Ally

by Michael B. Oren

  Netanyahu’s endorsement of the two-state formula indeed placed him within the American mainstream and removed one of the principal progressive complaints against Israel. This would make my job easier, though I harbored no illusions about the travails awaiting me in America. Obama’s Cairo speech and his coolness toward the Green Revolution reflected deep metamorphoses in U.S. policy that would inevitably impact Israel. My task was to identify and analyze these transformations and recommend changes in long-standing Israeli policy. But first I had to alter myself, fundamentally, at America’s Tel Aviv embassy.

  —

  It was an American, rather than an Israeli, requirement. Reflecting, perhaps, centuries of Jewish wandering, the Jewish State did not care how many passports its ambassadors held. But not the United States. By federal law, any American who officially served a foreign country had to renounce her or his U.S. citizenship. “It’s no fun, but you’ll live—I did,” Ron Dermer, a former American who acted as Israel’s economic attaché in Washington, consoled me. Netanyahu, who lived for years in the United States, also pooh-poohed the process, assuring me that he had undergone it twice—the first time as a commando in the IDF, and then, in America, as deputy chief of mission.

  Sacrificing for Israel had become second nature, and yet pulling up this deep-seated root of my identity made me wince. No one could cure my addiction to football, my Civil War mania, or, especially, my chronic sentimentality about America. But the thought that I would be the only non-American in my family—Sally and our children remained citizens—was tough to internalize. Trying to cheer me up, my friends said that I could someday apply for a green card.

  But no solace could stay the procedure’s execution. At the appointed time, I arrived at the U.S. embassy and reported, sweating, to the consul general’s office. I watched wordlessly as my passport was perforated. Then, in the manner of a condemned man, I had the opportunity to make some last remarks.

  “The values I acquired as an American—the love of liberty, a dedication to equal rights, religious freedom, and democracy—were integral to my decision to move to Israel,” I began. “My loyalties to the United States and the Jewish State are mutually validating.” The renunciation of my citizenship, though painful, “did not render me less American in my culture, principles, and spirit,” and I remained supremely grateful for the opportunities afforded me by the United States. Indeed, there could be no honor more rewarding for me than working to reinforce the bonds between the two countries I most revered by “representing my homeland to the home of my birth.”

  Somewhat dazed, I headed for the embassy’s exit, but paused before the twin glossy photographs of America’s leaders. These were nothing like the official portraits of Israeli presidents and prime ministers. Determined to project strength, Israeli officials confront the camera with a mixture of intelligence and grit. Their lips never smile, never even part. The U.S. president and his vice president, by contrast, virtually beamed from their frames with twinkling eyes and a flash of teeth. They appeared beneficent, charismatic, and nice. “That is,” I thought, “until they’re not.”

  Emerging into Tel Aviv, that bustling landmark in Israel’s saga, I thought about my own journey to this moment and the unchartered terrain ahead. The peace process, the Iranian nuclear threat, the Middle East spiked with incalculable dangers—all that and two leaders, Barack Obama and Benjamin Netanyahu, divided by worldviews and dispositions. The sheer uncertainty of it all was enough to make me reel. Yet one constant remained and strengthened me. Irrespective of the tensions and the personality differences, I believed that the alliance was solid. The United States and Israel would stay bound by ideas and interests. For all the asymmetries, we needed each other. And the world—especially Israel’s calamity-prone corner of it—needed us, too.

  While remaining committed to two countries, I exited the embassy possessing only one passport. Star-of-David blue and branded with a silver menorah, the document had been freshly printed by the Foreign Ministry and rushed to me in time for my departure to Washington. It identified me as Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary, meaning, in diplomacy, that I was authorized to speak in my government’s name. A month of metamorphoses had culminated in my own transformation. I was, the passport stated, His Excellency, the Ambassador of Israel to the United States.

  UNBREAKABLE, UNSHAKABLE

  In contrast to America’s fortresslike embassy in Tel Aviv, Israel’s counterpart in Northwest Washington at least makes an aesthetic effort. Situated at the terminus of an “embassy row” near the legations of Ethiopia, Bahrain, Bangladesh, and Jordan, and across the street from China’s gleaming postmodern compound, the Israel Embassy to the United States once conveyed pluckiness. With beige brick siding suggestive of Jerusalem stone and archways evoking the Old City, the structure no doubt looked trendy when it was built in the early 1980s. After thirty years, though, the bricks had faded and the archways seemed to sag. Plucky gave way to shabby, trendy to seedy. When entering the compound once, Netanyahu kicked a water-stained wall and instructed me, “Michael. Replace it.”

  Still, my chief priority was not renovating the embassy’s exterior, but learning its inner workings. New American ambassadors—all told, Obama appointed more than one hundred—undergo an intensive course in diplomacy and embassy-running. They learn the titles and roles of their subordinates, the principles of protocol, and the proper way to file a report. I, on the other hand, received zero instruction. No one briefed me on Israel’s positions on crucial issues such as bilateral trade and nuclear nonproliferation. Except for the cable-craft picked up from years of researching diplomatic correspondence, I knew little about how an embassy functioned.

  Nor did everyone at the embassy know about me. Entering the building on June 21, my first day on the job, I was promptly stopped by a security guard. A strapping graduate of an elite IDF unit, he pressed me in frenetic English: “Who are you? What is your purpose here?” His commander fortunately ran to the rescue. “Gaon”—genius—he chided the guard in Hebrew. “He’s the ambassador.”

  I took the elevator to the second floor. Rising, I remembered being back in the paratroopers, clutching the static line in the C-130 plane. I remembered the vicious hiss as the hatch swung open, the alarm sounding as the green light flashed, signaling me to jump. Just then, the elevator’s bell rang and the door slid open.

  I crossed into the glass-encased executive suite colloquially known as the Aquarium and entered my office. This was as run-down as the rest of the embassy, with fatigued furniture from the 1980s and a profusion of Judaica—shofars, silver menorahs, leather-bound Bibles—crowding its shelves. I had scarcely lowered myself into the Reagan-era swivel chair when a rangy, easygoing man in his middle thirties sauntered into the office and introduced himself as Lior Weintraub, my chief of staff. “You can trust me entirely,” he said, and my first instinct was not to.

  Many of my predecessors had described the embassy as a “hornets’ nest” in which diplomats conspire against one another and align against the ambassador. The challenge was especially acute for politically appointed ambassadors, who would leave the Foreign Ministry after their terms expired and could not advance the professionals’ careers. Lior’s position was the least likely to breed loyalty. With an office positioned just outside the Aquarium, the chief of staff must fend off, often physically, the 150 embassy employees—including attachés, congressional liaisons, spokespeople—whose need to speak to the ambassador was always urgent. Allegiance to me would make Lior permanently unpopular. Why, I asked myself, would he jeopardize a promising foreign service future for a political appointee?

  I had the same doubts about the newly named deputy chief of mission (DCM), Dan Arbell. In charge of the embassy’s day-to-day administration, controlling the content and flow of cables and supervising senior staff, the DCM in Washington often carries ambassadorial rank and the promise of significant promotion. Though exceedingly affable, the middle-aged Dan would surely place his long-term aspi
rations before those of any one-time envoy.

  Every one of my doubts proved groundless. Guided by a supreme sense of duty, Lior and Dan became indispensable, trustworthy, and available to me around the clock. Whatever resentments seethed beyond those glass walls, regardless of crises roiling outside the embassy, each day began with Lior ambling into my office followed by Dan, thickset and balding, with his congenital limp. Together we sat and dissected the issues, weighed options, and played iphah mi’stabra—devil’s advocate, in Aramaic—to my decisions. And we laughed. The belly-deep guffaws that my children like to imitate mixed with Lior’s cynical chortle and Dan’s horsey wheeze. Passersby in the hallway would pause and wonder what, with the Middle East and much of the world unraveling, could be so comical.

  —

  The answer, in truth, was: not much. Innumerable obstacles loomed, not the least of which was establishing my authority as ambassador. Unlike Americans who salute the rank—a policeman is always “officer,” and a former president is still “Mr. President”—Israelis salute the person. The commander of the IDF is not called “General” and the chief justice of the Supreme Court is not “Your Honor.” Rather, they are addressed by their first names and, more frequently, their nicknames—Moti (for Mordechai) or Rikki (Rebecca). This informality, a vestige perhaps of the biblical contempt for kings or the time when Israel’s population was minuscule, removes interpersonal barriers. But it also erases private space. Inbred by my father’s U.S. Army experience, my own respect for rank could not be renounced like my U.S. citizenship. Israelis universally refer to Netanyahu as Bibi (for Benjamin), but for me he was always “Mr. Prime Minister.”

  Unfortunately, I could not expect such deference from others. Everywhere in Washington I was “Your Excellency” or, most colloquially, “Mr. Ambassador,” except in the Israeli embassy. There, the Hebrew word for ambassador, shagrir, went virtually unuttered. And in spite of dogged efforts to establish myself as Meekha’el—my Hebrew name—I remained My-kel, my American moniker.

  And while I was no longer legally bound to the United States, I remained in Israeli eyes an Amerikai. This, too, was an impediment. Growing up, I remember how, on American television, naïve characters often had a southern drawl—think L’il Abner and Gomer Pyle—but naïfs on Israeli TV frequently sound like Americans. That accent still tinged my Hebrew. Americans who make aliya, moreover, can be disdained by those Israelis who, though die-hard Zionists, question why anyone sane would exchange cushy America for the hardscrabble Middle East. Surely, if you gave up living in a big Long Island house with a lawn and a two-car garage for squeezing into a similarly priced three-room apartment lacking a space for your thirdhand car but fully equipped with a bomb shelter, you had to be strange, some Israelis reasoned. The inflections in my speech and my decision to move to Israel remained impediments—however subliminal—to earning the embassy’s respect.

  That passage would take time, I understood, combining firmness, hard work, and demonstrable success. But it also required risk. Another principle inherited from my father, who left the military to head an inner-city hospital, is that all people, neurosurgeons and janitors alike, deserve dignity. I would esteem my staff. But beyond appreciation, I quickly discovered, Israeli diplomats value information. They yearn to be privy to secrets. Satisfying that longing without violating the government’s trust represented yet another delicate challenge.

  Leaks are the bane of any political system, above all those with free presses. Headline-hungry journalists are often sated by officials who, for personal or policy-driven reasons, feed them classified morsels. Such scoops were especially prevalent in the U.S.-Israel relationship with its countless “gov-to-gov” communications and intimate security contacts. Fairly or not, Israel’s foreign service was reputed to be particularly porous. Once, after a quiet lunch, an ambassador from a Middle Eastern country not known for its fondness toward Israel urged me not to write a cable about our conversation. “Your foreign ministry is like one of those pots, you know”—his hands traced the shape of a bowl—“with holes in the bottom.”

  The goal, then, was to determine which information could be responsibly shared and which had to remain confidential. That balance had to be struck each week when I gathered senior diplomats and department heads to discuss politically delicate issues. The meetings were conducted in a special room in the embassy that reminded me of the “Cone of Silence” from the sixties comedy Get Smart, and which I dubbed the Cohen of Silence. No one understood the joke, of course, but all grasped the need for secrecy. For more than four years, throughout periods of acute sensitivity in Israel’s relations with America, the Cohen of Silence stayed leakproof.

  The same, unfortunately, could not be said of quarters outside the embassy. A cable authored by Consul General Nadav Tamir in Boston, a sensitive and intelligent man, accused Netanyahu of inflicting “strategic damage” to Israel’s ties with the United States and likening his conduct to that of Iranian and North Korean leaders. Our equally capable consul in Los Angeles, Yaki Dayan, cabled the contents of a confidential talk in which Rahm Emanuel purportedly told him that Americans were fed up with missed Israeli opportunities to make peace and were liable to disengage from the process entirely. Leaked to the press, both cables made headlines—and headaches for me, Israel’s ambassador.

  Yet I made a similar mistake by briefing the foreign ministry’s ultrasecure intelligence department. I surveyed the “tectonic shifts” in American foreign policy under Obama and stressed Israel’s need to calibrate those changes and adapt ourselves accordingly. The next day’s papers barked “Oren Cites Tectonic Rift in U.S.-Israel Relations.” I learned a neologism—disleaktion, combining leak and distortion—and a lesson never to brief that department again.

  —

  No wonder Dan Arbell, Lior Weintraub, and I laughed each morning. Not because of the difficulties of establishing my authority among querulous diplomats or reconciling their demands for secrets with the state’s insistence on stealth. We laughed, rather, because those challenges seemed so risible compared to the more than one hundred thousand rockets now in the hands of Hamas and Hezbollah, the refusal of the Palestinians to negotiate with us, and Iran’s race for the bomb.

  We laughed, too, because the annoyances of press leaks and the embassy’s internal politics seemed so picayune compared to the grand sweep of Israel’s most crucial alliance. Along with the more than $3 billion in annual defense assistance, the United States provided Israel with diplomatic support in often-hostile international bodies, such as the UN. America was the guarantor of Israel’s essential peace accords with Egypt and Jordan, its protector against overwhelming threats, and the mediator of the all-too-frequent disputes with its neighbors. Israel, in turn, shared its expertly gained intelligence with the United States, its weapons development know-how, and its experience combating terror. Israel furnished airstrips and ports to American forces, and warehouses for prepositioning nearly a billion dollars in U.S. military gear. The staffs of most Israeli embassies included a military attaché, but only Washington had a defense attaché, signifying the unique breadth of Israel’s security relations with America.

  Beyond the strategic and tactical bonds, Israelis and Americans were conjoined by history. Only in the United States could streets be named for David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir. And Israel was the only Middle Eastern country to erect memorials to John F. Kennedy, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the victims of 9/11. Only Israel would have not one but two exact replicas of the Liberty Bell, each inscribed with the words from Leviticus, “Proclaim liberty throughout the Land.”

  We laughed—Dan, Lior, and I—because we understood that Israel’s ability to weather the gathering turbulence in the Middle East hung in part on our American lifeline. We understood that any alliance, no matter how deep and multifaceted, could fray and even snap. We laughed bitterly, knowing that the three of us, sometimes alone, would have to hold together U.S.-Israel ties that were already taut.

&nbs
p; New Realities

  The strain was palpable from my initial days on the job. The leftist Haaretz newspaper claimed that Netanyahu had been heard describing Rahm Emanuel and senior White House advisor David Axelrod as “self-hating Jews.” Attributed to no one in particular, the quote became the butt of Washington humor—“Rahm is many things,” one jokester put it, “but self-hating isn’t one of them.” Netanyahu was not entertained. “Call them, tell them I never said it,” he urged me. Contacting the White House Situation Room for the first time, I reached Rahm and David. Their response was polite but incredulous. “People say all sorts of things when they’re upset….” They clearly did not believe Netanyahu’s denials, nor did they sound disturbed by the report. Tension was becoming a permanent feature of the relationship and, some seemed to think, a useful one.

  The purpose was to pressure Israel into accepting a settlement freeze. The administration was adamant in demanding that Israel cease all construction in the areas it captured from Jordan in the Six-Day War. More than half a million Jews now lived beyond what was commonly called the 1967 borders, but which were in fact the armistice lines delineated in 1949 after Israel’s War of Independence. The freeze, according to the White House, must be total, with no exceptions made for the “natural growth” building of children’s bedrooms, clinics, and nursery schools. In addition, the administration demanded that Israel dismantle unauthorized settlement “outposts” while refraining from demolishing illegally built Arab structures. The policy applied not only to the West Bank but equally to Jerusalem.