Years of conducting SWAT-like arrests in the West Bank had rendered the IDF unprepared for large-scale fighting in Lebanon. I received a rifle that fell apart in my hands and had to pilfer a helmet and flak jacket. No instructions arrived from headquarters, leaving our small group of officers to work throughout the night devising press messages on our own. Luckily, we were joined by Dan Gordon, an IDF veteran and screenwriter of blockbusters such as The Hurricane. At the first report of war, Dan abandoned cozy Hollywood, got on a plane, and again risked his life for Israel. In a dinky rental car, Dan and I crisscrossed the front, briefing journalists and dodging Katyusha rockets. One of the missiles hit just up the road from our base and killed twelve reservists. Another struck on the far side of a tree where Dan had stopped to relieve himself. Shrapnel peppered the trunk but left Dan unscathed and relieved indeed.
Between assignments, I dashed off to Haifa’s Rambam Hospital, where my daughter, Lia, was serving as a medical social worker with the Golani Brigade, which took the brunt of the IDF’s casualties. Almost a replica of her mother—freckled, hazel-eyed, whimsically self-effacing —Lia was overwhelmed by the influx of wounded. She cried in my arms but then, just as another ambulance arrived, she pulled away and ran, utterly composed, to meet the stretchers.
Finally, international pressure produced a cease-fire, but before it could go into effect, Israel mounted an offensive. The objective was to enhance the IDF’s ground position, but the operation only brought us additional censure from abroad and more than thirty military funerals. Just before dawn, on a crater-pocked Lebanese road with flares streaming tearlike down the sky, Dan Gordon and I encountered a squad of Israeli commandos. Weighed down by their weapons and their faces grimy with fatigue, they nevertheless advanced unfalteringly, still determined to fight. Gazing at them, I thought, “You deserve better.” Israel could never again be unprepared.
At the conclusion of thirty-four days of combat and 165 Israeli fatalities, with Hezbollah unbowed and world opinion deploring us for displacing thousands of Lebanese, the Second Lebanon War seemed even more ill-conceived than the first. Returning dejected to our base after the cease-fire, I ran into Natan Sharansky. Short but pugnacious, he had quit the Israeli government in protest over the Gaza withdrawal and joined the Shalem Center. There we endlessly debated the Disengagement. The former Prisoner of Zion insisted that Israel’s departure from Gaza strengthened the terrorists, while I countered that it also strengthened our case against them. Now, looking up at my bedraggled uniform, Sharansky grinned and asked, “Do you still think the Disengagement was a good idea?”
The answer was both yes and no. Israel could settle those parts of the territories vital to its defense but not those containing large numbers of Palestinians. Yet Israel could not abandon areas from which terrorists could shell our biggest cities and industrial centers. While uncomfortable with the word occupation—a people cannot occupy its own homeland—Israel, I believed, needed to preserve its democratic and Jewish character. Consequently, Israel needed to establish a reality in which the maximum number of Jews would live within Israel and the Palestinians would not be under our rule. We needed to define borders Israel could defend.
Speaking for the IDF sharpened not only my political thinking but also my media skills. Reserve service prepared me to handle hostile questions and enabled me to log hundreds of interview hours under the most stressful conditions. I worked with some of the world’s foremost correspondents. Among them was John Roberts, then of CNN and later with Fox, oblivious to fire as he reported from the Lebanese front, and Anderson Cooper calmly broadcasting as 155 mm cannons blasted around his ears. Ann Curry of the Today show once came to our house to film a segment on “The Oren Family at War.” Jeffrey Goldberg, a good friend and fellow IDF veteran who reported for The New Yorker, never tired of reminding me of the Israeli commander who jokingly asked whether the journalists I escorted were anti-Semites. “No,” I replied matter-of-factly. “They’re NBC.”
An American Legacy
At the conclusion of each crisis, I came home, exchanged my fatigues for office clothes, and returned to writing. Success, I discovered, could be as harrowing as rejection, as people wondered whether my next book would rival Six Days of War or if I was merely a “one-trick pony.” My friends suggested I write a slim volume on a narrow topic—a single battle, say. Instead, I decided on a sweeping survey of more than two hundred years of history.
The idea first occurred to me in graduate school, when I heard about a troop of Civil War veterans who served in the Egyptian army and introduced Arab officers to American notions of patriotism and democracy. Their story surprised me since I subscribed to the widespread notion that America’s interest in the Middle East began after World War II, when the United States became dependent on Arab oil. But the presence of Rebs and Yanks on the Nile in the late 1860s suggested that American involvement in the region began much earlier, and was far more nuanced.
Now, with the United States so critically engaged in the area, I felt that Americans needed a sense of this legacy. So when an editor friend of mine, Bob Weil, asked me at dinner, “What is the one book about the Middle East that needs to be written but hasn’t?” I answered unhesitatingly, and scribbled a table of contents on my napkin.
That serviette signaled the beginning of another four-year period of negligible sleep and limitless fascination. I read about how the United States waged its first foreign war against the Barbary Pirates of Libya, Tunisia, and Morocco, and built its first overseas universities in Istanbul, Cairo, and Beirut. I learned that the Arabs were once dependent on American oil. The Middle East, for its part, influenced the making of the Constitution, fired the imaginations of authors such as Mark Twain and Herman Melville, and inspired freedom fighters from Frederick Douglass to John F. Kennedy. I recorded the single best American insight into the Middle East—by former Union Army General-in-Chief George McClellan, who in 1874 warned that the United States would never understand its peoples “so long as we judge them by the rules we are accustomed to apply to ourselves.”
The most startling revelation of all, though, was the essential tie between the idea of America and the concept of a Jewish state. Indeed, in the minds of many early Americans, the two were indivisible. Regarding themselves as the “New Israel” in a new promised land, the Founders’ generation—Christians all—felt a powerful responsibility for restoring the Old Israel to the original Promised Land. “I really wish the Jews in Judea an independent nation,” John Adams, America’s second president, professed. Discovery of this “restorationist” strand in mainstream American thinking came as a shock to me, and a deep source of gratification. I felt as if Adams was validating a belief that quietly guided my life. Beyond their common strategic interests, Israel and the United States were spiritually and morally bound. That conviction could be traced back to many American leaders, not only Adams. At the height of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln pledged that he, too, would work to restore the Jews to their homeland once America was reunited.
These findings were compressed into six hundred pages—and another hundred of notes—in a volume I titled, Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East from 1776 to the Present. Like Six Days of War before it, I strove to make the text accessible to all readers. They could learn about the Middle Eastern roots of “The Star-Spangled Banner” and the American roots of Arab nationalism. They could trace Hollywood’s romance with desert sheikhs to Washington’s occasional—and almost always unfortunate—fascination with Arab rulers. They could see images of America’s oldest war memorial, to the U.S. sailors killed by Libyan pirates in 1805, and the original Statue of Liberty, commissioned by Egypt, which featured a veiled Arab woman holding a torch. The gallery concluded with a horrific view of the twin towers’ collapse, with credit given to the photographer, Yoav Oren, the author’s son.
Despite its heft, Power, Faith, and Fantasy became an instant bestseller. The year was 2006 and Americans were still embroiled in t
wo painful Middle Eastern wars, with no end in sight for either of them. The book gave some meaning to this dolor by placing it in an historical context. Starting with George Washington, American leaders were always torn between their need to preserve economic and strategic interests in the Middle East and their urge to seed it with American ideas. And while the United States saw its task as enlightening Middle Easterners, the peoples of the area considered Americans infidels and interlopers. Negotiating with a representative of the Libyan pirates in 1786, Thomas Jefferson was told that the Quran commanded the destruction of all nonbelievers, Americans included. And yet, when President Thomas Jefferson later made war on Libya, he dreamed of transforming it into a democracy.
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Because it determined that America had done more good than harm in the Middle East, Power, Faith, and Fantasy was sometimes portrayed as a conservative book. In truth, my politics were difficult to pigeonhole. Early in the Iraq War, I told a congressional subcommittee that the American invasion would speed the spread of Iranian influence westward to Jordan and the West Bank. I further predicted that Americans could not employ the savagery needed to keep Iraq together and, like the British before them, would soon lose their stomach for it and leave. “Strike back at terror,” I told the legislators, “but do not get involved in Middle East state-making.”
My opposition to the Iraq War should have alienated me from the Bush administration. Instead, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was reportedly “curling up” with my book at night and urging the press corps to read it. Vice President Dick Cheney invited me to discuss Middle East matters at the White House and to brief the president’s staff. Then, in May 2008, George W. Bush selected me to be the only Israeli-American delegate on his first official visit to Israel.
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At all-time depths in the American polls, Bush’s popularity soared in Israel. “Israel’s population may be just 7 million,” the president told a cheering Knesset on the eve of Israel’s sixtieth anniversary. “But when you confront terror and evil, you are 307 million strong, because the United States of America stands with you.”
As part of the delegation, I was invited to give a lecture aboard the aircraft carrier Truman, cruising somewhere in the Eastern Mediterranean. Two hours after taking off from Ben-Gurion Airport, the U.S. Navy transporter landed on the flight deck with an eyeball-catapulting jolt. But, as the cargo door lowered, the scene that unfolded was dazzling. Here, in the middle of the sea, with seventy warplanes and a crew of more than five thousand, rose an island of American might. Emblazed on the bridge, a quote associated with the thirty-third president said it all: GIVE ’EM HELL.
That night, I dined with Captain Herm Shelanski, the Truman’s Jewish skipper. Herm showed me the ship’s chapel, containing one of the Torah scrolls confiscated by the Nazis for their “extinct Jewish people” museum. Nearby, an exhibit about Harry Truman recalled how the president ignored the advice of all his counselors who opposed Zionism. Eleven minutes after Israel’s creation on May 14, 1948, Truman made America the first nation on earth to recognize the nascent Jewish State.
As during the 1991 Gulf War, I felt the pride of liaising with U.S. forces, of sharing a common purpose. Though separated by seven thousand miles of sea, the United States and Israel were intrinsically linked. Defending the same values, we confronted similar threats, from Soviet communism to Saddam Hussein and jihadist terror. Of course, the interests of no two countries can ever be entirely confluent, especially not those of a superpower and a tiny Middle Eastern state. But then again, no two countries had more in common spiritually, ideologically, and strategically. And the fact that Americans and Israelis were willing to fight for their ideals placed us in a slimmer category yet, even among Western nations.
I saw the uniqueness of the relationship aboard the USS Truman. I saw it in the sailors from rural towns and inner cities who gathered for a Holocaust memorial ceremony belowdecks, and heard it in the earnest questions they asked me about life in Israel. They listened raptly to my lecture about the history of America in the Middle East, and about the legacy of American support for Jewish statehood.
Anti-Semitism indeed plagued my youth and anti-Israel agitation later confronted me on American campuses. I forgot none of that. But neither could I undervalue the warmth and admiration that the overwhelming majority of Americans, including the Truman’s crew, held for Israel. When we looked at one another, those sailors and I, we saw a familiar reflection. I thought to myself, brit—covenant. They thought: ally.
Hope, Change, War
Never linear for me, life after Bush’s 2008 Israel visit zigzagged. I went on a speaking tour in the United States just as the presidential race got under way and met the Republican front-runner, John McCain. He approached me after one of my speeches, offered me a ride to the train station, and, rather than doze, regaled me with war stories. In Congress, a brash and bantam representative named Rahm Emanuel invited me to update him on Middle East issues. Rahm—a Hebrew name meaning “lofty”—the son of a veteran of Israel’s independence war, was passionate about the Jewish State but censorious of its settlement policy. Basically, Rahm briefed me, but we established an enduring friendship.
Nationally, Hillary Clinton was leading the Democratic pack. Closing in behind her, though, was a young Illinois senator as renowned for his eloquence as for the singularity of his name. Moreover, Barack Obama’s campaign was infused with a spiritual zeal. The first time I saw a bumper sticker with his image haloed and adorned with the word Hope, I immediately called Sally and told her, “It’s messianic.”
The longing for that hope as well as for change lured millions to hear Obama’s speeches, at once earthy and soaring. The possibility of electing the first black president captivated a great many Americans, but some Israelis looked on confused. Accustomed to leaders like McCain, crusty old soldiers and seasoned pols, they could not understand why Americans would choose a candidate lacking in any military, administrative, or foreign policy experience. Overweight, short, bald, or bespectacled candidates stand little chance in a U.S. presidential election, but Israelis readily voted for portly Ariel Sharon, diminutive Ehud Barak, and Menachem Begin, who was both follically and visually challenged. Americans prefer their presidents to be eloquent, attractive, and preferably strong-jawed. Such qualities, in the life-and-death stakes of Israel, are irrelevant.
But Israeli political preferences were alien to most Americans, even to American Jews, nearly 80 percent of whom supported Obama. My own family members back in the States bedecked themselves with Obama pins and even slept in Obama pajamas. Some Jews, though, were troubled. They pointed to Obama’s twenty-year association with Jeremiah Wright, the Chicago minister who accused Israel of ethnically cleansing the Palestinians and of provoking the 9/11 attacks. After taking the title of his career-making book, The Audacity of Hope, from one of Wright’s sermons, Obama disassociated himself from the pastor and eventually quit Wright’s church.
Still, some of the uneasiness lingered and raised questions in my own mind as well. Curious about this cipherlike candidate, I accepted an assignment from a security affairs journal to write about Obama’s views on Israel and the Middle East. I culled all of his statements on the subject, his interviews and speeches. My findings, though I could not foresee it at the time, helped ensure that the future president would rarely surprise me.
With remarkable candor, Obama revealed his opposition to Israeli settlement building and his support for Palestinian rights. “Obama might be expected to show deeper sympathy for the Palestinian demand for a capital in Jerusalem,” I surmised, “and greater flexibility in including Hamas in negotiations.” The Democratic candidate seemed to regard the Arab-Israeli conflict as a root of Middle Eastern disputes and Arab-Israel peace as the key to regional stability. Calling for “less saber-rattling and more direct diplomacy,” he pledged to engage with Syria and Iran. At the same time, Obama consistently stressed his admiration for Israel and his commitment to its secu
rity. But he never masked his discomfort with the Israeli right wing as epitomized by the Likud party, which, though at the time in opposition, had long dominated Israeli politics. “There is a strain within the pro-Israel community that says unless you adopt an unwavering pro-Likud approach to Israel, then you’re anti-Israel,” Obama said, indicating his preference for Israeli parties to the left of Likud.
Prophecy was not required to foresee that an Obama presidency might strain the U.S.-Israel alliance, “especially,” I wrote, “if Netanyahu and the Likud return to power.” Even then, I urged pro-Israel voters to focus less on the candidates’ policies than on their capacity for leadership. Political upheaval in the Middle East, civil strife, and Iran’s accelerating nuclear program—these challenges, and not Israel, would determine the course of American decision making. “Israel is best served by a president capable of grappling with rapid and often turbulent change.”
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But most Americans were not focused on the Middle East. They were writhing under the worst economic depression since the 1930s, with millions out of work and left penniless. They wrestled through a brutal presidential contest rife with race issues and conspiracy theories. This was the America, glum and polarized, I encountered that fall as I began a sabbatical year at Georgetown University in Washington.
Despite my frequent visits, I had not lived in the United States for nearly two decades and found the country significantly altered. The mostly middle-class, white, and Protestant-dominated society I remembered had been largely replaced by a more financially strapped, multiracial, and religiously diverse population. Once right of center, America now leaned leftward. I felt like Rip Van Winkle of the old Dutch American folk tale, who wakes up from a twenty-year nap and can barely recognize his own village.
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