Michael Oren Is Challenged for Attack on President Obama and American Jewish Critics of Israel

In his controversial new book, Ally: My Journey Across The American-Israeli Divide, Israeli ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren, a native-born American who abandoned his citizenship and emigrated to Israel, launches an attack on President Barack Obama and upon American Jews who do not provide total support for Israel.

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 step-father abandoned him. He also makes a series of charges about U.S. foreign policy which have been widely challenged. In his review of the book in The Washington Post (June 28, 2015), 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.”

Oren charges that Obama is the first U.S. president to air differences with Israel in public. He charges that Obama is the first president to break with the principle that there should never be “daylight” in the relationship. To this, 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 relation¬ship as a way of pressing Israel to withdraw from the Sinai; Jimmy Carter clashed repeat¬edly 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 U.S. administration since Israel’s founding.”

When it comes to American Jews, Oren claims that Jewish journalists are largely responsible for the American media’s critical coverage of Israel. He writes that the antagonism toward Prime Minister Netanyahu shown by journalists such as Thomas Friedman of The New York Times, David Remnick of The New Yorker, and Leon Wieseltier of The Atlantic resembled “historic hatred of Jews.” Oren speculates that, “perhaps persistent fears of anti- Semitism impelled them to distance themselves from Israel and its often controversial policies.”

Philip Rothkopf, editor of Foreign Policy and 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 perspective and analysis that twist reality, pervert his analysis and make it hard for him to accept the idea that perhaps those criticisms don’t come from American Jews because of their flaws, but because of their strengths.”

Leon Wieseltier of The Atlantic states that, “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.”

Jane Eisner, editor of The Forward, wrote an article titled, “Michael Oren, You Hardly Know Us At All.” She 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 yarmulke 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. Another source of American alienation from Israel that the Netanyahu government has chosen not just to ignore but to exacerbate.”

In Eisner’s view, “Israelis are at fault for refusing to concede that Americans largely favor diplomacy over military action because the latter hasn’t worked out so well for us lately. And because we have myriad problems at home to address — problems like income inequality, persistent racism, assaults on free speech and reproductive rights, environmental degradation, a broken immigration system. The stuff Jews care about. A lot.”

Michael Oren declared that, “American Jews prefer comfort to sovereignty.” His Zionist philosophy causes him to misunderstand reality. American Jews are not Israelis in exile. They are American by nationality and Jews by religion, just as other Americans are Protestant, Catholic or Muslim. Israel’s claim to be the “nation-state” of all Jews ignores the fact that the nation-state of American Jews is the United States. It is Oren’s worldview which has skewed his understanding of reality. His book has divided Israel from the U.S. Government and American Jews in a manner different than the author expected when he wrote it. •