when there is no daylight, Israel just sits on the sidelines…”
This public distancing and open rebukes of Israel’s leadership must never again happen, demands Oren. Rather, the United States must in the near future officially recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, unconditionally support it in the U.N. Security Council, and refrain from demanding “swift and transparent investigations” of civilian casualties perpetrated by Israel. It must also release convicted spy for Israel Jonathan Pollard.
Oren claims Israel also has some obligations as a U.S. ally, but they are of noticeably lower value to the U.S., less costly to Israel, and mostly intangible. Israel should refrain from building “isolated” settlements (though East Jerusalem and the larger “blocs” are just dandy), respect “American Jewish pluralism” (e.g. stop claiming to be their main representative), and give more respect to the “prerogatives of the world’s mightiest power.”
Most importantly, according to Oren, American leaders must return to a policy of “no surprises, no daylight, and no public altercations.” This would be an international redeployment of the “united front” strategy parents often use to manage their unruly children. It would tuck newly energized American intellectuals and activists who oppose the horrifying ongoing carnage and costs generated by the “special relationship” back into bed, in the dark, without supper, awaiting parental decisions in which they have no say—yet which are ostensibly also for their own good.
No thanks.
Even Michael Oren must know that the American public has grown less infatuated with Israel each passing year. The Internet, alternative media watchdogs and WikiLeaks are buttressing American popular will that their country not be drawn into more Middle East conflicts on false pretenses by pro-Israel forces. The secrecy-powered “united front” Oren and many other Israel affinity groups pine for is both bankrupt and simply no longer possible.
In his last pages, Oren finally admits—in what may be the understatement of the century—that the so-called alliance “is not, of course, symmetrical.” In his first pages he claims “vocal segments” of the American Jewish community are “a vital component of the alliance.” Uniting the two provides the book’s key unintentional insight. The “special relationship” is not in fact an alliance, because it is all cost and almost no benefit to the U.S. It is rather a corrupt linkage that exists only because of the constant machinations of a small—and declining—subset of Americans who in their zealotry work as hard as Oren to bind America to Israel. Unlike Oren, most never have to finally turn over their U.S. passports, put on a uniform, or move to Israel. As an insider’s catalog of the demands and surface mechanics of this “undue influence,” Ally is somewhat useful to those well-read enough to distill unintended insights from Oren’s pithy anecdotes, soaring rhetoric and stomach-wrenching propaganda.
Grant F. Smith is executive director of the Washington, DC-based Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy (IRmep).
Oren’s Assault on President Obama and American Jewish Critics of Israel a Revealing Look at Zionist Worldview
By Allan C. Brownfeld
In his book, Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide, former Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren, a native-born American who emigrated to Israel and, upon being named ambassador, renounced his U.S. citizenship, launches an attack upon President Barack Obama and American Jewish critics of Israel which is unprecedented for a former diplomat. It reveals perhaps more about the Zionist worldview than Oren intended.
In op-eds and lectures prior to the book’s publication, Oren psychoanalyzes President Obama and accuses him of being too soft on Muslims because his Muslim father and stepfather abandoned him. He accuses Obama of “intentionally, maliciously abandoning Israel.” In Israel, this assault on the president has been widely criticized. Oren, now a member of the Knesset representing the Kulanu Party, did not even gain his own party’s support for such claims. Instead, the party leader, Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon, apologized for Oren’s remarks in a letter to the U.S. ambassador.
Israel’s Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan declared that “Oren’s claims are disconnected from reality.” Columnist Nahum Barnea, writing in the June 23 Israel Opinion, noted that, “Some of Oren’s colleagues in Jerusalem and Washington thought that he had gone mad.”
In his review of the book in the June 28 Washington Post, Philip Gordon, who served from 2013 until this spring as White House coordinator for the Middle East, North Africa and the Persian Gulf region, declares that, “The problem with the book is that Oren’s main argument is a caricature, bolstered by exaggerations and distortions.”
To Oren’s charges that Obama is the first U.S. president to air differences with Israel in public and the first to break with the principle that there should be no “daylight” in the U.S. relationship, Gordon responds: “Really? To take just a few examples, Dwight Eisenhower slammed Israel for the 1956 Suez operation and forced it into a humiliating retreat. Gerald Ford froze arms deliveries and announced a reassessment of the relationship as a way of pressing Israel to withdraw from the Sinai. Jimmy Carter clashed repeatedly with Prime Minister Menachem Begin before, during, and after the 1978 Camp David summit. Ronald Reagan denounced Israel’s strike on the Osirak nuclear reactor in Iraq and enraged Jerusalem by selling surveillance planes to Saudi Arabia. George H.W. Bush blocked loan guarantees to Israel over settlements; Bill Clinton clashed publicly with Israel over the size of proposed West Bank withdrawals; George W. Bush called for a settlement freeze in the 2002 road map for peace and afterward repeatedly criticized Israel for construction in the West Bank. In other words, Oren has a point—except in the case of virtually every Republican and Democratic administration since Israel’s founding.”
When it comes to his attitude toward American Jews, Oren is particularly instructive. He claims that Jewish journalists are largely responsible for the American media’s alleged critical coverage of Israel.
According to Oren, the work of such journalists as Thomas Friedman of The New York Times, David Remnick of The New Yorker, Joe Klein of Time Magazine, the late Bob Simon of “Sixty Minutes,” Leon Wieseltier of The Atlantic and a host of others resembled “historic hatred of Jews.” He speculates that “perhaps persistent fears of anti-Semitism impelled them to distance themselves from Israel.”
Oren describes how “The pinch I felt reading articles censorious of Israel sharpened into a stab whenever the names on the bylines were Jewish. Almost all of the world’s countries are nation-states, so what, I wondered, drove these writers to nitpick at theirs? Some, I knew, saw assailing Israel as a career-enhancer—equivalant of Jewish man bites Jewish dog—that saved struggling pundits from obscurity…Others still, largely assimilated, resented Israel for further complicating their already conflicted identity. Did some American Jews prefer the moral ease of victimhood, I asked myself, to the complexities of Israeli power?…I could not help questioning whether American Jews really felt as secure as they claimed. Persistent fears of anti-Semitism impelled them to distance themselves from Israel…”
This fanciful analysis overlooks another possibility, which is reality itself. The overwhelming majority of American Jews—journalists and others—do not believe in the Zionist worldview which so captivated Michael Oren as a teenager. His Zionist youth group leaders evidently were very convincing in advancing their doctrine that Jews outside of Israel were in “exile,” and that Israel was the Jewish “homeland.” He followed their ideological imperatives, abandoned his American “exile” and emigrated to Israel. But most American Jews reject Israel’s presumptuous claim to be the “nation-state” of all Jews. They consider the “nation-state” of American Jews to be the United States. Rather than living in “exile,” they consider themselves quite at home, Americans by nationality and Jews by religion, just as other Americans are Protestant, Catholic or Muslim.
In fact, Oren’s notion of Jewish identity has little to do with Judaism, a religion of universal values which uniquely held that all men and women, of whatever race or nation, are created in the image of God. His view, instead, is one of tribalism, which he understands has little appeal to most American Jews. He writes: ‘More tormenting still were the widening gaps between Israel and American Jews. Whatever our differences, I insisted, and however disparately we practice our religion, we still belonged to the same tribe…I could not imagine anyone not being thankful for belonging to it.”
Of particular concern to Oren is that younger American Jews did not believe they were members of a “tribe,” but had an obligation to advance Jewish morals and ethics, to pursue Tikkun Olam, the mandate to repair the world. He laments that “this concept derived from the medieval Kabbalistic idea of reconnecting with the divine light of creation. But in its 21st century American Jewish interpretation, it became a call to rescue humanity. To liberal American Jews especially, Tikkun Olam served as Judaism’s most compelling commandment, almost a religion in itself…It tended to sideline Israel as the focal point of American Jewish purpose…The drift away from an Israel-centric American Jewish identity distressed me.”
Ally has come under widespread criticism from many prominent American Jewish voices. According to The Atlantic’s Wieseltier, known as a vociferous supporter of Israel: “Oren might instead consider the possibility that it is not fear of anti-Semitism that impels his brethren in America to distance themselves from Israel and its often controversial policies, but the policies themselves…American Jewish insecurity? You must be kidding…Our problem over here is not Jewish self-hatred but Jewish self-love, we are secure to the point of decadence.”
Foreign Policy editor Philip Rothkopf, a former Columbia University roommate of Oren, declares: “He proposes their [American Jewish journalists] critique of Netanyahu is similar to the age-old, anti-Semitic image of the Jew as the ‘other’…
Nowhere does he entertain the possibility that those critics might just be right and their views motivated by the same hope for a better future for the U.S.-Israel relationship or for Israel itself, as are his. This view is not just wrong, it is profoundly, offensively wrong…He is rationalizing his view with perspectives and analyses that twist reality, pervert his analysis and make it hard for him to accept the idea that perhaps these criticisms don’t come from American Jews because of their flaws but because of their strengths.”
In an article titled, “Michael Oren, You Hardly Know Us At All,” Forward editor Jane Eisner notes that, “The pluralism Oren ridicules is now built into the DNA of American Jews…We feel accepted here because we are, and that leads many of us to broaden that acceptance to those not as privileged. Of course, the president looks awkward wearing a in the official Seder photograph, but that image serves as a powerful acknowledgment that our religious tradition is on an equal footing with the Christianity that once dominated America. The same cannot be said for Reform and Conservative Jews in the Israeli religious context.”
There is little introspection in Oren’s book. He never mentions the long history of Jewish opposition to Zionism and he seems genuinely unaware that his making the State of Israel into a virtual object of worship is engaging in idolatry, which Judaism abhors. He states many times that Israel and the U.S. share “common values,” but this is hardly the case. American nationality is not based on common race, religion or ancestry but upon a common commitment to the idea of freedom. “If you shed one drop of American blood,” Herman Melville wrote, “you shed the blood of the whole world.”
Our society champions freedom of religion. In Israel, there is a theocracy in which non-Orthodox rabbis cannot perform weddings, funerals or conversions. At the present time, sadly, Israel represents the tribalism Oren embraces. This, however, is not a “common” value.
It disturbs Oren that “American Jews prefer comfort to sovereignty.” But it is not “comfort” with which American Jews identify, but an American identity that guarantees freedom and equality to all citizens, regardless of background. They already exercise sovereignty, as Americans.
Oren abandoned America to join his “tribe.” Zionism did a good job of alienating him from his native country. In this sense, it remains a uniquely subversive enterprise. It is still doing its best to alienate young Americans from their country. Few, however, are heeding its call and following in Oren’s footsteps.
Oren laments that not very many are following in his path. In understanding this fact, however, he does at least recognize that Israel and American Jews are going in decidedly different directions. In that sense, his book serves to illustrate the ever-growing gap between American Jewish values and Israel’s exercise of power—perhaps a different result than the author intended. But he has done us the service of making Zionism’s worldview clear to all, something we seldom encounter, since obfuscation serves a philosophy such as this far better than clear explication.
Allan C. Brownfeld is a syndicated columnist and associate editor of the Lincoln Review, a journal published by the Lincoln Institute for Research and Education, and editor of Issues, the quarterly journal of the American Council for Judaism.