Ally

by Michael B. Oren

  Finally, there was the presidential Peres. Nearing ninety, he had at last gained what he always coveted—the love of Israel’s people. Though nominally the head of state, the Israeli president’s function is largely ceremonial. It includes accepting diplomats’ credentials, approving the appointment of Supreme Court judges, bestowing national awards, and pardoning prisoners. Most substantively, the president oversees the dissolution of the Knesset and, after elections, determines which party is likeliest to form the new coalition. For that reason, and because he (or, theoretically, she) is chosen by the Knesset, the president is most often a politician. Peres was indeed that, but, once ascending to the presidency, he became incalculably more. He became the mirror of Israel’s best image of itself, an internationally admired statesman, an icon.

  I got to sit with all three. With President Peres, I discussed international and, especially, American affairs. I pressed the historical Peres about his role in clandestinely acquiring arms for Israel in 1948, about the buildup to the 1956 Suez Campaign, when France, rather than the United States, was our principal ally. The master of the diplomatic tour d’horizon, the sentimentalist who adored reminiscing about Guy Mollet, Christian Pineau, and other French politicians of the 1950s, Peres could talk for hours. And we did, over breakfast each time I returned to Israel, in his hotel room whenever he visited America, and in limousines to and from airports. We talked books, we talked ideas, and, in talking with the historical and presidential Peres, I quickly forgot Peres the politician.

  Netanyahu, though, could not. While the two men, after decades of rivalry, begrudgingly respected each other, Peres and the prime minister were often at odds. Unwilling to remain within his symbolic role, the president ran a shadow government with positions openly divergent from Netanyahu’s. On the peace process, Peres called for freezing settlements indefinitely and for accepting the principle of a Palestinian state on the 1967 lines with swaps. Never understating the danger posed by the ayatollahs, the man who opposed Israel’s 1981 bombing of the Iraqi reactor was now not about to support a similar strike against Iran. Rather, Peres urged Israelis to demonstrate restraint and place their trust in Obama.

  And Obama, not surprisingly, appreciated him. From the eve of my appointment until the end of my term, America’s president repeatedly welcomed Israel’s to the White House. Their conversations, warm and mutually deferential, touched on all the pressing Middle Eastern issues. Consistently, Peres asked for Jonathan Pollard’s release and, just as regularly, Obama demurred. At some point, the pair always adjourned for a prolonged one-on-one talk. Free of the usual fear of hiccups and kerfuffles, I enjoyed these meetings, yet they placed me in a dilemma. As much as I cherished my friendship with Peres and deferred to his preeminent rank, I was sworn to preserve Netanyahu’s trust. But trust did not always characterize his relationship with Peres, whom he suspected of pursuing an independent foreign policy. Here was another high-wire act I had to execute, serving my president and updating my boss, one diplomatic foot planted carefully after the other.

  Outside of Washington, though, accompanying Peres was, quite simply, fun. No sooner had I seen Netanyahu’s plane off from icy Andrews Air Force Base in March than I boarded another flight to California and a rendezvous with Peres. At the DreamWorks headquarters, Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg convened the major studio heads to listen to Peres hold forth on Middle East and global affairs, even neurology. “The human brain understands everything around it, but does not understand itself,” Peres observed. “Brain science is our next great frontier.” He posed for photos with Billy Crystal and Barbra Streisand, then rushed to a reception for Hollywood stars hosted by media mogul Haim Saban and then another gathering of Hispanic leaders held by actors Andy Garcia and Eva Longoria. At each event, Peres revealed the secret of Jewish success: “Dissatisfaction.” Jetting back to New York, I watched him on The View charm Barbara Walters and Whoopi Goldberg by inviting them to join his Facebook page. “Won’t you be my friends?” he pouted. Later, I sat with Peres as he tried for a fervid hour to convince a subdued Woody Allen to situate his next film not in Paris or Barcelona, but in Tel Aviv.

  Assisted by his dedicated and mostly female staff—my office called them, affectionately, the “Peresites”—the president could be difficult to keep up with. Ever gracious, he was impossible not to like. With his corona of silver hair reminiscent of Ben-Gurion’s, his elegant suits, perspicacious eyes, and paternal air, he was the embodiment of the éminence grise. Despite his heavy Polish accent in Hebrew, English, and French, he succeeded in fashioning supple turns of phrase. I often jotted down these “Peresisms,” listing among my favorites, “Egypt is not a river with a country, it is a country with a river.” And, “You can’t come to the Arab Spring dressed in wintry clothing.” And, “The Middle East is divided between holy places and oily places.” Then, finally, my favorite, something that only Peres could say in public: “There are two things you must never do in front of a camera: make love and make Middle East peace.”

  None of these Peres experiences could cap the White House ceremony on June 13, 2012, when he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Awarded for “an especially meritorious contribution to…world peace,” this was America’s highest civilian distinction. Some cynical journalists saw the event’s timing—six months before the U.S. elections—as a transparent ploy for the Jewish vote or even a slap to Netanyahu in reprisal for his recalcitrance on Iran. Yet I saw the sentiment as genuine, reflecting Obama’s abiding respect for Peres. That esteem, however, did not inhibit the administration from denying entry to several members of the honoree’s entourage.

  That decision reached me at Blair House while I was working round-the-clock on Peres’s speech. Israel’s president was visibly upset—these were some of his closest friends—and asked me to call the White House. I did, and heard how these individuals had criticized Obama on television or committed some other offense that necessitated their omission from the guest list. One of the stricken names belonged to retired general Doron Almog. The son of Holocaust survivors, he had lost a brother in the Yom Kippur War and five close family members in an Intifada suicide bombing. Together with his educator wife, Deedee, Doron was also the founder of a Negev village dedicated to treating severely autistic children, among them their son, Eran. But radical European groups branded Almog, a decorated veteran of the Entebbe raid, a war criminal for his role in combating Hamas. The sight of Doron and Deedee in the East Room might be offensive to those leftists, the administration apparently feared.

  Outraged, I phoned Jack Lew, the former deputy secretary of state and now Obama’s chief of staff, with whom I always spoke frankly. “Just know, Jack, who you’re blackballing,” I explained. “Tomorrow’s headline in Israel won’t be, ‘Peres Gets Freedom Medal,’ but ‘Obama Insults Israeli Hero.’ ” The ever-sage Lew instantly understood. The Almogs, at least, were admitted.

  These bumps notwithstanding, the evening went smoothly—in fact, stunningly. Included among the more than 140 attendees were former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and George Shultz as well as Bill and Hillary Clinton. Israeli violinist Itzhak Perlman serenaded us with a minuet and Obama toasted us, “L’Chaim!” In Peres, the president said, “we see the essence of Israel itself—an indomitable spirit that will not be denied.” Peres replied by accepting the honor in the name of “the pioneers who built homes on barren mountains, on shifting sands. Who sacrificed their lives for their country.” Seated between Sally and Secretary Clinton, I beamed as the last leader of Israel’s founding generation—if not our Madison, our Monroe—“paid tribute to…the Jews who dreamed of, and fought for, a state of their own.” I took pride in the fact that I helped the president to write his words about America’s eternal bonds with Israel and the imperative quest for peace, though I failed to dissuade him from mentioning “brain science.”

  The next day, at the Residence, we hosted our largest-ever reception. There to honor Peres were his adoring children
and grandchildren, Yitzhak Rabin’s daughter Dalia, and hundreds of admirers from Israel and across the United States. Speaker after prestigious speaker rose to praise him. Then came my turn. And what could I, after all those accolades from world leaders, possibly add? So I told how, twenty years earlier, when we were living in the desert community of Sde Boker, the then foreign minister came to lay a wreath on the grave of his mentor, Ben-Gurion. Walking toward the hallowed site, he was stopped by a feisty eight-year-old who waved at him and cheered, “Hey, Shimon, how you doin’?” And rather than ignoring the kid and proceeding with the ceremony, the foreign minister took the boy aside and chatted with him for several minutes. “That boy,” I told the guests, “was our son Yoav. And that minister is the man we extol today, a man who, at the heights of political power, found time for an eight-year-old child.”

  Later that night, at a private dinner with his staff, Peres praised me as “a man completely without ego.” I was moved and grateful for this opportunity not only to touch, but to befriend, history. But history, by nature, does not wait, and while the past accomplishments of one president were feted, the future of another would soon be sealed. As Peres’s plane took off for Israel, I pivoted on the tarmac and started grappling with the next controversy: Israel’s alleged interference in the 2012 U.S. elections.

  Polls Apart

  Among its awe-inspiring achievements, Israel’s democracy stands supreme. Older than more than half of the world’s democracies, a member of that select club of countries—such as the United States, Britain, and Canada—that have never known a second of nondemocratic governance, Israel is unique in having withstood pressures capable of crushing most democratic systems. Yet, during elections, Israel’s scrappy Athenian-style democracy turns Spartan. The campaigns, strictly controlled financially and lasting roughly three months, feature a single hour of nightly television ads that hardly anyone watches. Whether it’s because democracy in Israel arose less out of ideals than from political necessity—the only way that multiple Zionist parties could achieve anything—or because so many issues are life-or-death, election time is not happy. There are no balloons, no ribbons, no conventions with streamer-hatted delegates hoisting placards. “If Americans celebrate democracy, then Israelis endure it,” I once wrote in The New York Times. “Voting in Israel feels like playing an extreme version of Russian roulette, a bullet in every chamber but one.”

  That pistol was fully loaded—for me, at least—as America entered its 2012 elections. Throughout the previous three years, much of the U.S. and Israeli media promoted a narrative in which Netanyahu actively stumped for the Republicans. The press pointed to the prime minister’s friendship with Sheldon Adelson and his close association with House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, the only Jewish Republican congressman and history’s highest-ranking elected American Jew. In its preference for free markets, its antipathy to political correctness, and militant stance on Iran, Netanyahu’s worldview indeed resembled the GOP’s. “Wouldn’t Netanyahu prefer an administration closer to his own beliefs?” journalists often asked me. “Could he afford another four years of public spats and not-so-secret disagreements with Obama?”

  Such questions were, in fact, irrelevant. Israel must never interfere—or even appear to intercede—in any American election, I maintained, much less one for the presidency. Choosing a chief executive, even one known to have contrarian views on Israel, remained a categorically internal American affair. Hewing to that rule, though, did not mean refraining from prognostications about which of the contenders would prevail. The winner in 2012, I had long predicted to Jerusalem, would be Barack Obama.

  That conclusion reflected less my assessment of the president’s record than my gauging of America. During my period in Washington, the once-WASPy United States became a nation with a white and Protestant minority and a Supreme Court presided over by Catholics and Jews. Single-parent families outnumbered traditional nuclear families and Hispanics now accounted for nearly a quarter of all K–12 students. Obama still succeeded in harnessing these transformations and cobbling together coalitions from diverse constituencies—liberals, students, immigrants, and minorities. Preserving civil liberties remained an overriding concern for a sizable number of American Jews who were, to quote one embittered conservative, “more pro-choice than pro-Israel.” The Republicans, by contrast, appeared determined to alienate all of these interest groups.

  I submitted my evaluation, but not everyone in the Prime Minister’s Office agreed. “Mosaic politics never work” was one answer I received. Others cited polls indicating a guaranteed Republican landslide. Nevertheless, I stuck by my forecast, all the while laboring to avoid the minutest impression of favoritism. Yet, as the election cycle accelerated, that task grew nearly impossible.

  The race was close and hinged on several key states, including Florida, with its sizable Jewish population. The pro-Israel vote could, then, become pivotal. Though the Democrats accused the Republicans of making Israel into a wedge issue, they were the first to post a YouTube clip with snippets of Netanyahu and me praising the incumbent. A Republican version soon followed. Speaking before American Jewish donors in New York, Obama purportedly said that “if Netanyahu lived in the United States, he’d probably be a Republican.” The remark deeply upset the prime minister, who saw it as a deliberate attempt to divide American Jews on the Israel issue. “How would he feel if I described him to Israelis as a Laborite?” he asked me. The front page of The New York Times posited that Netanyahu and Republican front-runner Mitt Romney enjoyed “a warm friendship, little known to outsiders, that is now rich with political intrigue.” The article traced the relationship to the mid-1970s, when both men worked at the Boston Consulting Group. A closer reading, though, revealed that the two overlapped at BCG for exactly one month. I protested the piece in a letter to the editor, but without effect. In the public’s eye, Netanyahu and Romney were now best friends, and the only question was which party initiated the story, Republican or Democrat?

  The matter was rendered largely moot on July 29, when Romney landed in Israel. He met with Netanyahu, Peres, and Palestinian prime minister Fayyad, and prayed at the Western Wall—all without incident. From the beginning, though, the tour triggered friction. Attributing Israel’s high-tech success to “Providence” and the “hand of culture,” Romney drew accusations of racism from the Palestinians, who also condemned his call to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. Left-wing Israelis criticized him for snubbing the head of the Labor Party opposition, which they described as Israel’s version of the Democrats. A fund-raising event inadvertently scheduled on a Jewish fast day had to be postponed to the next morning but then continued to draw fire when American donors contributed $1 million to the Romney campaign. “We have a solemn duty…to deny Iran’s leaders the means to follow through on their malevolent intentions,” Romney said, clearly rebuking Obama. “We must not delude ourselves into thinking that containment is an option.” From Washington, Vice President Biden acridly dismissed the remark as “just another feeble attempt by the Romney campaign to score political points at the expense of this critical partnership.”

  The heightened tension crested the following night when the Netanyahus hosted Romney and his wife and their son, Josh, for a private dinner. “It’s standard practice for the prime minister to meet with visiting presidential candidates,” I told reporters, and reminded them that then opposition head Netanyahu had similarly met with Senator Obama in 2008. But the intimacy of the gathering was striking and difficult to explain away. Even the pro-Israel Tablet magazine alleged that Romney’s visit—the “brainchild” of Ron Dermer, a former Republican advocate—was carefully coordinated by the Prime Minister’s Office. The fact that Netanyahu had declined invitations to attend additional Romney events, including the fund-raiser, could not dispel the image of Israeli interference in American politics.

  Determined not to deepen that impression, I walked fine lines around the Romney visit. Protocol-bound to accompan
y the candidate to Israel, I carefully limited my participation in his itinerary. The trick was to balance that caution with my curiosity about the squarely built, soft-spoken Romney and his amiable and almost absurdly good-looking family. I enjoyed discussing Middle East affairs with Dan Senor, Romney’s astute foreign policy advisor, who once interviewed me for his book, Start-Up Nation, about Israel’s high-tech miracle. But I could never cease glancing over my shoulder for the camera that would catch me “colluding”—so the headline would claim—with the Republicans.

  Instead, I got lambasted by the right for expressing “profound gratitude” to Obama for signing the U.S.-Israel Enhanced Security Cooperation Act, passed by both houses of Congress, and for allocating an additional $70 million to Iron Dome. “Such an expression is…so inappropriate, that one has to wonder whether Oren didn’t intend subtly to raise questions as to its sincerity,” speculated my friend Bill Kristol in the conservative Weekly Standard. “Oren signals that his absurdly overdone fawning before Obama isn’t to be taken too seriously.”

  Israel, I now understood, was unlikely to emerge unscathed from the 2012 elections. At best the damage could be minimized by keeping out of them entirely. So, prohibited by schedule conflicts from attending both the Democratic and Republican national conventions, I went to neither. Nevertheless, at the Democratic summit in Charlotte, North Carolina, starting on September 4, DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida told Jewish donors that I had complained to her about Republican efforts to transform Israel into a wedge issue. Such an assertion was, of course, untrue, but cherishing my friendship with Debbie, I gave her time to issue a retraction. Instead, she denied having made the remark, prompting Fox News to broadcast a video of it. Finally, as the Israeli news cycle approached, I had no choice but to respond. “I categorically deny that I ever characterized Republican policies as harmful to Israel,” I said in a press statement. “Bipartisan support is a paramount national interest for Israel, and we have great friends on both sides of the aisle.”