Ally

by Michael B. Oren

  In addressing American audiences, someone invariably asked me, “Why is Israel’s PR so bad?” I responded by admitting that, yes, Israel must do a much better job of explaining itself. Yet even if it did, the bad press would likely continue. No amount of spin can separate the public’s prurient fascination with Israel from the media’s hunger for ratings.

  Still, could I ignore the knowledge that 60 Minutes intended to portray Israel as hostile to Christians? Here, too, was a classic anti-Semitic theme culled, seemingly, straight from The Merchant of Venice. Here was a shameless attempt to libel the Jewish State, the only country in the Middle East with a growing, thriving Christian community. The damage to the U.S.-Israel alliance inflicted by such a segment could, at best, be mitigated or delayed. Did that relieve me of the duty of acting preemptively?

  —

  “Why, in view of the pervasive injustice against Christians in Middle Eastern Muslim countries, is 60 Minutes singling out Israel?” I asked in a letter to CBS president and CEO Les Moonves. I listed just some of the atrocities committed against Christians in the region, including mass murders, expulsions, and the wholesale destruction of churches. In Israel, contrastingly, Christians served in the military, in the Knesset, and on the Supreme Court. Though discrimination did occur in Israel—one Orthodox Jewish mayor in the Galilee objected to public Christmas decorations in his town—Israeli Arab Christians were on average better educated and more affluent than Israeli Jews. Moonves, a delightful person, the grandnephew of Ben-Gurion’s wife, Paula (Munweis), was very sympathetic but understandably reluctant to intercede in an internal editorial issue.

  Instead, he recommended that I take my case back to Executive Producer Jeff Fager, which I did, posing the same questions: Why pick on Israel again and on such unfair grounds? Why had not one Israeli official been asked to interview for the piece? But, in addition to protesting, I suggested ways of making the segment more balanced. Consult Israeli and Christian experts on the subject, I proposed, and provided several names. Make sure to disguise faces and even voices of the interviewed Christians, who will fear retribution from Muslim extremists. And supply regional context. The entire Middle East is roiling, I wrote, except for the Holy Land.

  My note led to some “acrimonious exchanges with Faber and with correspondent Bob Simon, who took exception to my use of the term “hatchet job.” Simon, who formerly lived in Israel and befriended Sally’s parents, had spent forty days in Iraqi captivity in the Persian Gulf War. He was a celebrated correspondent. When it came to Israel, though, its settlements and building in Jerusalem, Simon had an agenda. Pointing this out prompted 60 Minutes to review the project—so the inside source updated me—and push the broadcast past the football season, Christmas, and Easter. But, in the end, the episode would run and feature a single Israeli responder—me.

  I had never intended to be interviewed and sought the opinion of the Prime Minister’s Office. In view of my outreach efforts to American Christian communities as well as my past experience as Israel’s advisor on church affairs, it was decided that my voice would, in fact, be strongest. The situation was unwinnable, but the defeat might still be mitigated.

  A veteran now of hundreds of interviews, many of them hostile, I was shocked by Simon’s venom. For more than one and a half hours—my longest grilling ever—he accused Israel of forcing Christians to flee the Holy Land. I fought back by recalling that in Israel, alone in the Middle East, the Christian population had not diminished but actually grown by 1,000 percent. Why, I asked, had Simon confined his definition of the Holy Land to the West Bank while some of Christianity’s most sacred sites—the Sea of Galilee, Nazareth, the Hill of the Beatitudes—were located in Israel. Why was Gaza, where Christians had been brutalized by Hamas, excluded? Why had he not inquired into the reasons for the shrinkage of the once-great West Bank Christian populations of Ramallah, Jericho, and Bethlehem after 1995, when Israel transferred those cities to Palestinian Authority control? And why, if Israel’s policies since 1967 were so suffocating, had the West Bank’s Muslim population at least tripled?

  Simon ducked these questions and countered with his own—not about Christians at all but my attempts to preempt the segment’s production. “I’ve been doing this a long time,” Simon claimed, “but I’ve never gotten a reaction before from a story that hasn’t been broadcast yet.” I knew that this was flagrantly untrue. Recent press reports revealed Nancy Pelosi’s efforts to prevent 60 Minutes from investigating her investments. But I was not going to drag the House minority leader into a taped debate with Bob Simon. Instead, I replied point-blank, “There’s a first time for everything.”

  “Christians in the Holy Land” aired on April 22, 2012. Sally and I watched it at the Residence, together with two of our closest friends, bestselling novelist Dan Silva and his wife, NBC Today show correspondent Jamie Gangel. We sipped wine and braced for the worst. As bad as I anticipated, the segment was above all pathetic. Ignoring my advice that the West Bank Christians be interviewed incognito, Simon questioned them in an open panel featuring only figures notorious for their anti-Israel stands. Clergymen like Nazareth’s Father Gabriel Naddaf, who claimed “those who want to destroy the Jewish State are signing the death warrant on the last free Christians in the Holy Land,” and who called on the “seekers of peace [to] end your witch hunt of the only free country in the region,” went unheard. Rather, 60 Minutes blamed Israel’s West Bank security barrier for the Christians’ flight and accused the Jewish State of cleansing the Holy Land of Jesus’s followers. The Kairos Document, branded anti-Semitic by the left-leaning Central Conference of American Rabbis, was described as a document of “hope, love, and faith.”

  Of course, all of the questions I asked Simon were edited out, while my responses were cut-and-pasted in ways that would have fascinated any class on journalistic ethics. But I was heartened to see that much of Simon’s time was devoted not to vilifying Israel but to attacking me for trying to block the broadcast. The Prime Minister’s Office later congratulated me on my diversion. “What bullet won’t you take for the State of Israel?”

  Other viewers, though, were not in a congratulatory mood. Many thousands of them bombarded 60 Minutes with protest letters. The segment, they pointed out, lied by saying that the security barrier completely surrounded Bethlehem (it does not), and purposefully overlooked the hundreds of documented cases of anti-Christian abuse by Palestinian Muslims. The term they most frequently attached to the piece—without any prompting from me—was “hatchet job.”

  None of the protests pointed out the inaccuracy that I, as an historian, found the most offensive. One of the clergymen interviewed by Simon described Christianity as “made in Palestine.” But Jesus, of course, who lived in Judea, never heard the word Palestine, which was coined by the Romans a century after his death.

  Clarifying such distortions required time that I did not have. Several congressmen, formerly staunch Israel supporters, expressed uncertainty to me about aiding a country which, according to 60 Minutes, oppressed Christians. Bob Simon, meanwhile, further pressed his agenda by producing a segment on Iron Dome. This, I told my staff, would cast doubt on the system’s success but nevertheless blame it for facilitating Israel’s aggression against Gaza and occupation of the West Bank. And Simon’s segment did exactly that. Iron Dome, it suggested, did not intercept 85 percent of Hamas rockets, as Israel claimed, but far less, yet the system still provided the protection Israel needed to devastate Gaza. A Palestinian professor explained—unintelligibly—how shielding Israelis from Hamas rocket fire enabled them to build West Bank settlements. “Forget the Israel-bashing,” I told Jeff Fager, with whom, in spite of everything, I remained on cordial terms. “Any report that predictable is just bad journalism.”

  Simon would be killed in a car crash in 2015, but the struggle for Israel’s image slogged on. Victories were often measured by our ability to limit loss. While some solace could be derived from the fact that backing for Israel in the United S
tates steadily increased—a statistic reflecting America’s skepticism toward the media as much as its affection for the Jewish State—the relentless press criticism helped fuel a global movement of delegitimization. On campuses and in front of town halls, radical protesters bore signs demanding “BDS”—the boycott, divestment from, and sanctioning of Israel. Where conventional Arab armies and terrorists had failed to achieve their goal of destroying Israel, BDS aimed to succeed by devastating Israel’s economy and isolating its citizens internationally.

  Standing up for Israel in the media, battling BDS, often cast me back into my old Don Quixote role. These were struggles that could rarely be won entirely, only less damagingly lost. Yet, old-fashioned and illogical as it often seemed, I felt duty-bound to keep fighting. The press attacks on Israel and the campaign to delegitimize it internationally would continue. The windmills would churn and somebody had to tilt at them.

  —

  So I continued sallying, sometimes in situations that would have made Cervantes, that master of the human comedy, laugh. I had to pull columnist George Will out of a baseball game—like yanking Hemingway out of a bar—to correct one misattributed quote, and berate blogger Josh Rogin for recording a public talk between Jeffrey Goldberg and me in a synagogue, on Yom Kippur. Most miffing was the book This Town, a pillorying of well-connected Washingtonians by The New York Times’s Mark Leibovich. The only thing worse than being mentioned in Mark’s bestselling book was not being mentioned in it. I merited much of a paragraph relating how, at the Christmas party of media grandees Ben Bradlee and Sally Quinn, I “hovered dangerously over the buffet table, eyeing a massive Christmas ham.” But Nathan Guttman, a reporter for The Jewish Daily Forward, changed the word “eyeing” to “reaching for,” insinuating that I ate the ham. Ironically, the embassy employed Nathan’s caterer wife to cook gala kosher dinners.

  George Will graciously corrected the quote and Josh Rogin apologized. The Jewish Daily Forward printed a full retraction. Yet, in the new media age, old stories never vanish. A day after the Forward’s faux pas, I received several angry phone calls from around the United States. “You should be ashamed of yourself!” they remonstrated. “The Israeli ambassador eating trief? In public? On Christmas?” I tried to defend myself—“I didn’t eat it, I eyed it”—but fruitlessly. Those calls reminded me that, more complex than many of the issues I faced in the press, and often more explosive, was the minefield of American Jewry.

  We Are One?

  Viewing an American University art exhibition dedicated in my honor, the last thing I expected was to be accosted by a ninety-year-old Jewish woman whose head barely reached my belt. “I like you, but I don’t like everything your country does,” she growled.

  “Excuse me, ma’am,” I courteously replied, “but do you like everything your country does?”

  “No.” She wagged her finger in my face. “But your country must be perfect.”

  That one remark encapsulated what was for me the deepest and most painful divide. For a person who viewed himself as personifying an alliance, the rifts between the U.S. and Israeli governments often felt physically agonizing. More tormenting still were the widening gaps between Israel and American Jews.

  From an early age, I had an abiding—Freud would call it oceanic—love of the Jewish people. Whatever our differences, I insisted, and however disparately we practice our religion, we still belonged to the same tribe. A rambunctious, endlessly argumentative tribe, to be sure, that once drove Moses to grouse, “Why, God, did you saddle me with this stiff-necked people?” But we were also a boundlessly creative and caring tribe, and I could not imagine anyone not being thankful for belonging to it. When the American Jews of my youth contributed to Israel under the banner “We Are One,” I believed it.

  I believed it even during the desperate period leading up to the 1967 Six-Day War, when, with Israel’s existence endangered, tens of thousands of American Jews went out to demonstrate—against the Vietnam War. I still believed it decades later, after some prominent American Jews embraced Yasser Arafat and others repudiated Zionism entirely. I believed it in spite of knowing that only a third of American Jews ever visited Israel and many of those would cancel their trips at the first whiff of crisis. I believed it while, as an historian, I learned about the American rabbis who once denied the validity of a Jewish nation and the mainstream Jewish organizations that opposed the State’s rebirth. Much as I cherished Israel, I embraced Jewish peoplehood. Both were fractious, flawed, and more than occasionally maddening, but their very existence was a blessing, I believed, a miracle.

  Which was why I felt cleaved by the expanding gulfs between them. When I was growing up, many liberal Jews looked to Israel to fill the spiritual vacuum left by their flight from Orthodoxy. Others saw it as the means of expiating their guilt for failing to rescue their European Jewish families from the Nazis. For all, Israel seemed a source of celebration. This was the Israel of the breathtaking Paul Newman playing Ari Ben Canaan in the Hollywood epic Exodus, the Israel of the saccharine Sabra liqueur, and of the requisite horas at every Bar and Bat Mitzvah and wedding. American Jews may not have marched for Israel before the Six-Day War, but they danced for it zealously afterward.

  Yet the American Jewish community was evolving and in ways that often distanced it from Israel. In the seventies, American Jews answered Elie Wiesel’s challenge to confront the Holocaust. Countless millions of dollars were donated to fund research on the Final Solution and to construct the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, astride the National Mall. Israel—its victories, its spirit—emboldened American Jews to embark on this introspective process, but for some of them, the Holocaust began replacing Israel as the centerpiece of Jewish identity.

  A generation passed and new genocidal narratives—Cambodian, Serbian, Rwandan—emerged. No longer comfortable with defining themselves solely in tragic terms, younger American Jews searched for a fresh source of self-affirmation. This was Tikkun Olam. Meaning, literally, “Repair the World,” the concept derived from the medieval Kabbalistic idea of reconnecting with the divine light of Creation. But, in its twenty-first-century American Jewish interpretation, Tikkun Olam became a call to rescue humanity. For liberal American Jews, especially, Tikkun Olam served as Judaism’s most compelling commandment, almost a religion in itself. Addressing synagogues, non-Jewish politicians dependably mentioned the term and mangled it into Tekan Oleem and Tik Konolum. And like the Holocaust before it, Tikkun Olam tended to sideline Israel as the focal point of American Jewish purpose. How can we donate to the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, liberal Jews increasingly asked, when children went hungry in Honduras?

  This drift away from an Israel-centric American Jewish identity distressed me. Of course, I welcomed the willingness of American Jews, who once only whispered about it behind closed doors, to publicly reckon with the Holocaust. But, for me, the annihilation of the six million remained a uniquely Jewish catastrophe whose recurrence was best prevented by Israeli power. By contrast, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial conveyed a universalist message that stressed tolerance as the cure for future genocides. While Native, African, and Latin Americans designed national museums to showcase their cultures, American Jews erected a monument to the suffering they did little to prevent. When, as ambassador, I addressed the annual Day of Remembrance ceremony in the Capitol, I rose with hundreds of American Jews as the U.S. Army band played “National Emblem, Trio” and an honor guard marched into the Rotunda bearing the flags of those units that liberated concentration camps. Silently I asked: why are we standing at attention rather than rending our garments in shame?

  Similar ambivalence characterized my feelings about Tikkun Olam. Here, on the one hand, was an outstandingly prosperous community recalling its humble origins and responding to Judaism’s ancient, compassionate appeal. And yet, in fulfilling their commitment to aid the world, what resources would American Jews retain for assisting our own people? Honduran children were indeed needier than the Hebrew Univ
ersity, but did one charity have to eclipse the other? Feed the Hondurans—so I felt—but also support the students who were, after all, our family.

  Ultimately, though, neither refocusing on the Holocaust nor reenergizing Tikkun Olam could dilute the lure of the melting pot. Assimilation, according to surveys, soared, with as many as 70 percent of all non-Orthodox Jews marrying outside the faith. The younger the Jews, statistics showed, the shallower their religious roots. The supreme question asked by post–World War II Jewish writers such as Bernard Malamud and Philip Roth, “How can I reconcile being Jewish and American?” was no longer even intelligible to young American Jews. None would feel the need to begin a book, as Saul Bellow did in The Adventures of Augie March, with “I am an American, Chicago born.” Bred on that literature, I saw no contradiction between love for America and loyalty to my people and its nation-state. But that was not the case of the Jewish twenty-somethings, members of a liberal congregation I visited in Washington, who declined to discuss issues, such as intermarriage and peoplehood, that they considered borderline racist. Israel was virtually taboo.

  For Israel had also changed. From the spunky, intrepid frontier state that once exhilarated American Jews, Israel was increasingly portrayed by the press as a warlike and intolerant state. That discomfiting image, however skewed, could not camouflage the fact that Israel ruled over more than two million Palestinians and settled what virtually the entire world regarded as their land. The country that was supposed to normalize Jews and instill them with pride was making many American Jews feel more isolated and embarrassed.

  I shared their discomfort and even their pain. Yet I also wrestled with the inability of those same American Jews to understand Israel’s existential quandary, that creating a Palestinian state that refused to make genuine peace with us and was likely to devolve into a terrorist chaos was at least as dangerous as not creating one. I was frustrated by their lack of anguish in demanding Israel’s withdrawal from land sacred to their forebears for nearly four millennia. “Disagree with the settlers,” I wanted to tell them, “denounce them if you must, but do not disown them, for they—like you—are part of our people.”