Ally

by Michael B. Oren

  From a position of “I don’t bluff” about his willingness to use armed force against nuclear sites, Obama appeared to rule out any military option. InsteadObama appeared to rule out any military option. The acrid debate that once raged in Israel over whether the president could ever strike Iran had long been silenced by a grim consensus that he would not. Instead, White House Strategic Communications Advisor Ben Rhodes predicted that a final agreement with Iran would be “the biggest thing President Obama will do in his second term on foreign policy.” The treaty-making process, Rhodes noted, would be shielded from Congress members who were “very attentive to what Israel says on its security issues.”

  Congress’s attentiveness to Israel intensified after the November 2014 elections, when the Republicans regained the Senate. To those Israelis who regarded this turnover as a godsend, I recalled that a president blocked by both houses from pursuing his domestic agenda would naturally turn to foreign affairs. I reminded them that a second-term president concerned with leaving a legacy could ignore congressional objections much as Obama did the following month by lifting America’s embargo of Cuba. Finally, I sensed that the same commander in chief who sought congressional authorization for warlike actions against Syria and the Islamic State would try to sidestep the Senate in signing what he portrayed as a peace arrangement with Iran.

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  Far less prophecy was required to foretell the failure of Kerry’s peace initiative. The Israeli government released three large groups of Palestinian prisoners and reportedly agreed to an American “framework agreement” setting out the territorial parameters of a two-state solution. The country braced for the fourth release, which, for the first time, included Israeli Arabs jailed for murdering Israeli Jews. As a purported quid pro quo for these concessions, Kerry offered the release of Jonathan Pollard. But when Israeli leaders insisted that Abbas commit to remaining at the table, he bolted. Instead, on April 24, the Palestinian president announced his Authority’s adherence to fifteen international treaties. Once again, Abbas attempted to create a Palestinian state, without making peace, unilaterally through the UN. And once again, Abbas made a reconciliation pact with Hamas.

  A solid majority of Israelis were convinced that their leaders had surpassed the extra mile, and reports later revealed that Netanyahu was willing to make major concessions. Yet Kerry indicated differently. Settlements remained the contention point, specifically Israeli building in the blocs and the Jewish areas of Jerusalem. “Israel announced it would build seven hundred settlement units,” the secretary told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and the peace process went “poof.” The units were slated for Gilo, the Jerusalem neighborhood that in any future agreement with the Palestinians would certainly remain within Israel’s borders.

  I spent the next day on Israeli TV trying to find the Hebrew equivalent for poof. I labored to explain the administration’s refusal to condemn Abbas’s reconciliation with Hamas, even after the organization took credit for murdering the three Israeli teenagers. I tried, unsuccessfully, to analyze why Special Envoy Martin Indyk, in a flimsily disguised Israeli press interview with a “senior U.S. diplomat,” placed the bulk of the blame on Israel’s settlement policy. Netanyahu purportedly swore that he would never deal with Indyk again.

  Stoking these tensions, Israeli ministers were quoted calling Kerry obsessive, detached from Middle East realities, and even “messianic.” In a closed session leaked to the press, right-wing Knesset members took Ambassador Dan Shapiro to task for the administration’s alleged attempts to undermine Israeli democracy and its “anti-Semitic” policy toward Pollard. Anonymous Israeli sources also asserted that Netanyahu had given up trying to work with Obama and would wait out the end of his presidency. Along with “no surprises” and “no daylight,” the long-held principle of not airing soiled U.S.-Israeli laundry for the world to see was dangerously discarded.

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  We ran. As the siren droned on that July 7 night, I gripped Sally’s hand and sprinted across the abandoned lawn of Kibbutz Na’an. I headed for the nearest house, which was made of concrete and might provide partial shelter. But its front door was locked. So we huddled on the porch, together with Lee, Dar, and several other Bar Mitzvah guests, beneath a corrugated awning. A couple shielded their infant son with their bodies. Sufficiently experienced in shellfire, I kept my composure, though others shook and even whimpered. Any second, the rockets would hit.

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  No one that night imagined that Israel was on the brink of a desperate war with Hamas that would last for fifty days. The terrorists fired some 4,500 rockets and mortar shells at Israel and staged attacks through more than thirty tunnels dug deep under Israel’s border. Writing in The Washington Post, Dennis Ross admitted that the Obama administration had erred in pressuring Israel to allow shipments of cement into Gaza. “The Israelis countered that Hamas would misuse it” for building tunnels, Ross wrote, “and they were right.”

  Israel responded with Operation Protective Edge, which inflicted massive damage on its enemy. But seventy-two Israelis, soldiers, and civilians were killed—an agonizing cost for our small Jewish State. And Hamas’s tactic of shooting at Israeli civilians from behind innocent Palestinians again served its media and diplomatic strategy of producing pictures of Palestinian suffering. Though roughly half of the 2,100 Palestinian dead were combatants, the images of the civilian casualties again sparked outcries from abroad.

  Some of the most strident protests emanated from Washington. Obama reiterated his support for Israel’s right to defend itself from the rockets and rejected charges of Israeli war crimes. But he also criticized Israel for allegedly failing to live up to its own moral standards by harming Palestinian civilians. The president described these losses as “appalling,” an adjective so strong it had no Hebrew equivalent, and which he had last employed to characterize Gaddafi’s massacre of Libyans. Hamas, by contrast, had acted “extraordinarily irresponsibly,” Obama said, by firing indiscriminately at Israeli homes. “Gee,” a young friend of mine quipped, “one might expect Hamas to act more responsibly.”

  Each day of the operation subjected the alliance to seemingly insuperable strains. The brutal murder of a Palestinian teenager by deranged Israelis, and the beating of a Palestinian-American youth by Israeli police, sparked unprecedentedly harsh condemnations from the White House—despite Israel’s repeated apologies. Kerry, meanwhile, caught by an open microphone, cast doubt on Israel’s seriousness about limiting civilian casualties and revealed that neither Israel nor Egypt had asked him to mediate a cease-fire. The reason was that the secretary had tried to enlist Turkey and Qatar, both backers of Hamas, in the diplomacy. For the first time since 1967, the United States was uninvolved in an effort to end fighting between Arabs and Israelis.

  And the administration reacted heatedly. Marking another first in recent memory, it delayed the delivery of munitions needed by the IDF, and then, after a Hamas rocket landed just under one mile from Ben-Gurion Airport, declared the facility off-limits to all U.S. planes. Though Ambassador Shapiro assured me that the decision was required by federal regulations, most Israelis believed that it was punitive. Irrespective of the motive, the suspension of American flights to Ben-Gurion spurred mass cancellations from other airlines. Hamas won its greatest-ever strategic victory.

  I followed these events with a conflicting sense of angst and detachment. While sickened by the depth to which the alliance had sunk, I was too focused on defending Israel publicly to despair. Having earlier signed on as CNN’s exclusive Middle East analyst, I canceled my contract in order to make Israel’s case in the international media. Entire nights were spent speaking in front of foreign cameras before staggering into Israeli studios at dawn to comment on our international plight. In between, I published op-eds in the American press, including a front-page Wall Street Journal Review piece, “In Defense of Zionism,” composed on my laptop between my 2 and 4 A.M. interviews. “In a region reeling with ethnic strife an
d religious bloodshed, Zionism has engendered a multi-ethnic, multi-racial, and religiously diverse society,” I wrote. “Deriving its energy from a people which has doggedly refused to disappear—that insists, instead, on thriving—and its ethos from history-tried ideas, Zionism cannot be cowered.”

  In my few free hours, I visited wounded “lone soldiers” in the hospital and delivered the eulogy for one of them, Max Steinberg, who had moved to Israel from Los Angeles and fell in the Gaza fighting. “We thank Max, who gave his life so that we can live as a free people in our own land,” I consoled his parents at the grave site on Mount Herzl. To get there, I had to thread through thirty thousand Israeli mourners who, though they never met Max, also came to say “thank you.”

  Operation Protective Edge left parts of Gaza in ruins and aspects of the U.S.-Israeli alliance in tatters. Several American Jewish leaders told me that, in closed briefings, administration officials had cited Israel’s actions in Gaza as the reason for sharply rising anti-Semitism in Europe. Those leaders reminded the officials that Europeans had hated Jews for centuries before Israel’s creation and that anti-Semitism now often disguised itself as anti-Zionism. The Israeli press, meanwhile, reported that Ambassador Dermer was now effectively barred from the White House. Finally, in a new nadir, Obama gave yet another interview with Jeffrey Goldberg.

  My razor-witted friend continued to serve as Obama’s conduit on all things Israel-related. In a controversial talk with Jeff the previous March—conspicuously made when Netanyahu was in flight to Washington—the president again warned Israel of its growing isolation in the world and vulnerability to boycotts. “I took it to be a little bit of a veiled threat,” Goldberg later told Charlie Rose, interpreting Obama’s remark as “nice little Jewish state you got there, I’d hate to see something happen to it.”

  The threats turned ad hominem, though, on October 28, 2014, in Jeff’s talk with senior White House officials—including, some readers speculated, Obama himself. They assigned every possible invective to Netanyahu, including the politically incorrect “Aspergery,” and labeled him a coward. Coming from individuals who probably never wore a uniform, the insult was sufficiently offensive, though not as stinging as their exultation over having deterred Netanyahu from attacking Iran. “Two, three years ago, this was a possibility,” one of them boasted. “But ultimately he couldn’t bring himself to pull the trigger. Now it’s too late.” The prime minister whom Obama once thanked for granting him the time and space to negotiate with Tehran was now branded “chickenshit” for showing restraint.

  As with the “poof” precedent, I again spent the next day on Israeli television trying to translate chickenshit into Hebrew. Interviewers asked me to explain how America’s president could show more respect to Putin and Khamenei than he did to Netanyahu. Would the United States veto a Palestinian attempt to declare statehood in the Security Council, they wanted to know, or merely abstain? I replied as soberly as possible, emphazing that the alliance was about much more than the Netanyahu-Obama rapport, but what I really wanted was to shout “Stop!” An America that slanders the democratically elected leader of its ally is one that is respected neither by its friends nor its enemies. And an Israel whose primary military supporters openly mock its deterrence power is a target. I could not imagine that relations between American and Israeli leaders could have sunk lower, but then, as 2015 began, they plummeted.

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  Benjamin Netanyahu was invited to address another joint meeting of Congress. House Speaker John Boehner announced the event on January 20, the day of the State of the Union speech, after Obama vowed to veto any bipartisan effort to strengthen the sanctions. After sealing the invitation with Ambassador Dermer, the Speaker refrained from informing the president. “There’s no secret about the animosity that this White House has for Prime Minister Netanyahu,” he explained, “I frankly didn’t want that getting in the way.” Asserting Congress’s rights as a “co-equal branch of government,” Boehner stressed the need to hear Netanyahu’s views on “the grave threats radical Islam and Iran pose to our security and way of life.”

  Netanyahu’s gambit followed indications that the United States and other members of the P5+1 might meet the late March deadline for an agreement with Iran, which, for Israel, would indeed be a “bad deal.” Retaining thousands of centrifuges and a sizeable stockpile of 3.5 percent–enriched uranium, Iran could break out and make a bomb in a matter of months, Israelis feared. Reports also suggested that all restrictions on the Iranian program, international monitoring included, would be lifted after ten years. “Anyone…jumping to say we don’t like the deal, doesn’t know what the deal is,” Kerry complained to Congress, to which Netanyahu responded, “If there are those who think this is a good agreement, why must it be hidden?”

  Now, with Republican backing, Netanyahu would assail Obama’s Iran policy in the president’s congressional backyard. And the White House, predictably, was enraged. It warned that the United States would no longer share intelligence on Iran with Israel and that no one—not the president, the vice president, or even the secretary of state—would receive the prime minister. “The protocol would suggest that the leader of one country would contact the leader of another country when he’s traveling there,” Press secretary Josh Earnest said. Yet the president offered a different reason for the snub—not Netanyahu’s discourtesy but rather his candidacy for reelection. The United States, Obama explained, did not interfere in its allies’ internal politics.

  Successive coalition crises had brought down Israel’s government and elections were indeed set for March 17. Scheduled for two weeks earlier, Netanyahu’s speech could look less like an attempt to preempt a bad deal with Iran than like a vote-catching stunt. Controversy between pro- and anti-speech advocates mounted in both Israel and the United States, snaring me in the middle, for I had finally “leapt into the mud” of Israeli politics.

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  While still in Washington, I met a visiting Knesset member named Moshe Kahlon, a former Likud minister credited with breaking the cellphone monopolies and radically reducing the cost of calls. Soft-spoken and empathetic, Kahlon, who had risen from poverty to national prominence, left the Likud to establish a social and economic reform party. Kulanu (All of Us) inspired me with its commitment to closing the income gaps that deeply divided Israelis and drove thousands of them to emigrate. It gave me the opportunity to continue serving my State. Kahlon also empowered me to forge Kulanu’s diplomatic platform in which I invested nearly forty years’ experience studying and practicing Middle Eastern diplomacy.

  Set out in a Wall Street Journal article titled “The Two-State Situation,” the plan called for “building peace the Middle Eastern way, not with treaties but through understandings,” and laying the groundwork for a final agreement, even in the absence of a Palestinian negotiating partner. Israel would only build in the settlement blocs and in the Jewish neighborhoods of Jerusalem—in accordance with the 2004 Bush-Sharon letter—and proactively improve the lives of the 90 perecent of West Bank Palestinians already enjoying de facto independence. “Instead of demanding what each side cannot do, we must ask what each side can,” I concluded. “The window remains open to realistic horizons, even over an uncertain Middle East.”

  From the start, I relished taking part in Israel’s raucous democracy. In parlor meetings, public debates, and visits to open markets where each vendor plied me with the “best-ever” hummus, I promoted my party’s ideas. Having transformed myself from citizen to diplomat and back again over the course of several months, I plunged into an even profounder change—from citizen to politician—in a matter of days. Yet no challenge proved more daunting, even agonizing, than responding to Netanyahu’s speech.

  While I fully supported the prime minister’s position on Iran, I disagreed with his decision to present it in Congress. This would insinuate himself—and Israel—between Republicans and Democrats and exacerbate our differences with the White House. I felt the confusion and h
urt of those American Jews torn between their devotion to Israel and their allegiance to the president. The same speech could have been given at that week’s AIPAC conference, I suggested, or postponed until after the Israeli elections, removing the impression of grandstanding. “It’s incumbent on every Israeli leader to do the utmost to prevent Iran from getting the bomb,” I told the media. “But it’s just as vital to preserve bipartisan support for Israel in America. The first goal should not be attained at the latter’s expense.” I reminded Israelis that Americans salute the rank, not the person, and that even Obama’s critics—Fox News, for example—would resent what they perceived as an affront to the presidency.

  These positions brought me rebuke from Netanyahu’s backers as well as from his detractors who demanded an unconditional condemnation of the speech. Thomas Friedman, so rarely right on Middle Eastern issues, urging Netanyahu to take the “intelligent advice…of his previous ambassador in Washington,” brought me no solace. Nor, certainly, did the administration’s increasingly vehement remarks. National Security Advisor Susan Rice called the speech “destructive of the fabric of the [U.S.-Israel] relationship,” and John Kerry recalled Netanyahu’s support for the U.S. invasion of Iraq. “We all know what happened with that decision,” he told the House Foreign Affairs Committee, forgetting his own endorsement of that war. The subtext was clear: with a single speech, Netanyahu was dragging America into another ill-conceived conflict and, in the process, undermining the alliance.