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Thursday, July 23, 2015

Israel's Questionable Quixote
What Michael Oren Gets Wrong in "Ally"
Martin Indyk

MARTIN INDYK served as U.S. Ambassador to Israel from 1995 to 1997 and again from 2000
to 2001. He is Executive Vice President of the Brookings Institution.

It’s not easy to be the Israeli ambassador to the United States, Israel’s most important ally.
Anwar Sadat, the president of Egypt in the 1970s, once pointed out that “the United States
gives Israel everything from a loaf of bread to a Phantom jet.” At the time, he was
exaggerating about the loaf of bread. He could never have imagined that, 50 years later,
Israel would be the largest recipient of U.S. military assistance (to the tune of over $3 billion
a year), that its prime minister would be invited to address joint sessions of Congress more
often than any other foreign leader, and that its defense and intelligence relations with the
United States would become even closer than those between the United States and the
United Kingdom.

The U.S. relationship with Israel is so deep and broad that an ambassador’s job is difficult,
complicated, relentless, and at times overwhelming. The person in the role faces a friendly
Congress, a hostile media, a large and diverse Jewish community, and a broad and attentive
public. On top of that, the ambassador has to attend to the job’s principal responsibility:
representing the Israeli government to the administration in Washington and its vast
bureaucracy.

The ambassador can face an even tougher crowd at home. Candidates are jointly appointed
by Israel’s foreign minister and its prime minister. Given the nature of Israel’s fractured
politics, the ambassador’s bosses are rarely from the same party; if they are, they are even
more likely to be bitter rivals. The prime minister usually insists that sensitive reports not be
shared with the foreign minister, which constantly puts the ambassador in an invidious
position.

The predicament has been exacerbated in recent decades by Israeli prime ministers’
penchant for seeking a confidential backchannel to the U.S. president. The practice started
with Yitzhak Rabin in the 1990s and has continued ever since. Benjamin Netanyahu, who
was first elected prime minister in 1996, defeated in 1998, and then reelected in 2009 for
another three terms, has used his lawyer, Yitzak Molho, for this purpose. Occasionally, when
the prime minister trusted his ambassador, that person would be kept in the loop. Ehud
Olmert’s ambassador, Sallai Meridor, for example, would accompany the prime minister’s
chief of staff, Yoram Turbowitz, to White House meetings.

But more often than not, the ambassador would be excluded from meetings and might not
even be informed that they were taking place. And as soon as senior U.S. officials realized
this, they knew they could stop wasting their time on official channels. Such was the
particular predicament of Michael Oren, whom Netanyahu appointed as Israeli ambassador
to the United States in May 2009.

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At the time, Oren was neither a diplomat nor a politician. Although he was a historian by
training—he wrote an excellent book on the 1967 Six-Day-War—and a visiting professor at
Georgetown, he wasn’t an academic either. In fact, his principal qualifications were that, as
an American who immigrated to Israel in 1979, he spoke perfect English and that, as a
reserve officer in the Israel Defense Forces, he had honed his skills as an accomplished and
witty spokesman.

And so he became the media-obsessed Netanyahu’s chief spokesman to the U.S. public and
Congress. As Oren explains in this often startlingly frank memoir, he barely knew Netanyahu
and did not agree with the prime minister’s approach to the Palestinian issue or his
settlement policy. But he knew how to talk to Americans, and that was his assignment. “I
have three words of advice for you,” Netanyahu told Oren in one of their first meetings after
his appointment. “Media. Media. Media.”

It didn’t take long for Washington to understand Oren’s directive. Despite increasingly
desperate attempts to secure a meeting with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, she had
no time to meet with him. “The Secretary, I was told, did not receive ambassadors.”
Historically, that rule has applied to ambassadors from most countries, no matter who sat in
the secretary’s seventh-floor suite. But the Israeli ambassador was usually the exception
because of the special nature of the relationship between the United States and Israel. Not
so, apparently, in Oren’s case.

Further, as Oren tells it, when the Israeli prime minister or defense minister came to town, he
would more often than not be left standing outside the offices of the principals, later piecing
together snippets of what occurred inside. Denied a role in managing the relationship at the
top, he pursued his assigned task of spokesman with determination and, in my view,
considerable skill. But as he readily admits, it was a quixotic mission. (Indeed, Oren likens
himself to Don Quixote seven times in the course of his account.)

By the time Oren took up his post, Israel had occupied the West Bank for 42 years, and most
in the U.S. media had grown tired of it. As Oren keenly understood, an Israeli ambassador
could ameliorate the animosity when his prime minister was engaged in efforts to make
peace with the Palestinians. But there was little a spokesman in Washington could do to turn
the tide when a right-wing prime minister such as Netanyahu combined deep skepticism
about peace with the Palestinians with an expansive settlement policy in the West Bank and
east Jerusalem. Making things all the more difficult was the fact that a progressive
Democratic president now inhabited the White House. In his first meeting with Netanyahu,
Barack Obama demanded a complete settlement freeze in Jerusalem as well as in the West
Bank. Relations between the Netanyahu and Obama administrations went downhill from
there. By the time Oren departed Washington four years later, they had become toxic.

During his tenure, Oren was at a loss. He tried in vain to convince the prime minister to
launch a new initiative with the Palestinians or at least confine settlement building to the
Jewish suburbs of east Jerusalem and the large settlement blocs. In his frequent media
appearances, Oren was usually reduced to repeating that the U.S.-Israeli relationship was
“unbreakable and unshakeable,” notwithstanding the latest crisis. But he knew the truth. As
he admits, he had been consigned to that most unpleasant of diplomatic roles—to be, as the
seventeenth-century British diplomat Sir Henry Wotton once described, “a man of virtue sent
abroad to lie for his country.”

Little wonder, in these circumstances, that Oren became embittered, especially with
American Jewish journalists and pundits such as Tom Friedman and Leon Wieseltier,
members of his tribe who had turned critical of his boss. He had come to Washington to be
the custodian of the special relationship and had ended up tilting at windmills. He could
travel across the American-Israeli divide but he could not bridge it.

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PROBLEM PRINCIPLES

Unlike Oren’s earlier books, Ally is not a work of history. It is a memoir, complete with
anecdotes about the sorry state of his residence in Washington, the parties he hosted, and
memorable encounters with hostile audiences. Oren writes well, and readers interested in
what it’s like to be an Israeli ambassador in Washington won’t be disappointed. But nobody
should mistake the book for an insider’s account of what went so disastrously wrong in the
U.S.-Israeli relationship during Oren’s tenure. Oren was not really a witness to this particular
chapter of history; he was peeping through the keyhole.

For that reason, one should be particularly skeptical of his analysis of it. He claims that
Obama bears primary responsibility because the president supposedly violated two hallowed
principles of the special relationship: no daylight and no surprises. Any historian of the
relationship, as Oren previously was, would know that there are many examples of daylight
between U.S. and Israeli positions, especially when right-wing Israeli prime ministers insist
on acting against the policies or interests of the United States. There was indeed no daylight
between Bill Clinton and Rabin, or George W. Bush and Olmert, because they were partners
in the pursuit of peace (although the Council on Foreign Relations’ Elliott Abrams, who was
Bush’s Middle East adviser at the NSC, chronicles some daylight that emerged even there
[1]). Conversely, Netanyahu and Ariel Sharon became unwelcome in George H.W. Bush’s

Washington, and Clinton and Netanyahu had a fraught relationship (as Oren attests)
precisely because Netanyahu was acting in ways that conflicted with the Clinton
administration’s policies.

Oren is correct in noting that Obama believed in putting some distance between the United
States and Israel. But this was not an abandonment, as Oren claimed in a Wall Street
Journal [2] op-ed promoting his book [2]. Far from it. Obama was testing a theory that he
brought with him to the Oval Office: that he could help Israel by rebuilding U.S. influence in
the Arab world. It was wrong-headed, as Obama would soon discover, because by distancing
himself from Israel he lost the Israelis’ trust and therefore proved unable to deliver on the one
thing that would curry favor with the Arabs—a resolution of the Palestinian problem. Far from
abandoning Israel, however, during his time as president, Obama would take the U.S.
strategic relationship with the country to new heights. And in spite of the severe deterioration
in personal and political ties, Obama was adamant that the security relationship would never
be touched. In Ally, Oren recognizes this duality and repeatedly praises Obama for it.
Unfortunately, none of that appears in the op-eds he penned to promote the book.

Oren’s claim that Obama violated the “no surprises” dictum is also puzzling, especially when
the biggest surprise of all was Netanyahu’s March 2015 speech to a Joint Session of
Congress, cooked up by Ron Dermer, Oren’s successor as ambassador, and House Speaker
John Boehner behind Obama’s back. Israeli prime ministers have regularly surprised U.S.
presidents on matters of vital interest when confidentiality required it. Rabin negotiated the
Oslo Accords with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat behind Clinton’s back. Similarly, in 1998,
Netanyahu tried to negotiate a far-reaching agreement with Syria’s Hafez al-Assad without
Clinton knowing.

Obama decided not to inform Israel, or any other U.S. ally, about the opening of secret
negotiations with Iran in 2013 for a simple reason. Relations between the United States and
Iran had become so fraught and politically contentious that if exploratory talks were not kept
secret they were bound to go nowhere. The talks were not a betrayal of Israel; they were,
among other things, an attempt to help deal with a potential existential threat to Israel by
negotiating meaningful curbs on Iran’s nuclear program.

At any rate, the deterioration in the special relationship has little to do with these supposed
violations of principles that have been regularly breached by both sides. Nor is it about bad

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chemistry, even though Netanyahu’s mercurial personality—Oren describes Bibi’s rage as

“monumental”—did not mix well with Obama’s legendary detachment. The problem is more
fundamental: Obama and Netanyahu disagree on matters of war and peace in the Middle
East. And that problem is not just between leaders; it increasingly divides the people they
represent as well. Sadly, Oren’s book and his efforts to promote it have only widened the
chasm.

Copyright © 2015 by the Council on Foreign Relations, Inc.

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Links
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Tested-Zion-Administration-Israeli-Palestinian-Conflict/dp/1107031192
[2] http://www.wsj.com/articles/how-obama-abandoned-israel-1434409772

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