Ally

by Michael B. Oren

  “Not a bad idea.” Defense Minister Barak laughed on hearing the same story from Clinton. Netanyahu practically howled, “We’ll have to look into this!” But the escalating dangers Israel faced from the Arab Spring were far from jocular. Egyptian tanks in numbers well in excess of those established by the peace treaty were advancing into parts of Sinai, evoking terrifying Israeli memories of the Six-Day and Yom Kippur wars. The possibility that Syria’s massive chemical arsenal would fall into radical rebel hands also denied Israelis sleep. There was no way of neutralizing those stockpiles from the air without releasing toxic clouds, and no way of seizing them without sending in thousands of Israeli troops. Elsewhere, in Libya, a hoard of shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles—MANPADs—went missing. Some of these reappeared in Gaza, threatening IDF helicopters, just as Hamas rocket fire at Israel intensified.

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  In fact, the bombardment had never really stopped. Violating the 2009 cease-fire, Hamas and other terrorist groups maintained a steady “drizzle”—tiftuf, in Hebrew—of rockets and mortar shells on southern Israeli towns. After the Muslim Brotherhood’s 2012 victory, that drip became a downpour. On October 24 alone, Hamas fired eighty projectiles at Israel. This time the rockets struck deeper—at Ashdod, Ashkelon, and north of Beersheba. Some 1.5 million Israelis, including two of my children, came in range. Accompanying the barrages were ground attacks against Israeli patrols that succeeded in wounding a number of soldiers, one critically, and Hamas attempts to tunnel under the border. A full-scale military confrontation, perhaps more devastating than the last round, loomed.

  Gearing up for that clash, I phoned journalists and informed them, “Israel is under massive fire and must react. When it does, please don’t report that Israeli leaders woke up one day and decided to attack Gaza. Remember the context.” Beyond the likely press blowback, I was concerned about whether Israel possessed enough Iron Dome units and interceptors to protect its citizens. The costs were enormous—roughly $55 million per battery—and Israel urgently needed more. On the advice of the staff of Oklahoma senator Jim Inhofe, I wrote an op-ed on how the defense system not only saved lives, but prevented wars by giving Israeli leaders time to work out a cease-fire. I purposely placed the piece in Politico, the Capitol’s insider paper, under the headline, “Investment in Iron Dome Is an Investment in Peace.” The next morning, the phone in my office rang repeatedly as legislator after legislator called to ask how much aid Israel needed to defend itself.

  But that assistance, however generous, would not reach Israel in time for Operation Pillar of Defense—a reference to the divine cloud that shielded the ancient Jews fleeing Egypt—launched by the IDF on November 14. It began with the elimination, by air-to-ground missile, of Hamas chief of staff Ahmad Jabari. The terrorists responded with thousands of rockets, some of which struck the outskirts of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, killing three civilians. Israeli warplanes replied by bombing Hamas and Islamic Jihad targets in Gaza. The images were dispiritingly familiar: black smoke rising from Palestinian neighborhoods, Israelis dashing for shelters, world leaders urging restraint. The terrorists once again hid behind their own civilians while trying to kill Israeli civilians, and then cried “war crimes,” when innocent Palestinians were killed.

  And, once again, I defended Israel against such charges. Watched over by my trusted driver, Val, I slept in my car outside of the Washington studios where I gave some forty interviews. In between, I wrote for the Times and The Washington Post, and updated administration officials and congressional leaders on the operation’s progress.

  Much of my attention focused on Senator Dan Inouye of Hawaii. A one-armed Medal of Honor winner from World War II, his experience with racism against Japanese-Americans in that period made him an unflagging supporter of Israel. As the seniormost senator—third in line in succession to the president—and chairman of the Appropriations Committee, the gentle but powerful Inouye had always championed aid for Israel’s missile defense. But repeated media reports that Iron Dome was failing to destroy incoming missiles prompted Inouye to call me and ask, “Can’t your people get those things to work?” I explained that Iron Dome ignored rockets that it calculated would fall harmlessly in open areas and intercepted only those certain to hit neighborhoods. The system once again registered a success rate of 85 percent, I assured the senator. “Good,” Inouye replied. “Keep firing ’em.”

  Iron Dome did in fact save lives and generate time for diplomacy. If not for the interceptors, dozens of Israelis would have been killed and the seventy-five thousand reservists called up by the IDF would have invaded Gaza, resulting in untold Palestinian deaths. Iron Dome gave Hillary Clinton time to reach the area and begin the search for a cease-fire.

  “We were back on the high wire,” she wrote in her memoirs. Clinton’s last major mediating efforts as secretary indeed seemed acrobatic as she shuttled tirelessly between Cairo and Jerusalem. The task was to force Morsi to decide between his roles as Brotherhood chief and president of Egypt. He could not support Hamas and guarantee stability in the area. With tireless cajoling and pressure from Clinton, Morsi chose Egypt. Eight days after it began, with six Israelis and 158 Palestinians dead, Operation Pillar of Defense ended.

  The outcome left me relieved, ambivalent, and upset. I was grateful that the conflict had not raged on, escalating and claiming additional casualties. Life in Israel could return to its frenetic routine while Hamas-ruled Gaza stagnated. Yet, for the first time since the 1970s, I felt the frustration of not being able to protect my country in uniform. My duty, rather, was to stay in Washington, in front of the cameras and on the phone to policy makers. The response was inspiring. The American people and their representatives once again rallied to their ally. President Obama surpassed my expectations by coming out unequivocally in Israel’s favor. “We are fully supportive of Israel’s right to defend itself from missiles landing on people’s homes and workplaces and potentially killing civilians,” he declared.

  But still, I remained disturbed. Under the terms of the cease-fire, Hamas could replenish and upgrade its missile stocks and decide when again to unleash them. The fighting could easily reignite. A bomb planted on a Tel Aviv bus on the operation’s last day wounded twenty-eight people, further pressuring the Israeli government to act. Had the twenty-eight been killed, the army would have certainly invaded Gaza. And many Israeli soldiers would have willingly fought to uproot the terrorists and secure Israel’s borders. Instead, before demobilizing, disgruntled reservists lay on the desert sand and with their bodies formed the Hebrew words, “Bibi is a loser.”

  Most distressing, though, was the American press, which, in spite of my forewarnings, portrayed the operation just as I feared, without context. Virtually unmentioned were the nearly seven hundred rocket attacks that preceded Israel’s counterstrike. Once again, the media highlighted images of Palestinian suffering—some of them fabricated—and charges that Israel acted disproportionately against Hamas even as it fired from behind human shields. I trembled to contemplate the media backlash if Netanyahu had not held back and instead sent the IDF full force into Gaza.

  Ultimately, the only good to come out of the operation lay in the U.S.-Israel alliance. From Obama’s support for Israel’s right to defend itself, congressional largesse for Iron Dome, and Secretary Clinton’s commitment to achieving a cease-fire, the United States acted as Israel’s ally par excellence. A year earlier, at the outbreak of the Arab Spring, I had wondered if the turmoil in the Middle East would serve to strengthen our ties. Pillar of Defense substantiated those hopes.

  But for how long? In spite of their confluent interests in the Middle East, America and Israel remained divided over the peace process and the Iranian nuclear program. The administration continued to support Morsi’s Egypt, which refused to restore Israel’s embassy in Cairo or return an Egyptian ambassador to Tel Aviv. And Obama still balked at intervening in the Syrian civil war, which threatened to spill over Israel’s northern border and inundate Jordan wi
th refugees. “When you have a professional army that is well-armed…fighting against a farmer, a carpenter, an engineer who started out as protesters…the notion that we could have…changed the equation on the ground there was never true,” Obama explained to Jeffrey Goldberg.

  I found the comment startling, and not only because it overlooked the ill-armed American farmers who fought against Britain’s finest troops in 1776. It revealed the president’s determination to withdraw from the Middle East irrespective of the human price. It admitted that America could no longer grapple with a region swept by such massive sandstorms. And the remark alarmed me by forgetting that Israel, unable to retreat, remained in that maelstrom’s eye.

  Last Lap

  The last two years of my term in Washington had indeed been roller coaster–like. Yet many of the highest humps and sharpest descents still lay ahead. I encountered one of them only a few weeks after Operation Pillar of Defense, while driving to my parents’ house for Thanksgiving, on—of all places—the New Jersey Turnpike. The number on my cellphone indicated that the Prime Minister’s Office was calling.

  “We have an urgent situation,” I was informed. “Get to a diplomatic phone at once.” Such a line, I knew, existed at the Israeli consulate on Second Avenue in New York. Glancing out my window at New York City, I replied that I could call back in half an hour, and asked Val, my driver, to turn into Manhattan.

  And ran smack into the Thanksgiving Day Parade. How could I have forgotten? Unaware of where the parade ended, I feared that crossing to the East Side could take hours. So I bolted from the car and, with my security detail in tow, began running. Through the clouds of cotton candy munchers, beneath the ominous shadows of Snoopy and Buzz Lightyear, and between rows of marching kilted men, I sprinted. A special crew had to be called into the consulate to meet me, though they hardly expected to greet a winded ambassador in his shirtsleeves.

  “The Palestinian Authority is again applying for state status in the General Assembly,” the message began. “Abbas will then go to the International Criminal Court and sanction us as an illegal occupier. The court is biased and won’t accept our historic claim to the land or our need for secure borders. It’ll deny us the right to defend ourselves.” My instructions, consequently, were to contact key Congress members and urge them to threaten to cut off all UN funding if the Palestinians indeed turned to the ICC. “It’s a matter of national survival.”

  Hustling back to the West Side left me little time to question my orders. Only after I had already made the first calls did I begin to have misgivings. Learning of my appeals to Congress would surely infuriate the administration and reverse the goodwill achieved during Pillar of Defense. The smarter move, I thought, was to contact the White House first, and only if necessary turn to the Hill. So instead of joining my parents for turkey—they prepared me a sandwich and a slice of pumpkin pie—I drove back to Washington, arriving at 4 A.M. I immediately phoned Netanyahu and explained my reservations. “I get it,” he said. “Contact the White House.”

  But it was too late. Word spreads lightning fast in Washington and by 7 A.M. the White House already knew. Deputy National Security Advisor Denis McDonough was fuming. Still, he listened to my apology for not calling him before phoning the congressmen. We agreed to meet that same morning, despite the Thanksgiving weekend.

  With the Jewish and Israeli national holidays, Israelis enjoy many more vacations than Americans. But Americans take their few days off seriously, and the White House was eerily deserted. In the Roosevelt Room—deathly quiet except for a drumming grandfather clock—McDonough, together with an NSC legal expert, sat stoically while I made Israel’s case. “The ICC is a strategic threat,” I explained. “We need a diplomatic Iron Dome.” I mentioned existing legislation that protected U.S. soldiers and their allies from ICC-like charges. Would the United States threaten to sanction any country that sanctioned Israel?

  With a directness sometimes painful but always appreciated, McDonough told me what I already suspected. The administration had gone far enough in opposing Abbas’s unilateralism, he indicated, and would not take additional measures. The subtext was that as long as Israel adhered to its settlement policy, it should not expect above-and-beyond protection from the Palestinians. I thanked McDonough for interrupting his holiday, and hoped he and the legal expert could rejoin their families in time for leftover pie.

  As expected, the Palestinians, supported by 138 nations, elevated their UN status from “nonvoting member” to “entity,” enabling them to turn to the ICC. The United States, along with Canada, the Czech Republic, and several Pacific Island states, stood with Israel in opposing the measure. “The Palestinian people will wake up tomorrow and find that little about their lives has changed save that the prospects of a durable peace have only receded,” said Ambassador Susan Rice. But further efforts to establish that “diplomatic Iron Dome” with the administration proved fruitless. And the announcement of the construction of three thousand apartments in East Jerusalem and the settlement blocs hardly augmented our case. “The U.S. Sticks with Israel and Israel Sticks it to the U.S.,” shouted one headline. And though the new Palestinian entity did not turn to the ICC immediately, that threat dangled menacingly over Israel’s head.

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  Yet, mistletoe, too, hung over heads, many of them covered with kippas, a few weeks later at the White House Hanukkah party. I was able to bring my younger sister, Karen, and to introduce her to Obama. He kissed her on the cheek, hugged her, and ribbed me, “She’s better-looking than you are.” Later, after listening to the Jewish choir of the U.S. Military Academy regale us with dreidel songs, we bundled over to the Library of Congress for the Jewish legislators’ traditional Hanukkah gathering. Under the majestic Beaux Arts ceiling, the visiting IDF choir performed holiday favorites in Hebrew. Then, suddenly, the idea struck me. I ran with it to the evening’s host, Debbie Wasserman Schultz—the Democratic convention drama was long behind us—and she exclaimed, “Let’s do it!” Ten phone calls and much bureaucratic tape snipping later, the gray West Point tunics joined with the olive green fatigues of the IDF. Together, these young men and women sang “Jerusalem of Gold”—the theme song of the Six-Day War—and then stood at attention for “Hatikvah.”

  Surpassing that peak seemed almost inconceivable until the following week, when I held an overflowing goodbye dinner for Joe Lieberman. His retirement from nearly a quarter century’s leadership in the Senate was a landmark—and an irretrievable loss. Israel luxuriated with friends in Congress, but few of its members were available to Israel’s ambassador at any hour and each day except, perhaps, for the Sabbath that the Liebermans joyously observed. While regretting his retirement, Sally and I also wanted to celebrate Joe and his wife Hadassah’s life contributions. So we set up a tent outside the Residence and filled it with nearly one hundred of the senator’s admirers.

  The event promised to be a decorous affair, with heartfelt speeches by Jack Lew and Ehud Barak. But I could have kicked myself when Lieberman leaned over and quietly asked if I had invited his best friend, John McCain, to speak. “No,” I said, “but I will right now.” McCain agreed, nonchalantly, and then, without a note, rose to address the audience.

  “I have an important announcement to make,” he began, squaring his shoulders and gesturing with his signature stiff-armed chops. “I’m converting to Judaism.” The Arizona senator proceeded to explain that, for the past eleven years, he had accompanied religiously observant Lieberman around the world. “We’re in a Jerusalem hotel on a Saturday, and I push the ninth floor but the elevator only goes to the second and then the third. And I say, ‘Hey, Joe, what’s with the fuckin’ Shabbat elevator?’ We go to dinner and I order a steak and Joe orders salmon, and I say, ‘Hey, Joe, what’s with the fuckin’ salmon?’ And we fly to Afghanistan, and I’m lying on the floor of the C-130, trying to get some sleep, and hear someone mumbling over me. ‘Hey, Joe,’ I said, ‘what’s with the fuckin’ prayers?’ And so,” he concluded
over laughter that almost shook the Residence’s already-shaky foundations, “I figure if I’m keeping all this Jewish commandment stuff anyway, I might as well convert.”

  The next day, still chuckling, Sally and I left for what would be our first real vacation in nearly four years. Washington was all but closed down for Christmas and we took advantage of the quiet to fly off to Oaxaca, Mexico, to savor the art and the local mole.

  While still in the cab to the hotel, my phone rang with news of the horrendous murder of twenty children and six adults by a mad gunman at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. I instantly called Netanyahu to draft a condolence letter for President Obama and was assisting him still after the cab left us off in the middle of a teeming Mexican street. Shortly thereafter, at the hotel, I learned that Hillary Clinton had taken ill, and again I alerted the prime minister. Then, at a restaurant, I received a message from Andrea Mitchell of MSNBC asking for Israel’s help in locating correspondent Richard Engel, who had gone missing in Syria. Other calls followed—another confrontation between Israeli police and Women of the Wall—on the way to dinner. Finally, before I could order a meal, my chief of staff, Lee Moser, informed me that Senator Dan Inouye had died. His casket would lie in state in the Capitol and I, of course, had to be there to pay Israel’s profoundest respects. So we got onto the next plane, which was too small to carry our suitcases, and returned to the United States. The luggage, sent by Israel’s Foreign Ministry, followed via Mexico City and Jerusalem before reaching Washington four months later. By that time, I knew, there would never be a break from my job.