Ally

by Michael B. Oren

  But did all Israelis share in that sense of peoplehood? Hardly. I learned this on my first day on Kibbutz Gan Shmuel, when, while watching me unpack my prayer shawl, my teenage Israeli peers broke out laughing. “What’s so funny?” I stammered. “Aren’t you Jewish?” They snickered, “Jewish? No! We are Israeli!” They were the descendants of the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Zionists who believed they were forging a Jewish state but, in reality, founded a Hebrew-speaking Israeli nation with its own culture, cohesiveness, and ethos.

  Those pioneers never came to grips with an America that defied their definition of Diaspora life as a cultural and political dead end. Their point of reference was Alfred Dreyfus, the French captain who, though thoroughly assimilated, was accused of spying in 1894 and sentenced to Devil’s Island. Covering the Dreyfus trial, encountering mass anti-Semitic protests, the journalist Theodor Herzl concluded that Jews could never be a part of Europe but rather must leave and establish their own Jewish state. Herzl and the early Zionists could not have conceived of the sight that I came to regard as commonplace—of six Jews, three Israelis and three Americans, sitting in the White House and discussing Middle East peace.

  Similarly, those early Zionists could not have foretold the question I would one day pose to my son, Noam, now an officer in the IDF. “Who do you feel you have more in common with, your Bedouin sergeant Mahmud, or your cousin Josh in Long Island?” And no pioneer could have predicted Noam’s answer. “Are you serious?” he shrugged. “Mahmud slept in the dirt with me. Mahmud fought for this country.”

  So, it seemed, we drifted. Numbers of American Jews resented Israel for not living up to its original promise, and for taking their support for granted while not always respecting their religious and political views. Many Israelis—the world’s only Jews without a compound identity—looked down on an American Jewry that preferred comfort to sovereignty. Pressed with the monumental question of Jewish survival, both communities claimed to provide utopian solutions. Once, while assisting then-Israeli president Ezer Weizman to draft a “New Covenant of the Jewish People,” I approached American Jewish and Israeli leaders with a compromise. American Jewry would recognize making aliya as a means of ensuring Jewish continuity and Israel would acknowledge the legitimacy of Jewish life in America. Brushing aside my urgings, neither side would sign.

  Yet, in spite of all this estrangement, still I believed, “We are one.” And the reasons were simple. A collaborative effort, Israel emerged from the unity between its citizens and American Jews. Lovingly, often lavishly, American Jews enriched the social, educational, artistic, and scientific soil from which Israel’s creativity blossomed. Their names graced Israel’s playgrounds and libraries, its theaters and laboratories, even its ambulances. They defended Israel, sometimes as soldiers on its battlefields, more often as advocates on their campuses. Proportionally small but politically dynamic, American Jews brought their devotion to Israel into the ballot box, bore it into the halls of Congress and through the White House’s doors.

  Israel, in turn, sent hundreds of young volunteers to serve Jewish communities across the United States. Many thousands of young American Jews visited Israel in order to reinforce their Jewish identity. Our daughter, Lia, then a sergeant in the Golani Brigade, accompanied a bus of these Americans to Jerusalem, and called home sobbing.

  “Why are you crying?” Sally asked her.

  “Because we’re entering Jerusalem.”

  “But Lia, you live in Jerusalem,” Sally reminded her. “You were born in Jerusalem. Why are you crying?”

  “I’m crying,” Lia wept, “because we’re all crying.”

  And so I believed that these competing utopians—Israelis and American Jews—could munificently coexist. But that faith did not relieve me of the need to seek help. Returning to the United States as Israel’s ambassador in 2009, I scarcely recognized the American Jewish landscape I had left thirty years earlier. For guidance, I turned to Rabbi Steven Gutow, head of the Jewish Council on Public Affairs—the policy wing of the Jewish Federations—to Reform leader Rabbi David Saperstein, and to the legendary head of the Anti-Defamation League, Abe Foxman. “Help me navigate this,” I asked them, and they obliged, pointing out the major players, the emerging organizations, and, especially, the politics. Still, even with such expert helmsmen, the path forward proved labyrinthine. Jewish oneness was indeed a miracle, I discovered, but maintaining it became more than a full-time job.

  —

  I forget whose idea it was—fortunately not mine—to put Jewish Democrats and Jewish Republicans in the same room with Israel’s prime minister. The great rapprochement was to take place at Blair House during Netanyahu’s July 2010 visit to Washington. Representatives of the National Jewish Democratic Coalition (NJDC) and the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) in equal numbers quietly filed into the dark brocaded dining room. They took their seats around the elliptical table, the NJDC fittingly on Netanyahu’s left and the RJC to his right. I remarked on this lightheartedly and began to praise this display of bipartisan support that represented a strategic Israeli interest. But I never finished my thought. Suddenly the two delegations began screaming at each other, shaking their fists and pounding the table. The chandelier tinkled menacingly above us. Netanyahu merely looked on, dumbfounded.

  “Hold on! Hold on!” I shouted and hammered that poor table the hardest. “The democratically elected leader of Israel is here and you may just want to ask him a question!”

  The chastised representatives fell silent and finally acknowledged Netanyahu’s presence, but their near brawl demonstrated that Washington’s political schizophrenia also split American Jews. Though a decisive majority of them still voted Democratic—and percentage-wise supported Obama more than any ethnic group except for African-Americans—an increasingly upscale and vocal bloc leaned Republican. Together with gambling magnate Sheldon Adelson, right-wing Jews appeared alongside Republican governors Rick Perry and Mitt Romney, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and businessman Herman Cain, and other presidential contenders. While Florida congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a feisty young Jewish liberal, became head of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), Adelson donated at least $100 million to the GOP.

  Walking the partisan fissure between American Jews often felt like a high-wire act, and a wobbly one at that. Rebuked at a liberal rabbinic assembly for not attending the J Street convention, I was equally reproofed by several national Jewish leaders for meeting with J Street’s board. Jews opposed to Israel protested outside a New York synagogue where I spoke, claiming that I was anti-Obama, and several members of a Baltimore synagogue booed me for praising the president as pro-Israel. For some, the mere fact of Netanyahu’s conservatism and known friendship with Adelson was enough to brand me, his ambassador, as a closet Republican. For others, my utter refusal to come out in favor of Gingrich or Romney—much as Ambassador Rabin endorsed Nixon in 1972—labeled me an Obama supporter.

  The precariousness of the Israeli-American Jewish trapeze was highlighted at the end of 2011, when Jeffrey Goldberg broke a story about a series of Israeli Ministry of Absorption videos designed to convince Israelis living in the United States to come home. The YouTube clips, one of which depicted a little Israeli-American girl confusing Hanukkah with Christmas, conveyed an incontrovertible—and, for American Jews, unconscionable—message: only Israel can safeguard Jewish identity. Within minutes of going online, Goldberg’s report sparked outrage throughout the American Jewish community. Leaders called me quite literally screaming and CNN hauled me before the cameras to explain Israel’s insult. I immediately phoned Netanyahu, wakening him late on Friday night, and told him that the videos had to be removed, now. He agreed and the campaign instantly ended. But the resentment of some American Jews remained, as did the incredulousness of many Israelis who could not understand the umbrage those videos aroused.

  —

  Though sometimes dizzying, my high-wire balance at least came with a net named
the State of Israel, to where I would someday return. But no such safety mechanism existed for AIPAC, an entirely American organization headquartered in Washington. According to conspiracy theories, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee buys politicians and acts on Israel’s instructions. Neither charge is true. In fact, AIPAC educates legislators about the Middle East and endorses those most supportive of Israel. Under the rock-steady directorship of Howard Kohr, AIPAC members view themselves as Americans working to strengthen the United States by solidifying its ties with Israel—by promoting military aid, opposing terror and the Iranian nuclear threat, and upholding the principles of a stable Israeli-Palestinian peace. AIPAC’s detractors credit it with creating an artificial U.S.-Israel friendship that undermines America’s interests. But the opposite is true. Starting in the 1970s, the rise of the alliance elevated AIPAC, formerly an obscure group, into one of America’s most influential lobbies.

  Indeed, during my first three years in Washington, participation in AIPAC’s annual Policy Conference nearly doubled, to twelve thousand. It boasted of hosting more congressmen than any event except for the State of the Union address and of serving the world’s largest kosher banquet. Believing in the lobby’s prowess, foreign countries often assigned their diplomats to Jerusalem—I met several who spoke Hebrew—before posting them to Washington. The louder the conspiracy-mongers shouted “cabal,” it seemed, the faster AIPAC burgeoned.

  Which should have been superb news for American Jews. Instead, AIPAC became the target for community members on the right and left wings. Ultraconservatives faulted the group for placing bipartisanship ahead of its support for Israel and for refusing to take on Obama. “How could you sell out the Republican caucus, when we were advocating exactly what Bibi Netanyahu was!” a senatorial aide railed to The New Yorker’s Connie Bruck. But, with the same vehemence, left-wingers derided AIPAC as irredeemably Republican and directly controlled by the Likud. “Mr. Sharon has Mr. Arafat surrounded by tanks,” Thomas Friedman wrote back in 2004, “and Mr. Bush surrounded by…pro-Israel lobbyists—all conspiring to make sure the president does nothing.” Depending on whose opinions were solicited, AIPAC could either be spineless or overbearing, self-serving or mindlessly loyal. If adversarial on all other issues, Jews on both extremes of America’s political spectrum at least agreed on berating AIPAC.

  I, too, was caught in this crossfire. Yes, AIPAC sometimes fell out of step with Israel—it endorsed the two-state solution before Netanyahu did—and its outspoken positions on Middle East peace and security more than occasionally irked Obama. Yet I could not understand how anyone who remembered American Jewish powerlessness during the Holocaust would shun Jewish power today. I could not fathom why, with Democrats and Republicans at constant loggerheads, anyone would shatter a rare congressional consensus. And I could not comprehend any Jew opposing the U.S.-Israel alliance that AIPAC championed. Each time those twelve thousand Policy Conference attendees greeted me with a standing ovation, I could only blush and applaud in return. And whenever AIPAC came under partisan attack, I felt personally—and perhaps too viscerally—stung.

  —

  The political lines cut deeply through the American Jewish community, but they were hardly the most lacerating. Once cloistered in Russian shtetls, European ghettos, and Middle Eastern mellahs, Jews over the past two hundred years were exposed to the winds of modernity. From a generally observant people, they came to differentiate themselves as Orthodox, Conservative, or Reform, or, more commonly, as unaffiliated. Previously united as a religion and a nation—like the Japanese, only global—Jews began to distinguish between the two, especially in the United States, where most claimed to feel totally American. In Israel, meanwhile, an Ultra-Orthodox establishment monopolized lifecycle events—weddings, funerals, births—and strictly controlled who could convert and which food was kosher. Though many Israelis resented this status quo, opting for civil marriage ceremonies in Cyprus, relatively few mobilized to change it. The synagogue that numerous nonpracticing Israeli Jews never attended was Orthodox.

  Bridging those schisms stretched me emotionally if not physically, and in ways immeasurable to most non-Jews. Take, for example, the case of the hundred thousand non-Jewish Israelis, relatives of the million Jews who made aliya from the former Soviet Bloc, who wanted to convert to Judaism. To assist them, the Knesset in 2009 considered a law to expedite the traditionally protracted process. In return for securing its agreement, though, Israel’s Orthodox Rabbinate demanded that the State cease recognizing the conversions conducted by Conservative and Reform rabbis in America. These, in turn, protested vehemently to the Israeli government, accusing it of discrimination. For months I shuttled between American rabbis and senior Israeli ministers, desperate to prevent a fracture, but neither side would budge. Crisis seemed imminent when, in the spring of 2010, Prime Minister Netanyahu received a letter from eight Jewish senators. Any attempt to deny the validity of the Reform and Conservative movements, the senators warned, would permanently impair U.S.-Israel relations. The proposed conversion law instantly vanished.

  The near-collision between American and Israeli Jews over the conversion issue exposed me to the troubling rifts between them. What the former saw as matters of religious freedom and pluralism, the latter viewed as issues of governance, legality, and even national security. Informed by feminism and the civil rights movement, American Jews demanded equal rights. Scarred by wars and bearing sovereign responsibilities, Israelis insisted on stability and respect for its powerful Orthodox electorate. And so the breach widened and on no site more precipitously than the Western Wall.

  The largest remnant of the Temple destroyed by the Romans in the year 70, the Western or Wailing Wall—HaKotel, in Hebrew—abuts the Temple Mount, Judaism’s most hallowed site. Shortly after its capture by Israeli paratroopers in 1967, the Wall came under the aegis of Israel’s Orthodox rabbis. In keeping with their tradition, the Wall was divided between a men’s prayer section and a significantly smaller area for women. On either side, modest dress codes were strictly enforced. But then, starting in 1988, members of Women of the Wall, a Jewish feminist group, began worshipping in the women’s section while wearing the phylacteries and prayer shawls reserved by Orthodoxy exclusively for men. The women read aloud from the Torah, a practice also proscribed by the Wall’s rabbis. Consequently, some male worshippers cursed and spat at the activists and even threatened them physically.

  This triggered a twenty-year battle in which Israel’s government and Supreme Court bandied the Wall issue between them. Israeli police officers meanwhile adopted increasingly forceful policies toward the activists, who, they feared, would set off a riot. Though they rarely made Israeli headlines, Women of the Wall nevertheless tweaked one of the most sensitive U.S.-Israeli nerves. Many of the group’s members, and the bulk of its foreign supporters, were American. And, once again, what Israelis viewed through the lens of law and public order—most of Jerusalem’s shrines, including the al-Aqsa mosque and Christianity’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre, enforced similar status quo arrangements—Americans saw from the perspectives of freedom of speech and religion as well as women’s rights.

  The Western Wall controversy, spiritually and politically, divided me. Raised in the Conservative movement in New Jersey and a member of a Reform congregation in Jerusalem, I cherished Jewish pluralism. For that reason, the marriage of our son Yoav to Ayala Sherman was a mixture of joy and frustration. Both grew up in the same progressive synagogue, but they could not be officially wed in Israel, which did not recognize Reform nuptials. Instead, the two first underwent a civil ceremony at the Residence in Washington. Supreme Court justice Elena Kagan—after momentarily forgetting the rings but not for a second her infectious wit—pronounced them husband and wife. Later, under an Israeli chuppa in the presence of their lifelong rabbi, Levi Weiman-Kelman, Yoav stomped on the glass and kissed his stunning bride. But while cheering “Mazal tov!” with the rest of our guests—among them Israeli presiden
t Shimon Peres—I could not help regretting the refusal of the State I served to validate my son and daughter-in-law’s Jewish vows.

  Yet I still had to separate my personal ire from my ambassadorial duties. I had to support the Israeli police in executing their interpretation of an Israeli Supreme Court ruling upholding the Western Wall’s status quo. And I had to avoid a violent confrontation in which one of the Women of the Wall, most likely an American, could be injured. Such a catastrophe would be condemned not just by eight Jewish senators but by all of Congress and the White House.

  Remembering my experience with the conversion law, I called Prime Minister Netanyahu and other relevant cabinet members and stressed that the Western Wall was not merely a Jewish or a PR issue but a potential crisis maker in our alliance with the United States. Over the course of 2011 and into 2012, I spent countless hours discussing the issue with Reform and Conservative leaders, pressing them to agree on what was and was not permissible behavior in our most sacred space. I met with Women of the Wall as well as the Orthodox leaders who opposed them, and beseeched the Israeli police to show restraint. Nevertheless, by the fall of 2012, hundreds of liberal Jews, among them notable Americans, marched to the Wall, where thousands of Ultra-Orthodox demonstrators waited to confront them. Several Women of the Wall were arrested, raising outcries from congregations across the United States.

  The symbol of our faith and unity, the retainer of our most sacred mount, the Wall now threatened to divide us. But, then, just as the opposing sides neared the precipice, they all seemed to pull back. A local Jerusalem court ruled in favor of the Women of the Wall and instructed the police to protect rather than restrain them. The Orthodox, Reform, and Conservative rabbis finally agreed to the compromise I proposed for designating the archeological garden at the Wall’s southern end as an area for egalitarian prayer. Natan Sharansky, now the head of the Jewish Agency—the world’s largest Jewish NGO—secured the government’s support. Narrowly, a devastating breakdown of the Jewish people was averted.