Ally
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Which is why, after a half decade of tensions, we must begin the process of repair. The greatest single quality in a leader, I have long observed, is clearsightedness. The foreign relations field is dense with fog, and the ability to see through it is essential. American and Israeli leaders must discern their confluent interests and work to realize them. They must restore those three “no’s”—no surprises, no daylight, no public altercations—in their relations. They must revisit the meaning of ally.
Being an ally, for example, means not insisting that Israel, a sovereign country with a globally renowned judicial system, conduct “swift and transparent investigations” of security incidents. Americans would surely be offended if such demands were leveled at them by a foreign government, yet the United States routinely makes them of Israel. But being an ally also means that Israel should not repay America for supporting it in the Security Council by building in isolated settlements. Being an ally, on the one hand, means releasing Jonathan Pollard and recognizing Israel’s capital in Jerusalem, and on the other, respecting American Jewish pluralism and the prerogatives of the world’s mightiest power. Allies respect the decisions of one another’s democratically chosen leaders, even when they disagree. They back one another on principle and not merely to placate domestic constituents. Their bonds are elemental, meaningful, and mutually, enduringly beneficial.
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Unusually but understandably, thoughts about the U.S.-Israel alliance were absent from my mind that night on Kibbutz Na’an as the siren continued to blare. Together with Lee, Dar, and the Bar Mitzvah guests, Sally and I squeezed under the corrugated awning. The young parents shielded their sleeping child. Where would the rockets land, I worried, and how many people would be hit? Even while racing, my heart hurt for those thirteen-year-olds whose happiest day had become a lifelong trauma.
I held Sally’s hand and glanced over my shoulder just as two Hamas rockets roared in. Then, with twin booms that rattled the tin overhang and shook the ground below, the missiles exploded. Iron Dome interceptors, developed by Israel and funded by the United States, scored perfect hits. For moments afterward, as we emerged into that uncertain night, the glow of those bursts hovered over us, beaming like kindred stars.
IDF chief of staff during the 1967 Six-Day War and two-time prime minister of Israel Yitzhak Rabin also served as Israel’s ambassador to Washington. There, as a fifteen-year-old member of a Zionist youth movement, I met him. That handshake changed my life.
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On kibbutz as a teenager, working as a cowboy on the Golan Heights. “I’m in such ecstasy,” I wrote my parents, “for I know who I am and what I am doing here.”
As an advisor to Israel’s delegation to the UN “listening to diplomats in three-piece suits spouting anti-Semitism.”
In the Israeli paratroopers. In spite of the exhaustion and the loneliness, I still felt indebted to the camaraderie, the maturity, the chance to protect my country.
Beirut, 1982.
On a captured PLO jeep with the city of Beirut in the background. At night, “I watched, as if hallucinating, entire neighborhoods flaming with phosphorus and the night sky ablaze with tracers.”
Next to an incapacitated Israeli tank during the Second Lebanon War, 2006.
The Soviet Union was in its death throes and looked it. Sagging gray buildings encrusted in garbage, endless food lines, and the thinly disguised secret police—the ruthless KGB.
With Yitzhak Sokoloff (second from left) and members of the Zionist underground. Scientists, factory workers, teenagers, retirees—their only bond was their insistence on being Jews and their right to live in Israel. Soon to be sentenced to hard labor in the gulags, they were ordinary people of superhuman courage.
At Babi Yar, outside Kiev.
Here, in two days in 1941, the Nazis shot some 34,000 Jews. Forty years later, the Jews of the Soviet Ukraine were still yearning to be “a free people in our land.”
When our first child, Yoav, was born, I vowed, “That kid will never wear a helmet.” But he did. Twenty-one years later, while apprehending a Hamas terrorist, Yoav was shot and wounded. His sister and brother would also wear helmets—the price of Israel’s defense.
Family photo with our first Israeli grandchild, Ariel, and his parents, Ayala and Yoav (to my left), and (to Sally’s right) Lia and Noam. In response to our question whether we, by fulfilling our Zionist dream, had endangered them, our kids told us, “Raising us in Israel was the single best thing you could have done for us as parents.”
Lia and Yair with their newborn daughter, Romi. Having Israeli grandchildren is, for Sally and me, a crowning life achievement.
Grappling with situations that any normal family would find nightmarishly abnormal, we ultimately prevailed. The backpack with which I arrived in Israel blossomed into a furniture-filled home alight with laughter.
Presenting my credentials, July 2009. Instead of hearing my “elevator speech,” the president spent most of the event schmoozing with my parents (between Obama and me).
White House
Laughing with Lior Weintraub (left), my first chief of staff, and Deputy Chief of Mission Dan Arbell. We laughed because the embassy’s petty concerns—press leaks and management issues—paled compared to the tens of thousands of terrorist rockets aimed at Israel, the moribund peace process, and Iran’s race for the bomb. We laughed bitterly, knowing that the three of us, sometimes alone, had to safeguard Israel’s vital alliance with America.
With Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s first chief of staff and, later, mayor of Chicago. Rahm lost part of a finger in an accident which, President Obama said, cost him half of his vocabulary. In spite of his tart words and often strident criticism of our policy, I valued his friendship, his candor, and his commitment to Israel.
Brooke Collins/City of Chicago
Senior White House advisor David Axelrod was the guest speaker at the embassy’s Israel Independence Day celebrations, 2010. An advocate of a hard-line policy toward Netanyahu, David could be tough with me as well. Regarding the prime minister, I suggested to him, “Try love.”
Shmuel Almany/Embassy of Israel to the U.S.
Outside of the First Lady, Valerie Jarrett was the most powerful woman in Washington. In a very centralized administration, she stood within the innermost circle as the president’s closest advisor. Few Israelis, though, ever heard her name, much less appreciated her influence.
Shmuel Almany/Embassy of Israel to the U.S.
Greeting Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at Ben Gurion Airport. Formidable and seemingly inexhaustible, she also displayed an unflagging wit. “I’ve been phoning you and phoning you,” she exclaims to me here, after weeks of not responding to my calls. “But you never return my messages!”
Shmuel Almany/Embassy of Israel to the U.S.
Iranian Night with Israeli singer Rita.
Shmuel Almany/Embassy of Israel to the U.S.
Anti-Israel protestors accosting me on the stage at the University of Texas. People often asked me how, in such tense situations, I managed to keep my cool. In addition to thirty years’ experience coping with hostile crowds, I often recalled tougher times—such as the day I transferred from my high school’s “dumb class” to Honors English. Mostly, I was disappointed. These were the students I came to engage and, possibly, educate.
Embassy of Israel to the U.S.
A Holocaust denier and fierce advocate of Israel’s destruction, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad tours a nuclear plant with thousands of newly installed centrifuges. These could enrich uranium to a weapons grade, threatening Israel’s existence and triggering a Middle East nuclear arms race capable of destabilizing the world.
Office of the Presidency of the Islamic Republic of Iran/Getty Images
Erupting in December 2010, the Carmel forest fire—the worst conflagration in Israel’s history—destroyed five million trees, displaced seventeen thousand people, and killed forty-four. Whatever disagreements Obama had with Netan
yahu disappeared as the president immediately responded to the prime minister’s urgent request for aid.
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Together with U.S. Chief of Protocol Capricia Marshall, receiving Benjamin Netanyahu at the airport. Part commando, part politico, and thoroughly predatory, the prime minister had a grim view of Jewish history and an Old Testament temper. I gave him loyalty, honesty, and the advice he did not always relish hearing.
Embassy of Israel to the U.S.
Off-and-on talks between Prime Minister Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, here mediated by Secretary of State Clinton, brought the sides further from—rather than closer to—peace. Abbas ultimately forged a unity pact with Hamas and sought to achieve Palestinian statehood through the UN, without giving Israel peace. The Obama administration nevertheless placed the bulk of the blame on Israel’s settlement policy.
Drew Angerer
The holiest place in Judaism, the Western Wall became the scene of escalating tensions between the Ultra-Orthodox establishment and liberal women—many of them from the United States—who prayed in nontraditional ways. The controversy threatened to strain relations between Americans, who viewed the issue as a matter of freedom of religion and women’s rights, and Israelis, who saw it as a question of law and security.
AP Photo/Michal Fattal
In the Capitol Rotunda, addressing the annual Day of Remembrance. Back in the 1970s, Israel gave American Jews the courage to confront the Holocaust, yet they often forgot America’s failure to save European Jewry. Rather than standing and saluting at such ceremonies, I asked myself, why weren’t we rending our garments in shame?
Embassy of Israel to the U.S.
“A man at ease inside his body,” I told Sally.
And a leader, I concluded, “more about ideology than policy.”
Embassy of Israel to the U.S.
At the September 2012 UN General Assembly.
By drawing a red line across the bomb, Netanyahu gave Obama “space and time” for negotiating with Iran. The unusual gesture evoked comparisons with Wile E. Coyote. The White House repaid Netanyahu by branding him a coward.
AP Photo/Seth Wenig
At the Pentagon with Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, situated between Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Martin Dempsey and Under Secretary (later Secretary) of Defense Ashton Carter. Across the table sits Defense Minister Ehud Barak, a wunderkind only Israel could have produced—concert pianist, former IDF chief of staff and prime minister, master commando, and tinkerer of clocks and locks.
Embassy of Israel to the U.S.
Touring an Iron Dome battery during Obama’s March 2013 visit to Israel. This was the opportunity to convey an image of American-Israeli strength and unity to a tired and riven region. After more than four years of receiving mixed messages, the world would hear a single word: “ally.”
Foreign Ministry of Israel
March 22, 2013: Netanyahu’s “apology” to Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. I had no illusions that the gesture would appease the anti-Israel ruler. It was made to honor Obama.
Developed and deployed by Israel in a record four years, Iron Dome became the first antiballistic system in history to work in battle. As Hamas fired thousands of rockets at Israeli towns, Iron Dome gave negotiators time to work out cease-fires, and saved the lives of thousands of civilians who would have fallen victim to an all-out ground war.
Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance
Devoid of body fat, capable of bicycling dozens of miles each day, Secretary of State John Kerry tirelessly sought peace for Israel—first with Syria, next with the Palestinians. Both attempts failed. “Help the Palestinians to build viable institutions and only then try to create a state,” I advised his staff. But my counsel went unheard. The peace process, Kerry said, “went poof.”
Embassy of Israel to the U.S.
As the son of a former U.S. Army officer, I felt a special attachment to the military. I tried to visit as many bases as possible and to interact with those who defended our common values.
Embassy of Israel to the U.S.
In one of the perks of the job, I got to spend time with Israel’s president Shimon Peres. A founding father of the State, the architect of Israel’s nuclear program, and a visionary of peace, Peres was also a politician whose views often clashed with the prime minister’s. Here, at the White House, he receives America’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Embassy of Israel to the U.S.
September 30, 2013: My last day on the job was typical.
In the Oval Office with Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Obama are (clockwise) Vice President Biden, Secretary of State Kerry, National Security Advisor Susan Rice, Ambassador Dan Shapiro, NSC Middle East expert Phil Gordon, and Middle East Envoy Martin Indyk. To my left are Yitzik Molcho, Israel’s peace negotiator, and National Security Advisor Ya’akov Amidror.
White House
With Kulanu Party head Moshe Kahlon in January 2015, announcing my candidacy for Knesset. “Jumping into the mud”—as they say in Hebrew—of politics meant undergoing another radical transformation, but another opportunity to serve the State.
Dror Einev
“Behind the Iron Dome,” I once said, “stands a marble dome—of the Capitol.” Israel enjoys immense support in both houses of Congress. To help maintain that backing, I doubled the time I spent on the Hill. Among our greatest champions was the late Dan Inouye, the Democratic senator from Hawaii, seen here with Israel’s dedicated congressional liaison, Aviv Ezra (right).
Shmuel Almany/Embassy of Israel to the U.S.
Israeli-designed and American-financed Iron Dome interceptors destroying a Hamas rocket, July 2014. The explosion was so close I took this photograph with my cellphone.
To Ariel and Romi,
my first two Israeli grandchildren
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book crossed multiple divides—creative, political, strategic, moral, and emotional—and writing it required many allies.
Foremost among these were the benefactors of the Abba Eban Chair in International Diplomacy at Herzliya’s Inter-Disciplinary Center (IDC). My deepest thanks go to Ronald Lauder, Seth and Beth Klarman, Shmuel and Eleanor Katz, Lief Rosenblatt, Robert and Arlene Kogod, Marc Rowan, Ted and Annette Lerner, Suzie and Michael Gelman, Larry and Judy Tanenbaum, Elan and Eva Blutinger, Linda Frum and Howard Sokolovski, Lawrence and Fran Bloomberg, Harry Gross, Robin Neustein, Alan and Amy Meltzer, Ronnen Harrary, Stuart Kurlander, Alma and Joe Gildenhorn, Sheldon Inwentash and Lynn Factor, Michael Bregman and Kate Osborne, Gary and Tamara Fine, Ricardo and Raquel Di Capua, and the many others whose generosity made this book a reality. My special gratitude goes to Gerry Schwartz and Heather Reisman for their sage guidance, their unflagging commitment to Israel, and their invaluable friendship.
The book was also made possible by the Atlantic Council, through the vision of the incomparable Adrienne Arsht and under the inspired leadership of Fred Kempe. I also owe an immense debt to my brilliant assistant at the Council, Sarah Trager.
Arnon Milchan, a friend and font of expert advice, and his tireless representative in Israel, Hadas Klein, were instrumental in seeing this book through to publication. So, too, was my brother-in-law, Fred Kuperberg.
The IDC and its president, Prof. Uriel Reichman, provided a supportive and stimulating environment for writing Ally. I was blessed with a supremely motivated staff. To Arielle Heffez, Danny Brown-Wolf, Na’ama Moskovitz, and Tamar Katzir—thank you all. Ariel Steinberg, my former student from Yale who made aliya to Israel, served in the IDF, and later joined me at the IDC, lent me his wisdom, his keen editorial insights, and loyalty. While not formally a staff member, Netta Korin, a cherished friend and an “advisor for all seasons,” deserves many thanks as well, as do Roy Elman and Chen Lev, who graciously volunteered their time and skills.
A number of extraordinary individuals who assisted me in fulfilling my am
bassador role were not mentioned in book. Most of them, I know, would not even want to be thanked, but I will do so anyway. My deepest appreciation goes to Gil Shefer, Paul Berger, Haim Saban, Stuart Eizenstat, Ruth and Leonard Wisse, Yaakov Ne’eman, Ed and Debra Cohen, Stuart and Wilma Bernstein, Michael and Anne Mandelbaum, Michael and Amanda Alter, John and JoAnn Mason, Dan Poneman, Morad Zamir, Sharon Shalom, Edna Halabani, Orit Moshe, Jane Harmon, Yifat Sharon, Josh Block of the Israel Project, Jordana Kotler, Pamela Reeves, Heather Klein, Arnold Angrist, Stefanie Pearson Argamon, Phil and Laura Vallerand, Bob and Sally Burkett, Ken Weinstein, Amy Kauffman, Rudy and Ellen Boschwitz, Bill Knapp, Jeannie Milbauer, Karen Yianopolos, Danny Klionsky, Susan Blumenthal, Eva Blutinger, Kathy Kemper, Marjorie and James Billington, Nechama Shemtov, Tony Podesta, Ambassador Arturo and Veronica Sarukhan, Ambassador Ichiro and Yoriko Fujisaki, Ambassador Weger and Cecilie Strømmen, Ambassador Jonas and Eva Hafstöm, Ambassador François and Sophie Delattre, Ambassador Giulio and Antonella Terzi, Ambassador Nigel and Julia Sheinwald, Ambassador Peter and Susie Westmacott, Ambassador Sayed Tayib and Shamin Jawad, Ambassador Renée and Richard Jones-Bos, Ambassador Manuel and Christine Sager, Ambassador Sergei and Netalya Kislyak, Ambassador Adrian and Codrina Vierita, the late Senator Frank and Bonnie Lautenberg, Congressman Henry and Janet Waxman, Ambassador Gilles and Ellen Noghes, Mindy and Shelly Weisel, Nechama Shemtov, Ann Moline, Simcha Weinblatt, and Rabbis Levi Shemtov, Gil and Batya Steinlauf, Julie Schonfeld, Rick Jacobs, Eric Joffe, and Steven Weil.