I Am Amb. Michael Oren's 1000th

I finally won something:-

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Michael Oren Has A Problem with Menachem Begin?

After reading Michael Oren's op-ed, I sent this letter to the NYTimes, which, as usual, was not published:

In his op-ed, Israel's Ambassador to the United States Michael B. Oren, in reviewing Israel-Egypt relations, notes that "Anwar Sadat, also started...a revolution of peace" ("Will Egypt Be a Partner in Peace?", February 21). It is unfortunate that Israel's highest official representative could not see fit to mention Sadat's partner in that peace process, Israel's Prime Minister Menachem Begin, who indeed initiated the new diplomacy that led to the 1979 treaty and for which merited the Nobel Peace Prize.



Yisrael Medad
Shiloh, Israel

Yisrael Medad is the co-editor of the recently published "Peace in the Making: The Menachem Begin-Anwar Sadat Personal Correspondence" published by Gefen

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Guess Who

Michael B. Oren, Israel's Ambassador to the United States, published an op-ed in the NYTime: "Will Egypt Be a Partner in Peace?".

Here are the names of political personalities in that piece and I ask you to guess now, which name will be missing.

Have you guessed?

Okay, here are the names:

David Ben-Gurion
Gamal Abdel Nasser
Benjamin Netanyahu
Anwar Sadat
Sameh Shoukry
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
Yukiya Amano
Tony Blair

That's right, Menachem Begin, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, Israel's Prime Minister who initiated the 1979 peace treaty process is missing.

What does that tell you?

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Oren Criticized (Finally)

Although I have known Michael Oren for years and admire his intellect and academic achievements, I have made it clear that his politics are a bit problematic. He is not pro-Yesha in the basic sense.

I have commented on his ambassadorial appointment to Washington right from the outset (here and also here, for example) and found it not the smartest Netanyahu move.

Well, Caroline Glick, a long-time Bibi proponent, has seen the light (*). As she writes this past Friday in her column:

...Netanyahu must not become Obama’s spokesman. As part of his unsuccessful bid to convince Obama to change his policies towards Israel, Netanyahu and his advisers have gone on record praising Obama for his support for Israel. These statements have stymied attempts by Israel’s US supporters to pressure Obama to change those policies.

The Israeli official who has been most outspoken in his praise for Obama and his denial that Obama’s policies are hostile towards Israel has been Ambassador Michael Oren. Oren has repeatedly praised Obama for his supposedly firm support for Israel and commitment to Israel’s security ­ most recently in an appearance on Fox News on Wednesday. Moreover, according to eyewitness reports, in a recent closed-door meeting with American Jews, Oren criticized the Republican Party for attacking Obama for his animosity towards Israel.

This quite simply has to end. As foreign officials, Israeli diplomats should not be involved in US partisan politics. Not only should Israeli officials not give Obama undeserved praise, they should not give Republicans undeserved criticism...

Amen. Finally.

As usual with the right-wing nationalist camp, either they make very few appointments (a la Begin) or they make the wrong one (a la Netanyahu). We can't afford errors of judgment.

If Caroline has zeroed in on this, maybe someone in Bibi's bureau will begin to realize their mistakes.

Maybe.

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(*) UPDATE

Caroline informs me:

I have criticized Oren a number of times. I criticized his outreach to J Street and I think I criticized his appointment. I have also criticized Bibi a number of times.

Will Michael Oren Put His House in Order?

The New York Times decided to illustrate the complexity and, at times, cross-purpose nature of israeli politics by highlighting the inherent contradictions between the same-time visits of Defense Minister Barak and Jerusalem Mayor Barkat in Washington.

But read this:

Across town, on Capitol Hill, the mayor of Jerusalem, Nir Barkat, was making his own rounds...“There is no freeze,” Mr. Barkat said. “We’re minding our own business, building the city for the residents.”

That is not what the Obama administration wants to hear...Nor is it the message the Israeli government wants to broadcast right now...

...The Israeli Embassy was chagrined by Mr. Barkat’s remarks...

“For him, it’s fantastic; for us, it’s lousy timing,” said a spokesman for the embassy, Jonathan Peled. He tried to put things in perspective, comparing Mr. Barkat to Mayor Adrian M. Fenty of Washington. “He’s not going to be the one negotiating peace with the Palestinians, in the same way that Fenty is not going to be the one negotiating the Start agreement with Russia,” Mr. Peled said.

...“The issue is whether Netanyahu is getting a grip on his bureaucracy,” said David Makovsky, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and a co-author of the book “Myths, Illusions and Peace.”

A. It really isn't the task of Mr. Peled to mouth-off on Barkat as he did. Besides the fact that Barkat's position is the same as Netanyahu's, at least his public position, is Peled working for Barak or the Israeli government - or Meretz or Ir Amim?

B. As for Makovsky, he really should know better that bureacraciers are creatures of their own but more importantly, in a democracy, municipalities really do have the releative freedom to approve construction or not. What "grip" would he prefer?

Makovsky is a free agent, a pundit. Oren, however, is the one someone needs get a grip on so that he gets a grip on his spokesperson's gripe, or maybe a simply provide him with an understanding of the rules of bureaucracy.

An Azure Letter-to-the-Editor Reject

Michael Oren was at least as entertaining as the film he reviewed and certainly more intellectually stimulating. Nevertheless, his essay (“Post-Zionism, Hollywood Style”, AZURE No. 34, 2008), springboarded off of Adam Sandler’s “You Don’t Mess With The Zohan”, contained two errors of historical fact.

He asserts, p. 53, that, following the threat of American President Eisenhower to apply sanctions on Israel unless it retreated from the Sinai Peninsula after the 1956 Sinai Campaign, “the Jews of America remained silent”. Not all. The Betar Zionist youth movement attempted to protest what was perceived as unfair American pressure. A demonstration was conducted in the Garment Center district which led to the virtual expulsion of the movement’s Israel emissary. In addition, efforts were made by Betar and former Betar members to mobilize opposition to that administration pressure. Attempted approaches to such personages as Abba Hillel Silver, Henry Morgenthau Jr. , Felix Frankfurter and others were made with the assistance of Rabbi Louis I Newman, Eliyahu Ben Horin and Max Lerner however without success.

On page 54, Oren writes that “the first formal call for Jewish statehood was issued not in London or even Jerusalem, but in 1942 at New York’s Biltmore Hotel”. Not being sure of how “formal” is defined in this instance, I would suggest that at the 17th Zionist Congress of 1931 it was Ze’ev Jabotinsky who issued a formal call for Jewish statehood. His call for Jewish statehood was included in his proposal of an endziel declaration that Zionism meant the establishment of a Jewish state, with a Jewish majority in the original territory of the Jewish National Home as decided by the League of Nations prior to the British initiated partition that established Transjordan. The Congress voted against that suggested decision.

Yisrael Medad
Shiloh

Remember What I Wrote About Michael Oren?

I know Michael well and I am in awe of his academic accomplishments and book writing. However, as things go in Israel, we have a difference of outlook.

If you recall this post of mine, you won't be surprised to have me point this out from his NYTimes profile:

...Mr. Oren is putting his intellect and persuasive powers into the service of a right-wing Israeli government that does not see eye to eye with the White House. Judging from Mr. Oren’s writing and lectures, it is not clear he is completely eye to eye with his new bosses either.

He is on the record as supporting Israel’s unilateral disengagement from Gaza, a decision that led Mr. Netanyahu to leave the government of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in 2005. He has also said Israel must withdraw from its settlements in the West Bank, to save itself as a Jewish state.

“I am the last of the standing unilateralists,” Mr. Oren declared in a lecture in March at Georgetown University, where he was a visiting professor in Jewish studies until being named ambassador...Today, Mr. Oren is reluctant to discuss his views on settlements or to criticize Mr. Obama’s policies. But he insists, “I couldn’t serve in this government if I didn’t feel that the government’s positions closely, closely dovetail with what I’ve been feeling for a long, long time.”

Well, that was past. And the current?

He has lost no time cultivating Rahm Emanuel, Mr. Obama’s chief of staff, and David Axelrod, a senior adviser, both of whom are Jewish and have a keen interest in Middle East policy.

“The fact that Israel is having trouble with liberal America means we need to have someone who understands liberal America,” said Yossi Klein Halevi, a longtime friend and journalist who worked with Mr. Oren at the Shalem Center, a center-right research institute in Jerusalem.

Understand the liberals? Fine.

But not to compromise with them or to knuckle under.

Words from Israel's US Ambassador-Designate

...to maintain Israel’s demographic integrity, measures must be taken to separate Israel from the densely populated areas of the West Bank. In the absence of effective Palestinian interlocutors, Israel may have to draw its eastern border unilaterally. The new borders should include the maximum number of Jews, of natural and strategic assets, and of Jewish holy places.

in an otherwise great article here.

But consider:

Unilateralism brought us the post-Lebanon 2000 fiasco and the 2005 Gaza Disengagement fiasco.

The Galilee is also densely populated with Arabs.

Natural assets is an Israeli security presence on the hill plateau (gav hahar in Hebrew).

Jewish Holy Places is the Temple Mount, Cave of the Patriarchs and Joseph's Tomb.

Oren might be, at present, not quite a measured success.

Oiy Oren

Thanks to a commentator, over at IsraelMatzav, further to my post here, I was directed to this from the transcript of a September 2007 Background Briefing on ABC Radio National audio of Professor Michael B. Oren speaking at the University of Melbourne:

Michael Oren: Terror posed a primary challenge to our ability to remain a sovereign people, but also a Jewish people, and yet as in Moses and in Ben-Gurion's time, the greatest challenges were not external, they were internal, from the Jews themselves.

The government Ariel Sharon decided two years ago that Israel must withdraw from the Gaza Strip, and so in the summer of 2005 I donned my uniform again as a reservist and participated in the operation to remove 21 Israeli settlements from the Gaza Strip and 8100 inhabitants. Those residents regarded Gaza as the Jew's god-given patrimony, a gift which no government had the right to reject, and then the question arose, could this rift be spanned? Could Israel survive it? I was not sure.

On the morning I walked into the first of those settlements, with 500 Israeli soldiers, and the settlers set fire to the gate on fire so that we had to wait until an armoured bulldozer came and broke it down. We poured into the settlement and the residents pelted us with sacks of paint and assailed us wearing the yellow star of the ghetto, calling us Nazis. The settlers then barricaded themselves into the synagogue and would not come out, and finally the commander of my unit reached an agreement with the rabbi of the settlement that they would pray the afternoon prayer and then they would come out, and line up and go on buses. But they did not come out. That poor commander had to make the difficult decision any Jewish officer could make: to break into the synagogue with a sledgehammer. So we broke into that synagogue with a sledgehammer, and what greeted us in there was the most difficult scene I've ever encountered in my thirty years of army service. There were 100 Jews lying on the floor, wailing and screaming, clutching Torah scrolls, clutching pews, crying out for God to save them. And some of these Israeli officers, many of who were pilots and commando, fell as if they'd been hit by bullets. And for a while there we weren't sure who was evacuating whom as some of the settlers came to help the soldiers who had been stricken and fell down. And it took hours to literally tear these people away from these Torah scrolls and physically to carry them on to buses. And I was not sure that we could survive this as a people, as a state.

And finally when we had them on the buses the rabbi came down and asked the brigade commander if at that point all the residents and settlers could come off the buses and address us, the people whom we had just torn from their synagogue. And I thought the brigade commander was going to say 'Are you crazy? Go away'. But no, the brigade commander, with much greater compassion and wisdom than mine, said, 'OK'.

So the same people we had spent hours loading on to these buses filed off the buses. And we all stood there in an H formation with Israeli flags flying, and the rabbi of the settlement got up and spoke to us and he said 'We've just undergone the most profound trauma. What could be worse than this? And yet we must realise that tomorrow when we wake up we will all be part of the same Jewish State and that we have to work together to make this country more just, to make this country more moral, to make it more Jewish.' And then we stood, 500 soldiers, 100 settlers, and we all sang Hatikvah, The Hope, the Israeli national anthem. And then without a word the 100 settlers got on the bus and drove away. We had survived it, but only narrowly.

Does Netanyahu really think he's the best candidate for Israel's Ambassador to the U.S.? Would Michael yield up his American citizenship?

Bad News

I don't think he's the candidate, maybe a candidate.

Here:

Michael Oren says he'd be honored to serve at Israel's ambassador to the United States, but has not been offered the job.

Oren was responding to a flurry of media reports in recent days speculating that he was a leading candidate for the ambassador post. A Maariv article earlier in the week (link in Hebrew) said, without citing any named sources, that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had selected Oren, and on Tuesday Laura Rozen at ForeignPolicy.com reported that "sources in Israel and Washington" said Oren was the choice. Rozen updated the story on Wednesday, though, with a Yediot Ahronoth story which cited sources in the Prime Minister's office saying that Oren was one of a number of candidates for the job and that Dore Gold was considered the leading contender for the ambassadorship.

"I haven't received any offer," Oren told JTA on Wednesday

but Haaretz reports:-

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's candidate for Israeli ambassador to Washington, Dr. Michael Oren, supports a unilateral Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and an evacuation of most of the settlements.

Oren, a visiting Georgetown University professor, said in a lecture there last month, "The only alternative for Israel to save itself as a Jewish state is by unilaterally withdrawing from the West Bank and evacuating most of the settlements."

Oren, a Middle East expert and senior researcher at Jerusalem's Shalem Center, gave a 90-minute lecture entitled "The Gaza Crisis from an Historical and Personal Perspective on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict...Oren voiced his opinions about possible solutions to the conflict and the policy Israel should take. He emphasized that he does not represent the majority of Israelis.

"I may be the last of the standing unilateralists," he said. "The only thing that can save Israel as a Jewish state is by unilaterally withdrawing our settlements from the West Bank," and waiting for a new Palestinian leadership.

Oren said he does not believe that a solution to the conflict could be achieved at this stage. Instead we should find ways to "better manage the conflict, to relieve tensions and ameliorate the conditions under which people live to ensure against future flare ups."

...Establishing a Palestinian state would require the evacuation of tens of thousands of Jewish settlers from the West Bank and from holy cities like Hebron, Oren said.

To take such a traumatic step most Israelis must be convinced that they would be getting "absolute peace" and the "end of the conflict," he said.

Oren said he supported the disengagement from the Gaza Strip. After they started firing Qassam rockets from Gaza, he said Natan Sharansky asked him if the disengagement wasn't a mistake.

Oren said he replied that it had not been. The mistake was Israel's failure to react to the Qassam fire, which sent a message of weakness to the entire Middle East.

Oren also spoke about his personal experience regarding the Gaza Strip and said he had "traumatic relations" with the Gaza Strip and Hamas leadership...he...cannot forget that his sister in law was killed by a suicide bomber from Gaza

I hope people in Bibi's office will read this.

Carl is vehemently reacting to this.

Oh, So That Was What It Was About

Michael Oren writes about what the Annapolis Conference really was about:-

...Yet, in spite of its glaring handicaps, Annapolis must be deemed a triumph — not of peacemaking, paradoxically, but of girding the region for conflict. Though no doubt sincere in their desire to neutralize the Arab-Israeli irritant in Middle Eastern affairs, participants in the conference were above all motivated by their fear of a radical and relentlessly aggressive Iran. This fear has deepened with the success of the Iranian proxies Hezbollah and Hamas in Lebanon and Gaza, as well as the expansion of Iranian influence westward into the Iraqi vacuum.

The inability of the international community either to entice or deter the Iranians from producing nuclear weapons adds urgency to the need to unite those countries threatened by those bombs. That, and not American fiat, brought 49 states and organizations to Annapolis; that, and not the yearning for an Israeli-Arab accord, impelled a Saudi prince to sit alongside an Israeli prime minister.

Not unexpectedly, the Iranians reacted ferociously to Annapolis. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad pronounced it a “failure” and the government-controlled press promised to “bring down Islamic wrath” on its participants. But such rage merely betrays the anxiety induced by Annapolis in Tehran. For the first time a coalition of Western and modern Arab leaders has coalesced and declared its commitment to resist “extremism” in the Middle East — a well-known euphemism for Iran.

What’s more, new efforts have begun to confront Iran outside of the United Nations and woo Syria from Iran’s orbit. An international conference may not be the ideal formula for attaining Israeli-Palestinian peace, but it can provide a powerful forum for expressing solidarity in the face of war.

Fine, Michael, but what happens to Israel, its security, its ethos as the Jewish state, etc.?

Michael Oren A Bit Too Overenthusiastic

The Republican Jewish Coalition sent out Michael Oren's op-ed at the Wall Street Journal with its message of The president isn't selling out Israel or relaxing his call for Palestinian democracy:-

The Bush Doctrine Lives

Some excerpts:-

...Mr. Bush has not backtracked an inch from his revolutionary Middle East policy. Never before has any American president placed the onus of demonstrating a commitment to peace so emphatically on Palestinian shoulders. Though Mr. Bush insisted that Israel refrain from further settlement expansion and remove unauthorized outposts, the bulk of his demands were directed at the Palestinians.

"The Palestinian people must decide that they want a future of decency and hope," he said, "not a future of terror and death. They must match their words denouncing terror with action to combat terror."

According to Mr. Bush, the Palestinians can only achieve statehood by first stopping all attacks against Israel, freeing captured Israeli Cpl. Gilad Shalit, and ridding the Palestinian Authority of corruption. They must also detach themselves from the invidious influence of Syria and Iran: "Nothing less is acceptable."

Comment from me - so why even promise them a conference now? Just ask them to do all this and then we'll talk diplomacy, movement, etc?

In addition to the prerequisites stipulated for the Palestinians, Mr. Bush set unprecedented conditions for Arab participation in peace efforts. He exhorted Arab leaders to emulate "peacemakers like Anwar Sadat and King Hussein of Jordan" by ending anti-Semitic incitement in their media and dropping the fiction of Israel's non-existence.

Comment from me - oh, really. I didn't know they had stopped anti-Semitic propaganda. Did they?

Most momentous, however, was Mr. Bush's affirmation that "the United States will never abandon . . . the security of Israel as a Jewish state and homeland for the Jewish people." This means nothing less than the rejection of the Palestinians' immutable demand for the resettlement of millions of refugees and their descendents in Israel. America is now officially dedicated to upholding Israel's Jewish majority and preventing its transformation into a de facto Palestinian state.

Comment from me - (sorry for the repetition) oh, really? The security of Israel is ipso facto threatened not only by the "right of return", which Bush didn't explicitly mention [does he have a problem with that or, due to his concept of democracy, Israel may yet hear a future American President say 'sorry, folks, but democracy means your Jewish state can be voted out of existence not by "refugees" but by intenral demographics], but by the establishment of a Palestinian state.

Unfortunately, many of these pioneering components in Mr. Bush's speech were either implicitly or obliquely stated, and one might have wished for a more unequivocal message, such as that conveyed in his June 2002 speech on the Middle East.

Comment from me - ah, Michael, so what I have been saying is apparent even to you?

Another Unpublished Letter

In response to an op-ed last month. I waited - but in vain.

Michael Oren writes that while a peace settlement between Syria and Israel may yet be attained, the possibility exists that a clash between Israel and Washington may be ignited ("What if Israel and Syria Find Common Ground?", Jan. 24).

Another possibility needs be considered and that is with the Golan Heights back in Syrian control, a major strategic loss for Israel, how long is that "settlement" to last?