Ally

by Michael B. Oren

  Hours later, an ammunition-laden jeep picked me up outside our apartment and drove eight hours straight to Beirut. The boom of artillery fire—like oil drums thumping down stairs—hit me in the gut. We arrived at our headquarters, set up inside a church made of concrete so thick no shell could penetrate it. From the sandbagged portico, I watched, as if hallucinating, entire neighborhoods flaming with phosphorous and the night sky ablaze with tracers.

  I wondered when I would ever see Sally or be able to attend Princeton University, where I had been accepted into the doctoral program in Near Eastern Studies. The semester was set to begin in just a few weeks, but soldiers could not go home for overnight leave, much less travel abroad. Fortuitously, the IDF determined that my unit had sustained too many casualties and demobilized the few of us still unscathed. Scampering onto the back of a canvas-covered truck—a welcoming target for the snipers bristling along the serpentine road—I left Beirut behind me.

  —

  But I could not leave war, not while living in Israel. The following summer, when our first child, Yoav, was born, I turned to the obstetrician and vowed, “That kid will never wear a helmet.” He did, though, and so would his younger sister, Lia, and their younger brother, Noam. Already during the Persian Gulf War, in 1991, when they were still children, all three donned gas masks and took shelter in sealed rooms as Iraqi Scud missiles battered the country. Later, they lost a beloved relative as well as young people they knew to terror—so many that the thirteen-year-old Yoav cried to me, “Abba, I’ve been to more of my friends’ funerals than Bar Mitzvahs.”

  Six years later, Yoav, now strikingly handsome and strong, completed his training in a special IDF recon unit, a sayeret. During my paratrooping days, I took part in a handful of operations, but Yoav’s outfit undertook one almost every night. Knowing that, I wandered our neighborhood until dawn, worrying. Then, in 2004, a terrorist holed up in a house in Hebron began firing from behind his own children. While trying to extricate the kids, Yoav was shot.

  Rushing into Hadassah Hospital’s emergency room, I froze at the sight of my son’s bloody, shredded uniform on the floor. Thankfully, the doctors assured me that his wounds, while below the belt, were neither life-threatening nor incapacitating. Yoav’s friends needled him about having balls of steel, but that night I was more relieved than humored. For the first time in years, I slept soundly.

  Such successive traumas led Sally and me to wonder if we had indeed decided fairly. We decided consciously to fulfill our Zionist dream but, by doing so, denied that free choice to our children. “Did we make a mistake?” we asked them one Shabbat morning after breakfast. To our astonishment, they instantly replied, “Raising us in Israel was the single best thing you could have done for us as parents.”

  I would always cherish that response. It reminded me that having an Israeli family represented my proudest accomplishment, exceeding my youthful dreams. It justified all the slogging through the alfalfa and battlefields, the grappling with situations that any normal family would find nightmarishly abnormal. Yet we had prevailed. The backpack I shouldered that drizzly night I made aliya had blossomed into a furniture-filled home alight with laughter. And this was our home, rooted, in Israel.

  Wars of Words

  All of that—both the darkness and luminance—still lay years in the future. For the time, in September 1982, I left the hell of Lebanon and landed with Sally in idyllic Princeton. The program of Islamic philosophy, medieval and modern history, and Arabic, was rigorous, and my professors—including the preeminent Middle East scholar Bernard Lewis—superb. While studying, I also taught outstanding undergraduates and honed my political thinking. I came to respect Islam as a potent force in the Middle East, not just an expression of grievances but a deeply imbued worldview and catalyst for action. At the same time, I started doubting the staying power of those Arab states established by Europeans after World War I to satisfy long-defunct European interests. Weaken the kings and dictators at their helms, I concluded, and those states would fall apart.

  My thesis, on the origins of the Suez Crisis, also led me to some basic conclusions about America’s role in the region. In 1956, Egyptian ruler Gamal Abdul Nasser, backed by the Soviet Union, nationalized the Suez Canal and threatened Israel’s existence. Yet when Britain, France, and Israel—America’s friends—tried to stop Nasser, U.S. president Dwight Eisenhower turned against them. The invaders, Eisenhower concluded, represented imperialism while the Egyptian dictator somehow stood for liberation. Through America’s intervention, Nasser was saved, yet he remained ungrateful. Two years later, he tried to overthrow virtually all the pro-American Arab governments. A chastened Eisenhower appealed to Britain, France, and Israel for help. The lesson: when dealing with the shifting loyalties of Middle Eastern autocrats, stick with your stable, democratic allies.

  This was the first time in my life that I lived in America as an Israeli. That dual perspective enabled me to see the multidimensional ties between my two countries. Along with the common ideals and cultural affinities, I gained a clearer view of the long-term strategic interests binding them. The Middle East was becoming increasingly perilous—and not only for Israelis. The 1983 killing of 241 U.S. servicemen by a suicide bomber in Beirut, the subsequent kidnapping and murder of Americans by jihadist agents, and Libyan and Iraqi terror against American targets all underscored the fact that we faced identical enemies. Defeating them required the closest U.S.-Israeli cooperation. And that partnership proved vital not only to the security of the United States and Israel, but to the stability of the Middle East and regions beyond. Our alliance was beneficial to the world.

  That view certainty was scarcely popular at Princeton, though. The mood on many American campuses had turned against Israel and even against America. This was the legacy of the sixties revolutionaries who briefly occupied those quads, denounced the West, and embraced those they considered downtrodden. But, having failed to export their concepts much beyond the universities, the radicals locked the gates behind them and became educators.

  Their ideas found fullest expression in Orientalism, a book published in 1978 by Edward Said, a Columbia literary critic and spokesman for the Palestinian cause. Said denounced Middle East experts—the Orientalists—as “racist, imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric,” and accused them of abetting the region’s conquest by the West. Only by identifying “wholeheartedly with the Arabs” and becoming “genuinely engaged and sympathetic…to the Islamic world” could these scholars redeem themselves. They had to shun traditional Middle East professors such as Bernard Lewis and reject Israel, which Said maligned as the ultimate Orientalist project.

  Said’s book became canonical in many Middle East Studies departments, pressuring students and professors to prove they were not Orientalists. Israel’s history was subjected to withering revisionism. Among Israel’s most serious crimes, a self-styled school of new historians argued, was the “original sin”—a curiously Christian term—of expelling Palestinians during the 1948 War of Independence.

  Still, the transformation of Israel’s image was more than the product of just one generation of professors or even a single book. From the plucky David of the Six-Day War, Israel after the Lebanon War seemed to resemble a Goliath-like bully. Further challenging Israel’s reputation was its construction in areas captured in 1967—in East Jerusalem and in the “territories” of the West Bank and Gaza. Much of the world denounced these new neighborhoods and settlements as illegitimate if not illegal, and blamed them for precipitating the Arab-Israeli conflict.

  Such trends compelled me to stand my ground. I worked to expose Said’s Orientalism screed, noting that the first experts on the Middle East came from Germany and Hungary, neither of which ever colonized the region. “By condemning [the West’s] laudable curiosity about other cultures as imperialism,” I wrote, “Said planted a sequoia of self-doubt in the innermost courtyard of academic inquiry.”

  Defending Israel’s past, I acknowledged that
the IDF indeed ordered many Palestinians to leave their homes in 1948, but reminded readers that the vast majority fled after failing to destroy the Jewish State. This was a war of national survival in which Israelis could not surrender, because most of those who did were butchered. In those areas of Palestine conquered by Arab forces, not a single Jew remained. By contrast, all of the Arabs who stayed in Israel—nearly 160,000—became citizens. They and their descendants now constituted 20 percent of Israel’s population.

  Similarly, I recognized that the Lebanon War had tarnished Israel’s image but had not changed the reality of a Jewish state surrounded by vastly larger forces determined to destroy it. Some settlements, I admitted, were of questionable strategic and diplomatic value, but they were not the cause of the conflict. The Arabs fought Zionism for fifty years before the first Israeli settlers even broke ground. Hatred of Israel held the Arab states together between the 1948 and 1967 wars, both of which they launched to annihilate Israel. The terrorists, together with their Arab and Iranian state supporters, would still try to massacre us even if every settlement were removed.

  I held firm but the academic atmosphere regarding Israel remained toxic. Once, during a visit by the ambassador of Syria’s totalitarian regime, my department head, a retired State Department Arabist, exhorted me to refrain from posing difficult questions. Yet, when a spokesman for Israel’s government came to campus, that same professor publicly excoriated him, “Sir, I pity you!” This paternalist treatment of the Arabs, denying them agency and responsibility as adults, disgusted me. So, too, did the tendency to single out Israel. Any liberal, democratic state could be criticized, of course, but never more so than its monarchical and tyrannical neighbors.

  Still, Israel continued to draw fire, and not only from faculty members. The darling of the press after the Six-Day War, Israel by the 1980s was the focus of escalating media critiques. In addition to the Lebanon and settlement issues, news outlets faulted Israel for frustrating Palestinian aspirations. Subtly, the once-prevalent question “Why should terrorists target the Jewish State?” was supplanted by “What has Israel done to the Palestinians to drive them to such desperation?” And, propelled by the nightly news and the front page, this change in attitude penetrated one of the final bastions of unquestioning love for Israel. For the first time, prominent American Jews publicly disassociated themselves from the democratically approved policies of the Israeli government. A delegate of American Jewish intellectuals—one of my professors among them—met with a remorseless Yasser Arafat and branded him a man of peace.

  The downturn in Israel’s stature meant that I could no longer confine my counterarguments to Princeton. These had to be made on other campuses and before Jewish communities across the United States. I had to teach myself to speak passionately yet persuasively. Faltering at first, failing at moments that would still sting me years later, I learned that the most convincing speech emanated from the heart, avoided propaganda, and touched even the most flammable topics. “I want Israel to be the ‘good guy,’ ” I told one audience, “but when I put on a uniform, I will do everything to protect us no matter how it looks in the press.” American Jews, I said, had a duty to warn Israel “when a truck is bearing down on us,” but added that “I’d think a hundred times before making the recommendations for Israel’s future advanced by some of them.” I spoke about the challenges facing the Jewish people as a whole. “In America, the problem is a scarcity of Jewish identity, while in Israel, the problem is a superabundance. I, for one, would rather deal with a superabundance.”

  Over time, the names and locations of these lectures became blurred. Decades later, people would approach and flash a yellowed photograph of me attending some rally I embarrassingly no longer recalled. One occasion, though, stuck with me. On a frozen, wind-whipped football field in Yardley, Pennsylvania, under snapping Israeli flags, I waited for hours before alighting the bleachers and greeting a crowd of ten. My hands were too numb to hold my notes, so I spoke off the cuff about an Israel that remained worth fighting for and America’s irreplaceable friend. I would remember that speech in future years while appearing in comfortably heated halls and addressing thousands. The memory kept me centered, reminding me of my journey’s purpose.

  —

  Receiving postdoctoral fellowships from Tel Aviv University and Hebrew University, I returned to Israel in the mid-1980s. Later, I spent five years in the Negev desert, writing Israeli history at the Ben-Gurion Research Center at Sde Boker. Sally and I now had three children, all packed into a single bedroom at night, but during the day free to ride their bikes limitlessly in any direction. As a hobby, I rebuilt an old Willys jeep that ferried my family through the wadis and dunes, occasionally without breaking down.

  The Lebanon War ground on and the economy staggered under 450 percent inflation. But this was also a time of miracles. Israel airlifted tens of thousands of Ethiopian Jews, and, following the collapse of Soviet communism, absorbed nearly one million Russian and Eastern European Jews. Freed from the gulag, Yehudit Nepunyache and the underground activists who so inspired me achieved their dream. Occasionally, I would encounter one of them in the middle of some Jerusalem street and we would just stand there, two Israelis, staring at each other wordlessly. Yuli “Yoel” Edelstein, the former street cleaner, eventually became Speaker of Israel’s Knesset. After nine years of forced labor and solitary confinement, Prisoner of Zion Natan Sharansky became a free man in the Land of Zion and a minister in several Israeli governments.

  These wonders went unnoticed by Israel’s critics. On campuses they continue to accuse Israel of colonialism and ethnic cleansing, even genocide. Confronted with this onslaught, I could easily have stepped aside. Instead, I stood up for the state, both on the page and in the classroom. The objective was not to justify everything Israel did but to judge it fairly by rational standards. Yet pursuing even that modest goal left me isolated, often a lone voice in an increasingly one-sided harangue.

  Perhaps I had never fully escaped my high school role of Don Quixote, the protector of outmoded causes. But Zionism, for me, was far from passé and Israel’s enemies were no mere windmills. Unlike the Don, driven to an early death by his futile struggles, my quixotic efforts for Israel were enlivening. And the only cost I paid was professional. Publisher after publisher rejected my books, precluding an academic career. Though Sally never gave up on me as a writer, my closest friends urged me to show mercy on myself and find some other profession.

  Dark Decade

  Stymied in academia, I tried my hand at managing a major software company and ghostwriting for the legendary Israeli statesman Abba Eban. But the high-tech bubble burst and Eban tragically passed away. To pass the time while unemployed, I wrote several novels and a screenplay about Orde Wingate, the storied British general who pioneered modern guerrilla tactics during World War II and taught Israel’s founders how to fight. The novels came painfully close to being published, and the screenplay, though twice optioned, never reached production. Barely able to support my family, for the first time I wondered if I could afford to remain in Israel.

  Then, in 1992, Yitzhak Rabin was elected prime minister. The man who had motivated me as a teenager to follow in his ambassadorial footsteps now inspired me with his leadership and his principled vision of peace.

  That vision appeared near realization a year later, when President Bill Clinton embraced Rabin and Yasser Arafat on the White House lawn. The Oslo peace process, named after the city where it was secretly negotiated, called for staged Israeli withdrawals from the territories and the creation of an autonomous Palestinian Authority. Though not spelled out in the accords, the process would presumably culminate in the emergence of a Palestinian state living side by side with Israel. A century of bitter conflict would end.

  The Oslo process sparked both optimism and fear in Israel. On the night of the signing ceremony, I stood atop an office building in downtown Jerusalem. From there, I could see the city’s Arab areas sparkling with
holiday lights while the Jewish neighborhoods remained darkened. I, too, was skeptical of a rapidly reached peace, and not only because of Arafat’s bloody past. Lacking stable institutions and farsighted leaders, the Palestinians seemed unlikely to maintain a cohesive state or a long-term peace with Israel. Their identity was heavily dependent on rejecting ours. True reconciliation, rather, would take many years, perhaps generations, to achieve—much as it did among Germany, Great Britain, and France.

  Yet, still, I supported the process. Even if we could not immediately achieve peace, we were morally bound to lay its foundations. We had to convince the world and, more importantly, our own children, that Israel had done its utmost to avoid confrontation. Hundreds of thousands of Russian and Ethiopian Jews were arriving in Israel, and absorbing them required beating some swords into plowshares. So, too, did transforming our economy, long girded for war, into a global, high-tech contender. And while the Land of Israel—including the West Bank—remained our birthright, sustaining it came at a rising international price.

  Moreover, I believed in Rabin. Having obtained an invitation to the signing of the Israel-Jordan peace treaty in Israel’s Aravah desert in October 1994, I watched as the prime minister and King Hussein warmly clasped hands. Hundreds of white doves and thousands of balloons in the signatories’ national colors were released over the rugged, tawny terrain. Upward they soared toward clouds pierced by a rainbow that, just at that moment, bridged both sides of the border.

  The realization of Israeli-Jordanian peace coincided with the fulfillment of my dream of working for Rabin. I secured a job in the Prime Minister’s Office, as Advisor on Inter-Religious Affairs. I did not report directly to Rabin, though I often encountered him in meetings and passed him in the halls. Sometimes I would shake his hand, amazed that this was the same lax grip that so seized me thirty years before and fixed my life’s direction.