Ally

by Michael B. Oren

  The flotilla incident provided another example of the administration’s uncanny ability to stay on message. In contrast to Israel, where ministries issue uncoordinated statements, the tightly centralized Obama White House controlled the content of every response from the State Department to the Democratic-led Congress. “We expect the Israeli Government to conduct a prompt, impartial, credible, and transparent investigation that conforms to international standards and gets to all the facts surrounding this tragic event,” declared Secretary of State Clinton. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi similarly called for “a credible and transparent investigation,” as did Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman John Kerry. All reactions reiterated the need for a comprehensive Israeli-Palestinian peace.

  While not surprised, I nevertheless found the administration’s reaction to the flotilla disappointing. After upholding a blockade designed to fight Hamas and bolster the Palestinian Authority, after its soldiers were mauled by armed Islamic extremists, Israel might have expected stauncher backing from its ally. But, then again, I reminded myself that the president always opposed the blockade, that Turkey was also America’s ally and Erdoğan, Obama’s friend. And though our Special Forces acted in self-defense, something surely went wrong on the Mavi Marmara. Why, for example, after their first attempts to board the boat were repulsed, did our commandos continue to descend to the deck rather than break off contact and rethink their tactics? Still, the White House might have honored Israel’s request to veto the Security Council condemnation of the incident. Instead, the U.S. delegation merely worked to soften the resolution’s language and to prevent another Goldstone-like report. For that, at least, I felt grateful.

  Gestures at the UN could not, however, hide the main contention between Obama and Netanyahu. “No foreign judges,” Netanyahu instructed me before I set off to the White House to fulfill my morning’s second task. This was to object to any American demand for an international probe of the flotilla incident. But no sooner did I enter the West Wing than I learned that that was exactly what the president demanded. Amid the ceremonial swords and pistols that appointed his office, General Jones informed me that without an “international component” in Israel’s inquiry, the United States could not protect the IDF from charges of war crimes. I countered that Israel, just like the United States, took pride in its world-class judiciary and rejected any attempt by foreign bodies to pass judgment on its troops. The administration remained adamant, though. An exclusively Israeli inquest would not salve world opinion, which was livid over the flotilla.

  The difficulty of the first two tasks—canceling Netanyahu’s Washington visit and trying to deflect America’s insistence on an international investigation of the IDF—shrank before that of the third. Reentering the embassy before noon, I collided with a massif of media reports impassibly critical of the operation.

  The New York Times dedicated its entire op-ed page to deploring Israel. Historian Tony Judt, a British-born Jew and former Zionist who later opposed Israel’s existence, accused Israel of endangering the U.S.-Turkish alliance, jeopardizing America’s standing in Afghanistan, Central Asia, and the Arab world. In one of his last pronouncements before dying of ALS, Judt called for the end of Israel’s special relationship with the United States. “The time has come to…treat Israel like a ‘normal’ state and sever the umbilical cord,” he wrote. Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Michael Chabon marshaled the IDF’s “unprecedented display of blockheadedness” to refute the Jews’ claim to intellectual prowess. “Now, with the memory of the Mavi Marmara fresh in our minds, is the time for Jews to confront, at long last, the eternal truth of our stupidity as a people.” Even ardent Israel defenders—and personal friends—assailed the Shayetet 13’s actions. Leon Wieseltier, my brilliant erstwhile colleague at The New Republic, decried the assault on the Mavi Marmara as “a stupid gift to the delegitimators.”

  The sheer mass of these critiques astounded me. By comparison, the accidental killing of fourteen Afghani women and children by U.S. forces that same week hardly merited a mention in the American press, much less entire pages of commentary. But more painful for me was the rush to condemn Israel for enforcing a policy essential to its civilians’ security and the success of the peace process—all before the IDF released the operation’s details.

  Yet obtaining those facts proved frustrating for me as well. The army was loath to release videos of its finest troops being clubbed and tossed over the Mavi Marmara’s guardrails. Invaluable hours slipped by before I heard that the other boats in the flotilla had surrendered without violence and been safely towed to Ashdod. More time passed before word arrived that the IHH members in fact carried no humanitarian aid for Gaza, only video clips—filmed in advance—showing their arrest by actors dressed as Israeli soldiers, plus more than a million dollars in cash. Only on the next day did I learn that cartridges collected from the deck as well as the bullet extracted from the leg of one of our soldiers were of a caliber not used by the Shayetet. In addition to attacking with “cold weapons” such as bats and knives, the IHH also fired guns.

  The second I received this information, I rushed it over to Congress. Several dozen legislators, all Democrats, listened as I expressed regret for the flotilla’s casualties but explained Israel’s need to resist any attempt to pry open the sea-lanes to Gaza. Those channels would not be used to ship humanitarian aid, I stressed, but Iranian rockets for Hamas. “We, too, want a free Gaza,” I later wrote in The New York Times, “a Gaza liberated from brutal Hamas rule as well as an Israel freed from terrorist threats.”

  Such arguments, however compelling, could not dispel the impression of Israeli cold-bloodedness. Altering that image necessitated an out-of-the-box approach. So I accepted an invitation to interview on The Colbert Report.

  This was a hazardous gamble. A wildly popular comedy talk show, the Report was also the graveyard of public figures who, with the help of the ingenious Stephen Colbert, made national fools of themselves. Having previously interviewed with Jon Stewart and Bill Maher, I knew the risks—knew that the guests, unlike the emcees, were unscripted and could not request a retake. I understood that I was on the show to be pilloried, and that the best I could expect was to suffer Colbert’s poking fun at me and perhaps get in a point or two. Yet I saw no other venue for reaching the millions of young Americans for whom such shows provided a major news source.

  Playing a half-deranged, right-wing pundit, Colbert indeed tried to goad me into making misstatements about the flotilla. I joined in the live audience’s laughs, even when at my own expense, and strove to stay on message. But, then, offering me a mug marked with “World’s Greatest Friend of Israel,” he quoted the haggish Helen Thomas telling Israeli Jews to go back to Poland and Germany. “If anything, the Palestinians should go back to where they came from,” Colbert said. “Do you agree?” Here was the most fatal trap and, with slightest affirmative, I could have tumbled into it. Instead, I nodded and said, “No. There’s room for both of us to share this homeland—Palestinians living in their homeland, Israelis living in their homeland in a position of permanent, legitimate peace.”

  My performance on Colbert may have mitigated, if only marginally, the flotilla’s public relations fallout. Eventually, the news cycle moved on to other stories. General Petraeus replaced General Stanley McChrystal, fired by Obama for criticizing him in Rolling Stone magazine, as commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan. Helen Thomas resigned. Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan, when asked by Senator Lindsey Graham about her whereabouts at the time of the Christmas Day bombing attempt, responded, “Like all Jews, I was probably at a Chinese restaurant.” Behind the scenes, though, there was no relief from the melee that erupted on the decks of the Mavi Marmara. On the contrary, the controversy only deepened.

  Israel still insisted that it alone would investigate the flotilla episode, without external adjudication. Detailed inquiries were indeed filed by the IDF and a civilian commission. These reconstructed the events leadin
g up to the clash—including my contacts with the Turkish ambassador—as well as the operation itself. The jurists, though critical of some of the government’s decisions, nevertheless upheld the legality of the Gaza blockade and recognized the commandos’ need to defend themselves. Under American pressure, Netanyahu agreed to include two international observers on the civilian panel. But Turkey rejected all of Israel’s conclusions and the White House endorsed an official UN probe. Isolated, facing another Goldstone-like calumny, Israel buckled and cooperated with the UN.

  Then, a miracle happened. The UN investigation, headed by former New Zealand prime minister Geoffrey Palmer, affirmed most of Israel’s claims. Though the IDF employed “excessive and unreasonable” force aboard the Mavi Marmara, the flotilla had acted recklessly in challenging a legal blockade. Palmer called on Israel to express regret for the incident and to pay compensation to the bereaved Turkish families, but he also called on Turkey to mend its differences with Israel.

  Israel accepted the Palmer Report but Turkey rejected it. Worse—Erdoğan threatened to try IDF commanders for atrocities and to dispatch his navy against Israel’s exploration of natural gas deposits off its coast. Though Israel quickly repatriated all of the flotilla’s participants without leveling charges, and even released the Mavi Marmara, Turkey accused Israel of torturing the IHH members and manhandling the ship. Even my friend Namik Tan—painfully, for me—joined in the allegations of war crimes. Turkish-Israel relations had run smoothly, he claimed, until Israel scuttled the flotilla.

  But threats and condemnations did not suffice for Erdoğan, who now demanded that Netanyahu apologize for Israel’s actions, publicly and unconditionally. Israeli leaders assumed the White House would reject these stipulations—the United States did not apologize for killing Pakistani troops along the Afghan border—but they assumed wrongly. In a poignant conversation with the prime minister, Secretary of State Clinton stressed that maintaining Erdoğan’s goodwill represented a strategic U.S. interest. Turkey’s cooperation was vital for America’s deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as for the efforts to curb Iranian nuclearization and achieve Israeli-Palestinian peace. The apology, Clinton made clear, was also a matter of personal importance to Obama.

  Back in Israel for consultations, I sat across from Netanyahu as he received the secretary’s request. Clinton can be intensely persuasive, and I wondered whether the prime minister could resist her beseeching. But he did. Israeli leaders could not apologize, he explained, and leave Israeli soldiers to face war crimes charges alone. Moreover, saying sorry to Erdoğan, who never ceased vilifying Israel and bolstering terrorist groups seeking its destruction, would send a wrong message to other Middle Eastern adversaries. “We live in a tough neighborhood,” he said.

  I agreed with him. The time for making amends with Ankara might someday arrive, but not now, with Israeli commandos still hospitalized and their officers reluctant to travel abroad for fear of being arrested as war criminals. “He who apologizes is neither a valued friend nor a feared foe,” Bernard Lewis, the renowned Princeton professor, once told me. “In the Middle East, no one gets credit for a preemptive cringe.” But Netanyahu did give in to the administration’s pressure and ease the Gaza blockade. Now, not only cilantro crossed the border, but also construction materials, supposedly monitored by the UN.

  Seventeen months later—after five years’ imprisonment—Gilad Shalit regained his freedom. The price was unprecedented: 1,027 Palestinian prisoners released from Israeli jails. The Obama administration bristled at the deal, which, it claimed, strengthened Hamas at Abbas’s expense and included several terrorists known to have killed Americans. But the exchange also troubled many Israelis, my family included, as we watched the Palestinians hail as heroes the murderers of 569 of our countrymen. Some of those former inmates, we knew, would return as active terrorists and kill more civilians. But in Israel, where every soldier is everybody’s son, the sweetly timid Shalit—an honorary citizen of Baltimore, New Orleans, and Pittsburgh—felt like family. Along with anxiety and anguish, his homecoming also evoked joy.

  In retrospect, I asked myself whether the Gaza blockade justified its political costs or how Israel might have handled the flotilla differently. Could Israel have found one legal loophole and let the Mavi Marmara pass? Should Israel have collected intelligence on the IHH? Monday morning quarterbacking—an American term untranslatable into Hebrew—is a luxury in which statesmen can rarely indulge. The facts, though, remained irrefutable: Israel’s image suffered a grievous blow and relations between Washington and Jerusalem were once again strained. Though the Israeli Navy kept a vigilant watch for Iranian arms ships bound for Gaza, thousands of advanced rockets reached Hamas through the tunnels from Egypt, where Hosni Mubarak’s regime mostly looked the other way. Not only Israeli border towns like Sderot were now within missile range, but downtown Tel Aviv and even the outskirts of Jerusalem. The scene was set for the next showdown with Hamas, to be fought not on the high seas but in the neighborhoods of Israel’s major cities.

  “You serve in honor and in shame,” Yossi Klein Halevi, who doubled as my closest friend and spiritual sustainer, reminded me. “In honor and in shame—it’s the highest privilege.” Still, I wondered about the honor of Israel in sustaining the almost daily rocket strikes from Gaza and the Obama administration’s continuing appeals for an apology to Turkey. The former situation, I knew, would eventually provoke a large-scale IDF response, while the latter aggravated the president’s pent-up frustrations with Netanyahu. Either one could erupt into crisis.

  The problem was that I had zero time to prepare for such exigencies. My second year in office began with Israeli commandos descending on the Mavi Marmara and would go on to confront successive crises in the U.S.-Israel alliance. In addition, there would be man-made and natural disasters together with a rash of personal ordeals—truly a year of afflictions. And swiftly they followed. That 3 A.M. call from Lior Weintraub was still resounding in my mind when the 6 A.M. news in Israel announced that I had contradicted long-standing government policy and tweaked the rawest of bilateral nerves.

  09185-016

  The cliché is true: the crisis that smacks hardest is the one least foreseen. While interviewing me on a Washington, D.C., radio station about the flotilla incident, my host abruptly changed topics and asked me: “What do you have to say about Jonathan Pollard? Doesn’t the fact that he spied for Israel against the United States mean that Israel is not a faithful ally?” I might have paused briefly before responding, struggling to recall whether any Israeli official had ever briefed me on Pollard, much less set out our policy. “Jonathan Pollard worked for a rogue organization in the Israeli intelligence community twenty-five years ago,” I answered. “We apologized for it and we hope he’s let free.”

  In the relentless public and discreet diplomacy that followed, I completely forgot that exchange. And I still had difficulty remembering it when wakened by an Israeli broadcaster telling listeners that Jonathan’s wife, Esther, had denounced me for “putting out lies.” An instant later, the phone rang with a call from Israel’s cabinet secretary, Zvika Hauser, a lawyer who often handled sensitive legal matters. Zvika calmly informed me of a letter to Esther sent by the first Netanyahu government in 1998, which assumed full Israeli responsibility for Pollard’s spying activities in the United States. This was no rogue operation. “So, Zvika,” I responded, “what’s our policy on Pollard?” As imperturbable as he is intelligent, the secretary for once seemed stumped. “Don’t you know?”

  I immediately published a clarification: “Though the unit that operated him no longer exists, Mr. Pollard worked for and on behalf of Israel, and the ambassador hopes for his early release.” The crisis moment passed, but rather than relieved, I felt sickened.

  Over the course of twenty-five years—while I was married, raising children, building a vibrant life—Pollard sat behind bars. For seven of those years, he was locked in solitary confinement. After divorcing his first wife
and accomplice, Anne, who served a five-year sentence, Pollard married Esther. Relentlessly, she campaigned for him, conducted a hunger strike, and criticized Israeli officials—me, most recently—for failing to stand up sufficiently for his cause. The Pollards were even reluctant to receive me at the Federal Corrections Complex in Butner, North Carolina, unless the visit hastened Jonathan’s release.

  The Pollard affair was a re-inflaming wound in American-Israel relations. Like the IDF’s deadly attack on the USS Liberty, a navy spy ship, during the Six-Day War, it perpetuated allegations of Israeli perfidy and evoked some of the darkest preconceptions about Jews. While writing my book about the war, I had scrupulously researched the Liberty incident and ruled it a tragic mistake in which Israeli forces reasonably believed the vessel was hostile. By contrast, Pollard deliberately and knowingly committed espionage against the United States, and at Israel’s explicit behest.

  Pollard’s story has been extensively, if divergently, documented. All versions agree that he was raised in a giving Jewish home. All acknowledge that Pollard became fascinated with Israel at an early age and remained so throughout his undergraduate years at Stanford. Academically gifted, the sources concur, he secured work with U.S. Navy intelligence near Washington. Starting in 1984, Pollard began passing classified papers to Israeli Defense Ministry handlers who, in turn, paid him tens of thousands of dollars. Exposed the following year, Pollard sought asylum at the Israeli embassy only to be denied entry and arrested. He was tried for conveying national defense information to a foreign state and for conspiracy to commit espionage. As part of a plea bargain, Pollard admitted his guilt and believed he would receive a lighter punishment. But while in jail, Pollard interviewed with Wolf Blitzer, then a reporter for The Jerusalem Post. “I want to be very clear,” the prisoner purportedly told Blitzer, “I do not believe the operation was a mistake.” Such remorseless statements, U.S. authorities held, violated his agreement with the court. Pollard received a life sentence.