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?’
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 MosheKahlon 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.
 |
| Michael Oren |
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.
 |
| Secretary of State John Kerry and ambassador Michael Oren at Ben Gurion Airport in March 2013 |
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?
 |
| Michael and Sally Oren (Facebook) |
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 fucking shit,” and
I have nothing else to say to him other than “I don’t like this fucking 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 fucking defund UNESCO. They fucking teach the fucking 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.
 |
Michael Oren with Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu and US Ambassador
Dan Shapiro in Jerusalem during President
Barack Obama’s visit to Israel in
March 2013 (Facebook)
|
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,” but it’s not the documentation
of an alliance. It’s the documentation of the failure of an alliance.
It’s a cri de coeur, that’s what it is,
for an alliance that should be in a much better place than it is.
I’m gonna take this conversation
somewhere. You don’t have to use any of this. We’ve been living here pretty
much the same amount of time. I’m older than you. I’m getting up to 40 years
here. I’ve done a lot of different things in Israel… I thought I knew this
country before I got in here. I got in here and found I don’t know squat.
This (Knesset) building?
(Laughs). This building is Israel. I’ll
tell you about three discussions I went to, on one day, last Thursday.
I went to a discussion in the
constitutional committee about whether the State of Israel should give grants,
advantages, to industries within the Gaza envelope area. That’s defined as
seven kilometers from the border. Seems like an open and shut case. Of course
you give them advantages. These guys have been under shell fire. All these
different NGOs show up and they say, “Wait a minute. If you give advantages to
the Gaza envelope, my factory in Eilat is going to close and my factory in
Afula is going to close.” Should a person who owns a factory in Sderot but
lives in Tel Aviv get those advantages? What happens if you own a factory
that’s 7 kilometers and 2 meters from Gaza? It was a fascinating debate, where
these NGOs were interacting with the elected officials.
Then I went to the lobby for Arab Book
Week. There is no Arab Book Week. I feel strongly about it. I was in there with
a Knesset member from Meretz and other Arab Knesset members. They’re on a
panel. There are Arabs there, with women with head coverings. Some writers. And
the entire conversation is in Hebrew (laughs). This is Israel.
Then I go to a huge caucus meeting,
attended by people from Meretz, Likud, Yesh Atid, my party, on educating young
Israeli people about transgenderism. There were maybe 100 transgender young
kids there.
Now all of this is happening about a two
hour drive from ISIS. Think about it. There were two extraordinary things: One,
this is happening a two-hour drive from ISIS. And two, I’m probably the only
person in the room who thinks this is extraordinary. I’m sureI’m the only one who is thinking, “holy shit, this
is happening here!”
 |
Michael Oren of the Kulanu party at the
swearing in ceremony for the 20th
Knesset, on March 31, 2015.
|
Why do I bring this up in this
conversation? Anybody who would want to in any way endanger this little pearl
of democracy, with all of its craziness, to me is being reckless and
unappreciative of what we have here. There’s a tremendous lack of appreciation
for what we’ve accomplished here. That doesn’t mean we don’t make mistakes. We
make huge mistakes. But as irreplaceable as the United States is for Israel as
the ultimate ally, we are an ultimate ally for the United States. You’re not
going to find anything (else) like this here. There’s a lot of talk in this
book about being on the right side of history. History’s going the other way.
There is no Iraq. There is no Syria anymore. And this alliance is crucial for
Middle East stability, and through Middle East stability is crucial to the
world. I deeply believe that.
Don’t get me wrong. You can have
disagreements. The Obama administration was problematic because of its world
view: Unprecedented support for the Palestinians. Reconciling with what Obama
calls the Muslim world; even the choice of the term is interesting. And
outreach, reconciling with Iran. From the get-go. You see that right from the
beginning. He comes into office going after Iran.
But (the administration) is also
problematic because the White House jettisoned the two core principles of the
alliance, which were “no surprises” and “no daylight.” Obama said it: I’m
putting daylight. And proceeds to put daylight, public daylight. And then surprises. I was
told that with previous administrations — I’m certainly going back to Clinton —
we were always given advance copies of major policy speeches. The Cairo speech
(that Obama delivered in 2009) was twice as long as the First Inaugural
Address. It touched on issues that were vital to our security. We never had any
preview.
How endangered are we? My impression, from the book, is that the
summer or fall of 2012 was Israel’s last opportunity to intervene militarily
against Iran.
I don’t know that for a fact. I really
don’t. I didn’t know it for a fact then.
How endangered are we on Iran because of the Obama administration?
You say nobody should want to endanger this pearl. But that’s what’s happened,
isn’t it?
It has happened.
The good news is that America is not just
the administration, as you know. America is America. America is the Congress.
My biggest fear is not the Obama administration. I am deeply concerned about
the future of the Democratic Party, with the progressive wing in the
background. I think we have to do much more to reach out to that progressive
wing. I would love to have had members of the progressive wing in the
Democratic Party sit in that caucus the other day. I think they’d be blown
away.
Which one, the transgender one or the
Arab Book Week one?
Either one. Either one. Hello?!
(Senator) Lindsey Graham has been here
many times and he’s an old friend, but he’d never been to the Knesset. I took
him to the Knesset. He was here just over a week ago. I took him to a plenary
session. I sat him down and what was the subject? You couldn’t make this up.
Homophobia in the health care system. He watches an Arab Christian woman up
there and give a speech, and he watches a Druze get up there and give a speech,
about homophobia in the health system. There’s people yelling at each other. It
was supposed to be a two-minute visit, but I couldn’t get him out of there. He
was fascinated, couldn’t believe this was happening. This is why I talk about
learning Israel in a different way. People don’t know it. This is our failure
too. People don’t know us.
Let’s go back to the question of the
United States and the danger (we face). We are in danger, but we’re not the
only ones. A lot of people think they’re endangered by this. One of the
ironies, as I mention in the book, is that Obama set out to bring Arabs and Israelis
closer together through peace. He didn’t. He brought us closer together, but
not through peace. He brought us together through our common anxiety over his
policies. Our relationship with the Gulf countries is probably closer than at
any time in our existence because of it. We’re living in a tremendously
perilous time.
My conclusion from your book is that America
prevented Israel from taking action to stop Iran thus far and isn’t going to
take action itself.
(On Israel’s non-intervention) I can’t
say that for sure. There might have been other factors.
You write about Washington “quashing” Israel’s
military option.
I don’t know. I wasn’t privy to that
decision-making process.
They’re not going to use force against Iran.
That’s for sure.
Well, there was a debate whether Obama
would ever use force. And I reach certain conclusions (in the book) about the
conditions under which they might. But in the summer of 2012 you had major
(Israeli) figures (urging no attack on Iran) — Meir Dagan; Gabi Ashkenazi;
Shimon Peres saying, “If the president says he’s not bluffing, he’s not
bluffing.” Now, in a recent interview with Ilana Dayan, Obama basically says
there’s no military option. What are we to say about that?
The bottom line is that the day that Obama
didn’t act against the Syrians (for their use of chemical weapons in 2013, and
thus failed) to maintain the Syrian “red line,” was the day that the debate
(over whether Obama was serious about his military option on Iran) stopped
here. Did you notice that? Just stopped. Dead. And everyone went quiet. An
eerie quiet. Everyone understood at that point that that was not an option,
that we’re on our own.
To me that’s a refreshing Zionist moment.
We realize we’re on our own. It’s a different topic, but I have a thing about
this regional peace conference with the moderate Arab states that everyone
keeps talking about here, certain parties. To me it’s running away from what I
believe is an Israeli Zionist responsibility: taking our fate into our own
hands. Waiting for the Saudis to somehow bring redemption? I don’t think it’s
going to happen.
This administration is in power for another
year and a half. How do you see it playing out on the Palestinian front?
It’s very important to note, and I say
this in the book, that when Obama says security relations are closer than ever,
it’s true. Security relations are closer than ever. It was also part of an
approach that said we can have daylight on diplomatic issues, but not daylight
on security issues. The problem is that in the Middle East, it doesn’t work.
Nobody believes it. They don’t distinguish between types of daylight where we
live. Impressions are paramount here.
In the last Gaza war, as you note, Obama used the word “appalling”
to describe the deaths of Palestinian civilians, a word he had last used to
condemn Gaddafi massacring his own people. You highlight again and again the
demands of Israel and the absent demands on the Palestinians, the misguided
tactic that makes the Palestinians harden their position. And now we face
efforts at the UN for statehood, and boycott efforts, and there’s still a year
and a half of this administration to go. How do you see that playing out?
Right now, not well. I don’t want to focus just on
the administration. I have to talk about what we’re doing too. It takes two to
make a bad tango.
The administration has a mantra: If you don’t make
moves on peace, if you don’t freeze (settlements), you’re going to be isolated,
you’re going to be boycotted, you’re going to be sanctioned. We all understood
this was a threat. When your parents say if you don’t clean up your room… it’s
a threat. I always thought it was the wrong approach. I say in the book,
Israelis make concessions when we feel secure. “If you do this, no matter what
anybody tries to do to you, we’re going to defend you” — that should have been
the approach. But it wasn’t. It was always trying to hit us over the head.
Maybe someone thought that if you beat Bibi on the head frequently enough,
he’ll give in. After all, they called him
“chickenshit.” Until he showed up in Congress and all of a
sudden he wasn’t chickenshit any more.
 |
Congress is not going to cut aid to us,
but there’s Europe, and that stick was flashed in front of our face an awful
lot. We can’t stop these Europeans. Sometimes I meet with European officials
here and I say, “Don’t you ever get sick of being America’s stick? Why don’t
you do something creative, not just be America’s stick?”
I refer to the Palestinian issue as one of Obama’s kishke (gut)
issues. It’s one of those core issues that he has.
This book, respecting you as a historian, reading you as a
diarist, it seems terribly worrying. You say we’re either at May 1948 or May
1967. Do you consider that Israel is facing potential disaster? You say this
book is a cri de coeur. How worried should we be about Israel’s place,
especially given that we have this incredibly problematic relationship with a
president who at the end there you quote saying that “America will be with you
in a war because that’s what Americans want” rather than “because that’s what I
want” or “because we’re allies with shared values”? So how bad is it?
There’s two stories, two sides to it.
Everything has two sides to it. As I say in the book, best case we’re May ’67,
worst case, we’re May ’48, because rarely in our history have Israeli decision
makers faced such a broad spectrum of monumental threats all at the same time.
ISIL is the least of them, in many ways. 100,000 rockets in Lebanon; NATO
doesn’t have 100,000 rockets. I don’t know a state in modern times that’s faced
anything like it. Last summer we were hit by twice as many rockets as were
fired by Nazi Germany at Britain in all of World War II. I’m talking about V1s,
V2s. 100,000 rockets. In the Cold War, countries built up rocket arsenals, missile
arsenals, in order not to use them. That’s not the case with Hezbollah. It’s
built it to use it.
We face the Iranian nuclear program. We
face instability along our crucial Jordanian border. Our security border is not
Jordan-Israel, it’s Jordan-Iraq. Insecurity in Sinai too. The Palestinian issue
going nowhere. BDS. Delegitimization around the world. That’s also a strategic
threat. It’s immense, it’s enormous.
And daylight, to put it mildly, with our key ally.
Yes. So I’ll give you a bad scenario. If
Hezbollah opens fire at us, we can’t neutralize them from the air. We’d have to
send our army in. They’ve put at least 25,000 rockets in houses underground.
We’re going to have to go into all those houses. You’re talking about a military
operation that’s going to take months, involve many, many thousands of
casualties. The army has put out its estimates of how many hundreds, if not
thousands of rockets will be hitting us every day. We’ll not only need Iron
Dome. We’ll need Diplomatic Iron Dome. Who’s going to protect us? Last summer
we had a case where the administration held up supplies of vital munitions.
We’re going to expend munitions; it’s not going to be a couple of weeks. These
are hard questions.
And therefore?
And therefore, we have to think
strategically, always. We had a difference of opinion on how to deal with
Obama, how to meet the challenge. I thought that if we could show more
flexibility on the Palestinian issue, we could dig in our heels more on the
Iranian issue. I thought if we didn’t sweat the small stuff so much, we could
be tougher on the big stuff. There was a difference of opinion (between me and
Netanyahu). It was like the Guiliani broken window thing: if you let the small
stuff go, people will assume you won’t stand up for the big stuff. It was an
honest argument. It was an argument that sometimes I won. But then I ran into a
problem. The moratorium (on settlement expansion agreed by Netanyahu in
2009-10), Bar-Ilan (Netanyahu’s 2009 speech in favor of the two-state solution),
all those things that Netanyahu did to try to go some way towards Obama (on the
Palestinian issue), he received no credit for. On the contrary.
Indeed. Your argument is not overwhelmingly compelling.
It is not.
And Netanyahu’s is not unreasonable.
And I think I’m rather honest in the book
about that.
Absolutely.
I felt that I was there to try to make
things better, but (the administration) didn’t make it easy for me. And then we
do things that aren’t smart. The United States will stick with us at the UN and
we’ll annex 960 dunams and build on it in the West Bank. What do you expect?
Yes, the administration committed what I think is a cardinal error in
disavowing the Bush-Sharon letter of 2004 (ruling
out an Israeli return to the pre-1967 lines) which I think was a great
diplomatic achievement. It gave space not only to us, it gave space to the
Palestinians. When Abbas gives that great interview to Jackson Diehl in which
he says Obama put me up a tree and then he went down the ladder and took the
ladder away, that’s what he was referring to. But we didn’t help. They (the
administration) erased the difference between building a balcony in Gilo and
building a neighborhood in Itamar, but we didn’t stand by the difference
either. We should have said no. This is a presidential commitment.
By the way, it’s a terrible precedent: a
president coming in and not recognizing a presidential (commitment). A lot of
our security understandings with the United States are based on presidential
commitments. It’s a source of worry.
 |
George W. Bush, right, and Ariel Sharon, left,
walk
together at the end of a joint press conference
in the
Cross Hall of the White House in Washington in
April,
2004.
|
Everyone
looks at this alliance as a type of litmus for the way America treats its
friends in the world. Even the Palestinians (look at it in that way). I was
shocked. We have these relations with Arabs in Washington that you can’t have
outside of Washington. At one point there were two different groups of
Palestinians who didn’t talk to one another, but I talked to both of them. When
Obama came out publicly against us on the settlements, it had the exact
opposite effect on the Palestinians than you’d think. It made them think, if
this guy does this to his friends, we can’t trust him. Amazing. President Bush
in 2007 — this is President Bush beat up by Iraq and Afghanistan — in November
convened the Annapolis Peace Conference. Very quickly, within like two weeks,
he got 47 almost heads of state, secretaries of state, including all the Arab
states, to convene in Annapolis. Obama now has trouble getting a couple of Gulf
Arab states to go to Camp David. That’s telling you something about the way
people have looked at alliances here. That’s why I said that the alliance with
Israel is vital to the United States too, and vital to the region. Everyone’s
looking at us.
It seems that Obama is the most dangerous
president there has been for Israel?
 |
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sits under a
portrait
of the first Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion
as he
speaks during a special cabinet meeting at the
Sde
Boker academy to mark 40 years since
Ben-Gurion’s
death. November 10, 2013
|
There’s dangerous in
different ways. Kennedy had a notorious relationship with Ben-Gurion. You want
to get scared, read
the protocol of Ben-Gurion’s talk with Kennedy in the Waldorf Astoria Hotel (in
1961), about Dimona. Eisenhower threatened to sanction us.
But we are now exposed to a potential nuclear threat by a regime
that wants us to be annihilated.
Yes. I can’t put a finer
point on it.
And that didn’t have to be. With a different president, that would
not have been (the case).
Er, yes. This is
ideological for him. Clearly ideological for him. It is hard-wired. Listen, one
of the first things he does when he gets into the Oval Office, even before
that, he’s talking about Iran. It didn’t have to be.
You know, I disagreed with
the prime minister’s decision to give the speech in Congress, but I certainly
agree with everything he said in Congress, which was the alternative (path to
tackling Iran). The administration gave a binary view: you’re either for this
deal or you’re for war.
Yes, the president was so disingenuous. He actually said words to
that effect.
But it’s false. Of course
there’s a better way of doing it: a better deal. A better deal through harder
sanctions and a credible military threat. Clearly. I suggest some ways in the
book why they reached this conclusion. But for us none of the rationales are
good. There are structural differences between the United States and us on
Iran. A big country, far away, not threatened, big military capabilities,
versus a small country, near, threatened, you know. But there’s also deep
ideological differences, worldview. It all boils down to two lines. Obama says
Iran is not North Korea, and Bibi says Iran’s worse than 50 North Koreas. It
all comes down to that.
Our margin for error with
Iran is exactly zero. The Iranians are smart. Ehud Barak used to always say,
they don’t play checkers, they play chess and they don’t play chess, they play
triple tier chess. So, they’re moving 100,000 rockets to Hezbollah. They’re
moving into Yemen. They’re coming across Iraq.
They’re out to destroy us?
They’re out to do many
things.
Yes, but what I care about the most is, Are they out to destroy
us?
We are one of the things
they want to achieve. I think it’s dear to their hearts. They make no secret of
that.
Our demise is something they would like to achieve?
Yes, it’s part of their
raison d’etre. And it may have deep, not just ideological, but maybe theological
roots, but they’re moving at us in various ways. One of the fears I express in
the book is that the Iranians are very smart. They observe. They observed what
happened to Gaddafi and what didn’t happen to North Korea. One guy gave up his
nuclear program and the other guy chose (nuclear) experiments. They saw what
happened.
They also saw what happened to Assad.
That was one of the most illuminating episodes in modern Middle East history.
It happened over the course of a couple of days. We discussed its impact on the
debate here. The Iranians also watched it and what did they conclude? They saw
how Assad went from being part of the problem to being the solution. The minute
he gave up whatever percentage of his chemical weapons program, he could barrel-bomb
his own people with impunity. That locution “Assad must go” disappeared from
the American vocabulary. Just disappeared. You think the Iranians didn’t notice
that? And they drew a lot of conclusions.
Let’s talk about Netanyahu for a second. I interviewed (former
foreign minister) Liberman last week.
Yeah, I read that.
He said, in
about six languages, that Netanyahu’s all talk. Is Netanyahu all talk on Iran? You write about his emphasis on
rhetoric.
That’s what he has in common with Obama.
But is he going to do anything on Iran?
I don’t know.
The man who feels that he is fated to be prime minister to protect
us from genocide, and who may have allowed himself not to act in the summer of
2012 because the Americans were pressing him, has the moment passed? I get the
sense that the moment passed and then I have people telling me that he just
doesn’t have the guts. That he couldn’t even face down Hamas.
I don’t know. I know this: What you said,
that Netanyahu is a man who views himself as a person in history, which is
different from many leaders. Ehud Olmert didn’t see himself as a person in
history. Not all leaders see themselves as transformative and as being born for
a certain moment. Of that I have no doubt.
Really what I’m asking you is: Are people going to look back in a
few years’ time and say that this is what they were talking about in Israel as
Iran closed in on the bomb and they were wiped out? And they were moaning about
this and moaning about that.
It’s happened before in history, hasn’t
it? (Laughs grimly) The whole conversation is very down here.
You’re in caucus meetings about transgenders…
I mean really, it’s crazy.
And they’re closing in on the bomb.
There are people who are dealing with
that. It doesn’t mean we can afford to overlook the suffering of people who
have sexual challenges.
By all means, I understand, I agree. And yet, in a few years’
time, I don’t want somebody to be looking back and saying, Oh, and that’s when
Israel was lost. That was the period when Israel was lost. Did you spend four
years in Washington when we missed the opportunity to protect ourselves and we
no longer had a protector there?
(Long pause) I can’t say. I don’t know.
You’re asking me about being privy to certain conversations that I wasn’t privy
to. The ambassador knows an awful lot…
No, I’m not asking you that. I’m asking you about your wise
assessment.
In the book I talk about my deep
ambivalence. On the one hand, I share that feeling that this is our historic
mission. There may have been a moment (for fulfilling that mission) in 2012. I
don’t know.
Our historic mission being?
Our historic mission is to ensure the
survival of the Jewish state and the Jewish people. That’s our historic
mission.
And there may have been a moment…?
 |
Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah
delivers a
speech shown on a screen during a rally
commemorating “Liberation Day,” which marks the
withdrawal of the Israeli army from southern
Lebanon
in 2000,
in the southern town of Nabatiyeh, Lebanon,
Sunday,
May 24, 2015.
|
And I was ambivalent (at that moment). My
daughter was getting married that summer and my whole family was coming. And
there was ambivalence because I knew what it would mean for our relationship
with the United States. The big question with the operation on Iran was not the
actual operation, which by all accounts would have been certainly complex, but
we always used to worry about (the fallout): D1, D2, D3. D1, D2, D3 was
Hezbollah. It was at that time we could still think about getting hit by Syrian
rockets. Iranian rockets. Who was going to defend us? Who was going to defend
our ability to defend ourselves? That was always the question. And we
understood already from the Second Lebanon War that this defense could not be
ensured from the air. Who was going to defend us from lawfare? Who was going to
defend us from condemnations in the UN Human Rights Council, from sanctions?
That was what I call the Diplomatic Iron Dome and I was not at all sure of it.
I am not at all sure of it.
Last summer shows that my fears were founded. Toward the end of the
book I mention the closing of Ben Gurion Airport. (Two-thirds of foreign
airlines, including all US carriers, ceased flying to Israel for a day and a
half after a rocket from Gaza struck a mile from the airport during last
summer’s war.) Now my good friend and former colleague Dan Shapiro (the current
US ambassador to Israel) explained to me that there’s a federal regulation that
says that if a rocket falls less than a mile from… Ask any Israeli if they
believe that.
Of one thing you can be certain: The next
war, thousands of rockets at Ben Gurion Airport. It was the single greatest
strategic achievement ever given to a terrorist organization. They closed this
country off from the air. There was a decision made (by the US administration
to bar US airlines from flying to Israel). What can I say? That’s going to tell
you something about if there’s another round. Is Hezbollah watching this? Is
Hezbollah thinking this? Hezbollah was watching last summer’s war very
carefully. So, yes, I have my fears.
On the other hand, as Obama hiimself said
in his last meeting with Bibi that I quote: “If war comes, we’re with you,
because that’s what the American people want.”
The way you write it, it was as though Obama was speaking through
gritted teeth: Unfortunately, because the American people want to stand with Israel…
Amazing remark.
Netanyahu does come out of your book quite well.
Does he? I didn’t set out
to write a book…
 |
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and then -ambassador Michael Oren
meeting with members of the Foreign Affairs Committee , September 30, 2013
in Washington,, DC
|
Do you think you could do this job?
I used to say I wake up in the morning
and say a little blessing that I don’t have to deal…He gets really about 4
hours sleep and he gets woken up constantly. The Israeli public don’t know the
depths of his exhaustion. I’m just dealing with one small aspect of his job.
His job is to deal with labor unions, and things you don’t want to know about,
party politics.
Would you like to be prime minister?
Don’t ask me that question.
You’d say no if you wanted to say no.
I’m going to give you the diplomatic
answer, which is that I will fulfill whatever role the people of Israel call me
to fulfill. That’s the line. But I have an appreciation, certainly, of that
part of the prime minister’s job. That, in itself, is a triple-time job: the
care and feeding of the American-Israel relationship.
Reading your book I’m not convinced that even if Netanyahu had
done all those things that you advised him to do — more empathetic in principle
on the Arab Peace Initiative, not building in isolated settlements, etc. — it
would have had any effect on this administration.
If there was a Labor government, I don’t
think it would have been much different.
Unless it was a Labor government prepared to take far greater
risks (on the Palestinians)?
Would a Labor government have had
problems with the Iranian nuclear agreement?
Yes, I think so. But on the Palestinians…
Even the Palestinians. At the end of the
day the Palestinians were not going to sign an agreement with us.
That’s such a great line in the book: Biden, during his 2010
visit, asks Abbas to look him in the eye and promise he can make peace with
Israel, and Abbas refuses.
Biden told me that story.
Both Biden and Dennis Ross told me that story.
And Biden goes back to Obama and tells him that story, or he
doesn’t?
Biden was a great friend,
he really was. In many ways.
I’m asking you: Does Biden then go home and say to Obama, I did
ask Abbas to promise me he can make peace, and he refused?
You’re dealing with a kishke issue.
One of the reasons I joined
Kulanu was because it gave me an opportunity to be the architect of a
diplomatic platform, which I published in the Wall Street Journal three months
ago, called The Two-State Situation. I think
that our position should be, as a matter of diplomacy, we support the two-state
solution. As a practical matter, think it out. We’re not just talking about
moving 80 to 100,000 Israelis. We’re talking about creating a state that has no
institutions, no economy, a corrupt, unelected leadership, which is incapable
of defending itself, even last summer when Abbas was going to be overthrown. So
how long is this state going to last? Really. No one is being realistic.
We should always say,
“We’re at the table ready to negotiate,” even if Abbas is not here. We should
limit where we build. We should go back to the Bush-Sharon formula. That would
go a long way to lessening the chances for boycotts. It would help our friends
in the Democratic Party tremendously.
The president is very
serious about the two-state solution and now maybe perhaps is not guaranteeing
that he’ll veto a French resolution (at the UN Security Council on Palestinian
statehood). I can’t guarantee you that they’re going to veto the French
resolution. But I do know that if we adopted that kind of policy, we could go a
long way to ensuring that the United States would oppose.
Assuming that Israel gets to the next presidency intact and given
your dealings with Hillary Clinton, how effective might she be as president in
healing this fracture? Is it fractured, broken, collapsed, in tatters?
Part of it was in tatters.
Certainly. When you have people in the White House calling your prime minister
what they call him, and the prime minister going and giving a speech without
informing the president, that’s not a very healthy situation.
I had a lot of hours
working with Hillary. She’s an incredibly formidable intellect, physically
robust. She’s of that generation that still has that warm place in her heart
(for Israel). Her formational experience with Israel was the Six Day War and
not, say, the First Intifada. But we’d still have to move toward her. We’d have
to meet her halfway. If she were president — and this is all highly
hypothetical — and we retained the status quo (on the Palestinians), we would
still be in a very difficult situation.
But there would be a level of empathy that there isn’t…?
But empathy only gets you so far. Even
Bush put a lot of pressure on us at various times. Think about the presidents
who had empathy for us who put a lot of pressure on us.
We couldn’t just sit back on our laurels
and not do anything. But she comes from a place of empathy.
In the book I wrote about our abortive
attempt to take our first vacation, in our fourth year (in late 2012), in
Mexico. I landed. There was Sandy Hook. A guy goes missing in Syria. We can’t
have a vacation. Hillary has some kind of physical breakdown. She gets sick.
This is not in the book. I call the prime minister from the cab. I called him.
I told him what happened. He got very upset. Fifteen minutes later he calls me
back again. “Is she okay?” Fifteen minutes later, he calls me back again. “What
am I going to do? Is she okay?” I was amazed by this. Suddenly you realize that
this guy actually cared for her. Why was he doing this? She was near the end of
her period as secretary of state. He was genuinely concerned. They had a
rapport. Did they agree on (all) things? They did not. But they had a rapport.
They go back. She understands certain things about Israel. She writes about it
in her book. She gets it. She also thought that the abandonment of Bush-Sharon
was a bad idea. Just tactically, it’s a bad idea.
(An aide comes in to call Oren for a meeting of his Kulanu
faction.) David, we
didn’t talk about Jews at all. There’s also a long section in the book about
relations with the press. I really wrote so much of the book for the American
Jewish community, to get in that discussion about us. (Sighs). Everything’s
Obama and Bibi.
***
How is it possible that
only now it is beginning to dawn on David Horovitz that we are really in
trouble? How could Oren himself had been
initially so wrong about Obama? It was clear already in 2008 when I wrote Facing
Iran, Alone that this would happen.
***
How on Earth did David
Horovitz come to the following conclusion: “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”? Especially after Oren said: “Everyone understood at that point that that
was not an option, that we’re on our own”.
Does David Horovitz
really believe that Israel would just sit there and wait for the Iranian bomb
to fall on Tel Aviv?
Horovitz is an experienced
journalist, yet he seems be like a deer caught in the headlights with his
questions regarding Iran: “They out to destroy us? Yes, but what I care about the most is, Are
they out to destroy us? Our demise is something they would like to achieve? But
we are now exposed to a potential nuclear threat by a regime that wants us to
be annihilated.”
