Copyright © 2015 by Michael B. Oren
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
ISBN 9780812996418
eBook ISBN 9780812996425
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Foreign Policy for permission to reprint excerpts from “ ‘A’ Jewish State vs. ‘The’ Jewish State” by Michael Oren and David Rothkopf, Foreign Policy, May 15, 2014. Reprinted by permission of Foreign Policy.
All photographs, unless otherwise indicated, are from the author’s collection.
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CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
FOREWORD: WASHINGTON, MAY 1970
Map of Israel
Map of Judea and Samaria/West Bank
THE PERFORATED PASSPORT
Growing Up American
Rising to Israel
3335335
A Free People in Our Land
Peace for the Galilee?
Wars of Words
Dark Decade
Six Days Re-created
Firing Line
An American Legacy
Hope, Change, War
Unclenched Fist
Hat in the Ring
Boot Camp
Metamorphic Month
UNBREAKABLE, UNSHAKABLE
New Realities
Map of Jerusalem
Daylight on Pennsylvania Avenue
At Home and on the Water
Obama 101
Blood Libel
Autumn of Malcontents
Chrysalis
Tremors
Blood and Treasure
Fish and Fighters
YEAR OF AFFLICTION
In Honor and in Shame
09185-016
Partners for Peace?
DNA
The Twenty Percent Solution
Conflagration
Wintry Spring
Through the Dust Darkly
Six Days in May
In Sunshine or in Shadow
ROLLER COASTER
Job 1:16
Hatchet Jobs
We Are One?
Zones of Immunity
Ducks and Bombs
How You Doin’, Shimon?
Polls Apart
Sandstorms
Last Lap
ALLY, GOODBYE
You Are Not Alone
Kerry Ex Machina
Surprises
The Things I Carried Home
A NIGHT AT KIBBUTZ NA’AN
Photo Insert
Dedication
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
PROMINENT FIGURES IN ALLY
By Michael B. Oren
About the Author
FOREWORD
WASHINGTON, MAY 1970
Crowded into the basement of a low-budget hotel, we stared at the double doors and counted the seconds. Even now, more than four decades later, I can still feel the anticipation. Along with some fifty other fifteen-year-olds in our Zionist youth movement, I bused from New Jersey to Washington, D.C.—my first-ever visit to our nation’s capital. I suppose we toured the Capitol, the White House, and the sites along the National Mall. My only memory, though, is of that basement glazed in fluorescence and the moment those doors swung open.
He marched in with curt, single-minded strides, ahead of his security guards, who struggled to keep up. A shorter man than the giant I imagined, he climbed onto the foot-high riser that served as a stage. “On behalf of the State of Israel,” he said, “I want to thank you for your commitment and support.” Or at least that is what I think he said, for his voice was also surprisingly small, almost bashful, and our cheers drowned him out.
We sang at the top of our teenage voices, “Heveinu Shalom Aleichem”—we welcome you in peace—and clapped until our hands grew numb. I could scarcely believe that I was seeing him. Here, only yards in front of me, stood the hero of the 1967 Six-Day War, the former commander of the Israeli forces who rescued Jewish dignity from the pall of the Holocaust, who enabled us—so American Jews claimed—to stand with our backs straight. And now he addressed us as Israel’s ambassador to the United States, the representative of the reborn Jewish State to the world’s greatest power.
He spoke only for a few minutes and concluded with a reticent smile. He then stepped off the improvised dais so that the guards could hurry him back through the doors. As he passed me, I managed to extend my hand. He accepted it—shyly, eyes looking down—and gave me a perfunctory shake. But that was enough. Silently, I vowed, “That is what I’ll be someday—Israel’s ambassador to America.”
His name was Yitzhak Rabin. And his life remained a model for mine. Following his example, I would devote myself to Israel, fight in its wars, and defend it from critics. I shared his vision of peace in spite of disappointments and bloodshed. Years later, together with countless candle-holding mourners, I filed past Rabin’s casket. Though I never had the opportunity to tell him about the impact he had on me, I never forgot that encounter in the basement. Or the pledge I made to myself.
Forty years would pass before the day arrived that I—however improbably—moved into Rabin’s Washington residence. With Israeli flags fluttering from its hood, a limousine pulled up and bore me along Pennsylvania Avenue. Through the wrought-iron gates, the limo glided onto the crescent-shaped driveway of the White House. I entered, nodding at the Marine guards stiffening to attention, and proceeded to the Oval Office. There, presenting my credentials to the president, I fulfilled that vow I made at age fifteen. I had become Israel’s ambassador to America.
If only a few miles, my journey from that Washington hotel to the White House was scarcely effortless and marked by at least as much tragedy as triumph. It took me from baseball fields to battlefields, from work in kibbutz fields to interrogations by the KGB. Burnt-out buses and peace-signing ceremonies, “dumb” classes and Ivy League halls, orthopedic braces and athletic medals, the scars of racism and lustrous family mementos—all lined that path. But the journey did not end in the Oval Office. Exiting that illustrious place, I embarked on the most tortuous and exalting passage yet.
This is the story of that journey. It crosses two countries and spans their extraordinary relationship. The United States and Israel are bound by ideas far older than both, by values they commonly cherish, and interests they have come to share. Theirs is the deepest bilateral friendship that either has sustained since Israel’s founding in 1948. And the reasons are many-sided and profound.
In addition to a spiritual affinity unrivaled by that between any modern nations, Israel and the United States are akin in their commitment to democracy. Listeners to Israel’s Declaration of Independence can easily hear the echoes of 1776. In America, Israel has an immensely generous source of diplomatic support and annual defense aid. In Israel, the United States has a stable, loyal, and militarily proficient asset—a scientific and technological powerhouse—and a pro-American island in an often toxic sea. Surveys regularly show that Americans and Israelis lead the world in patriotism and in their willingness to fight for their country. They are ideologically, strategically, and naturally allied.
Ally is a simple, beautiful word. It evokes warmth—indeed, fraternity—and its meaning is invariably positive. One may be a partner, but never an ally, in crime. Ally’s Hebrew counterpart is even simpler and more stirring. Ben brit, literally the son of the covenant, re
calls the circumcision rite and, beyond that, the Jewish people’s special relationship with God. Fittingly, a “special relationship” is said to exist between Israel and the United States. And like its biblical precedent, that brit is both physical and eternal.
Or, at least, in theory. For the reality is that, alongside their immemorial ties, the U.S.-Israel relationship includes bitter differences. The United States does not recognize Israel’s capital or its claim to large parts of the ancestral Jewish homeland. Israel frequently disagrees with America’s approach to peacemaking with the Palestinians and its friendship with Middle Eastern rulers who are technically or actively at war with the Jewish State. Vocal segments of the American Jewish community—a vital component in the alliance—are critical of Israeli actions, while Israel, in turn, does not validate the ways in which many of those Jews practice their religion. Israel is a contentious issue in the American press and on many American campuses. In recent years, public disagreements between the two countries’ leaders have become commonplace. America and Israel are allies in the most meaningful sense, yet their alliance is scored with divides.
This is the story of that alliance and also its divides, as experienced by one who treasures his American identity while proudly serving the State of Israel. My personal journey intertwines with that story and never more intimately than during the more than four years—from mid-2009 to late 2013—that I represented Israel in Washington.
This was a transformative period for America and a time of violent revolutions throughout the Middle East. Hundreds of thousands of the region’s people were killed, and the lives of millions more threatened. Israel and America grappled not only with the peace process and other complex bilateral issues, but with the terrorism and Iranian nuclearization that imperiled the world. The alliance would be subjected to enormous strains and its future questioned by commentators in both countries. On more than one occasion, the friendship’s very fabric seemed close to unraveling. At all times, though, it was my task—and my privilege—to hold it together.
The job of ambassador is widely misunderstood in today’s world, in which presidents and prime ministers can chat or shout at each other by videophone, without any need for go-betweens. But ambassadors not only represent leaders, they link peoples, and none more closely than Americans and Israelis. As Jerusalem’s envoy to Washington, I enjoyed a strategic viewpoint and a depth of access unattainable by even the most senior Israeli officials. That unique perspective is also part of the story.
It is a story for those who care about Israel and America and the challenges they face in the Middle East. It is a quintessentially American story of a young person who refused to relinquish a dream irrespective of the obstacles, and an inherently Israeli story about assuming onerous responsibilities. It is both a chronicle and a confession. Never before have I written in the first person, as a participant in history rather than a dispassionate observer of it. Instead of distant figures from the past, I have described my contemporaries, among them many colleagues, family members, and friends. More than a memoir, this is a testament. It is my tribute to the enduring bonds between the United States and Israel. This is the story of an alliance that was and, I unreservedly believe, will remain vital for both Americans and Israelis, and beneficial to the stability of the world.
Michael B. Oren
Tel Aviv, 2015
THE PERFORATED PASSPORT
The Embassy of the United States to the State of Israel should be a majestic structure. After all, it is the hub of America’s most special relationship with any foreign nation. And yet the building—squat and colorless—looks like a bunker. Perhaps the purpose is to discourage the hundreds of Israelis who daily line the sidewalk outside to apply for tourist visas, or to confound any terrorist who managed to skirt the concrete obstacles girding the grounds. Whatever its purpose, the bleak exterior reflected my mood as I entered the compound in early June 2009 and presented my passport.
That Yankee-blue document announced that I had been born Michael Bornstein, in Upstate New York and had been a U.S. citizen for more than half a century. With a faded cover and pages tattooed by customs, it had accompanied me on innumerable transoceanic flights. Presenting that passport at Newark’s Liberty International Airport, a twenty-minute drive from where my parents raised my two sisters and me, I beamed each time the inspectors wished me, “Welcome home.”
I believed in that passport—in the history it symbolized, the values it proclaimed. Awareness of the nation’s darker legacies, such as slavery, did not make me less sentimental about America. My eyes still misted during the national anthem, brightened at the sight of Manhattan’s skyline, and marveled at the Rockies from thirty-five thousand feet. Once, when reading aloud the inscription on the Lincoln Memorial and already choking at “four score and seven years ago,” my children rolled their eyes and sighed, “There he goes again….”
My affection for America sprang naturally. Growing up in the northern New Jersey town of West Orange, I played Little League baseball, attended pep rallies, and danced—in a lamentable banana tux—at my senior prom. My father, who fought in World War II and afterward served in the army reserves, took me to his unit’s reunions and to summer maneuvers to watch the color guards parade. I, too, marched, albeit across halftime gridirons puffing into a baritone horn. At Boys State, the American Legion’s semimilitary seminar, Vietnam vets put me and other selected seventeen-year-olds through a basic training in American democracy. The following year, I starred as Don Quixote in our high school’s production of Man of La Mancha, the musical based on Cervantes’s classic. Arrayed in rusted armor, I tilted at windmills and strained for the high notes while enjoining the audience to “Dream the Impossible Dream.”
Yet there were handicaps. Like many in our working-class neighborhood, my parents struggled financially. They could not afford to send me to the pricey Jewish summer camps, and instead packed me off to a rustic YMCA program with mandatory church services and grace before meals. Overweight and so pigeon-toed that I had to wear an excruciating leg brace at night, I was hopeless at sports. And severe learning disabilities consigned me to the “dumb” classes at school, where I failed to grasp elementary math and learn to write legibly.
Yet, fervently determined, I managed to overcome these obstacles. At fourteen I went on a draconian diet and slimmed down, forced myself to run long distances while keeping my feet straight, and forged myself into an athlete. Meanwhile, my mother lovingly showed me how to type on an old Fleetwood on which I began to peck out poetry. After publishing my verse in several national magazines, I was transferred into a “smart” class, taught myself grammar and spelling, and ultimately attended Ivy League schools. All the hallmarks of an American success became mine, I acknowledged, thanks in part to uniquely American opportunities.
If sentimental about the United States, I also felt indebted. From the time that all four of my grandparents arrived in Ellis Island, through the Great Depression in which they raised my parents, and the farm-bound community in which I grew up, America held out the chance to excel. True, prejudice was prevalent, but so, too, was our ability to fight it. Unreservedly, I referred to Americans as “we.”
Now I was about to forfeit that first-person plural. The Marine behind the glass booth at the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv examined my passport and wordlessly slipped it through the window. The coolness of his reception would soon become routine. Landing at Liberty Airport, I would never again be greeted with “welcome home.”
Americans, I would often remind Israelis, are painstakingly nice—until they are not. “Have a nice day” can become “screw you” in an instant. That morning, officials at the U.S. embassy were in courteous mode, expediting the security check, escorting me between the cubicles of the consular section. There passports are extended and new ones issued. Mine would be neither.
My knees felt rubbery and my shirt, already dabbled by the humidity outside, stuck to my flanks. Relief came in the teddy-bearish form of Lui
s Moreno, the deputy chief of mission, an old acquaintance. Luis brought me into the office of U.S. Consul General Andrew Parker, who sat behind his desk surrounded by mementos from his previous postings and fronted by a gold-trimmed Stars and Stripes. We exchanged pleasantries, griped about the khamsin—the gritty desert wind plaguing Tel Aviv—but could not ignore the reason for my visit.
Bespectacled, neatly goateed, Parker could be mistaken for a kindly professor if not for his undertaker’s tone. Raising my right hand, he asked me to repeat after him: “I absolutely and entirely renounce my United States nationality together with all rights and privileges and all duties and allegiance and fidelity thereunto pertaining.” I repeated those words while gazing at the flag to which I had pledged allegiance every school day from kindergarten through high school. Then, across his desk, Parker arrayed several copies of an affidavit. This reaffirmed “the extremely serious and irrevocable nature of the act of renunciation,” acknowledging that, henceforth, “I will become an alien with respect to the United States.”
I signed each copy, swearing that I knew precisely what I was doing and that I was acting of my own free will. I must have appeared shattered because Luis Moreno leaned over and gave me a hug. But the ordeal was not yet complete, Consul General Parker indicated. Officiously, almost mechanically, the consul general inserted my American passport into an industrial-sized hole puncher and squeezed. The heart of the federal eagle emblazoned on the cover of the document was pierced.
Growing Up American
How did I reach this unnerving moment? Back in the sixties, young radicals burned their passports and cursed their fascist country, “Amerika.” But my reverence for the United States had always been deep—deeper than any hole puncher could bore. No, renouncing my American citizenship was not an act of protest. It reflected, rather, a love for another land—not that of my father, but of my forefathers.
That love could not be presented in a passport, nor could it be renounced. When did it begin? There was the distant cousin who arrived one day from a far-flung place and gave me, an eight-year-old numismatist, a shiny coin inscribed with letters I recognized from Hebrew school. Somewhere, I intuited, people actually spoke that language. There were the nerve-fraying weeks of May 1967, when the enemies of those people amassed and my parents murmured about witnessing a second Holocaust. Then, the miracle. A mere six days transformed those victims into victors. Draped in belts of .50-caliber bullets instead of prayer shawls, paratroopers danced before the Western Wall in Jerusalem. They were our paratroopers, suddenly, our people.
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