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Summary
Summary
Michael Oren served as Israel's ambassador to the United States from 2009-2013, a transformative period for America and a time of violent revolutions throughout the Middle East. Hundreds of thousands of the region's people were killed, and the lives of millions more threatened. Israel and America grappled not only with the peace process and other complex bilateral issues, but matters such as terrorism and the Iranian nuclear program which imperiled the world. The alliance would be subjected to enormous strains and its future questioned by commentators in both countries. On more than one occasion, the friendship's very fabric seemed near to unraveling. This is the story of that alliance and of its divides, as experienced by one who treasures his American identity while proudly serving the State of Israel. In a world in which presidents and prime ministers can chat or shout at each other by videophone, without any need for go-betweens, the role of an ambassador seems increasingly nebulous. But ambassadors represent not only leaders but peoples and, in the case of Americans and Israelis, peoples linked at multiple levels. A quintessentially American story of a young person who refused to relinquish a dream, irrespective of the obstacles, and an inherently Israeli story about assuming onerous responsibilities. It is a record, a chronical, and a confession. And it is a story about love, about someone fortunate enough to love two countries and to represent one to the other. But, above all, this memoir is a testament to an alliance that was and will remain vital for Americans, Israelis, and the world.
Author Notes
Michael B. Oren is an Israeli historian born on May 20, 1955. He is also an author, politician and former ambassador to the U.S. He has written books, articles, and essays on Middle Eastern history. His titles include the best-selling Power, Faith and Fantasy and Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East, which won the Los Angeles Times History Book of the Year Award and the National Jewish Book Award. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard, Yale, and Georgetown universities. In 2015 his title Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide, made The New York Times Best Seller List.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (2)
Kirkus Review
The former Israeli ambassador to the United States balances his personal story with his ambassadorial history. American-born Israeli historian Oren (Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present, 2007, etc.), who is currently a member of the Knesset, is forthright in his memoir of service as ambassador from 2009 to 2013, years of some discord between the two proud allies. A former paratrooper, his performance is on a tight rope fixed by his love at one end for the nation where he was born and, at the other, the beloved spiritual land of his forefathers. Beyond the speeches and state dinners, crisis management was a constant duty, as terrorism never abated (in 1996, Oren's sister-in-law was killed by a Hamas bomber). He represented Israel during the ill-fated Arab Spring, and Turkey, once friendly, turned hostile. Visiting Vice President Joe Biden was twice offended, and Oren was blindsided by unsanctioned announcements of increased settlements. There was turmoil in Egypt and, internationally, calls for boycotts, divestments, and sanctions against Israel. Amid burgeoning anti-Semitism, there arose an existential threat with Iran's steady march toward nuclear weaponrynot to mention an often hostile press. Oren has seen shifts toward abandonment of the working paradigms of the historic alliance, and his characterizations of various key legislators, government functionaries, and ill-informed pundits are deft and pointed. The author is candid in his admiration of his former boss, Benjamin Netanyahu. Less warm is his assessment of the American president, whom the former ambassador found sometimes inspiring but too often cerebral, remote, and deficient in understanding the political machinations of the Middle East. Throughout, the author proves a genuine, ardent advocate for the well-being of his beleaguered homeland and its ongoing alliance with the land of his birth. Even before its publication, Oren's book has been attacked, based on culls of provocative pieces. Readers would do well to attend to the entire text of this fluent, important political memoir. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
New York Review of Books Review
WHEN ISRAELI Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited Washington in July 2010, he met with representatives of the National Jewish Democratic Coalition and the Republican Jewish Coalition at Blair House. After the two delegations quietly entered the dimly lit brocaded dining room, they sat down at a large elliptical table, the Democrats to Netanyahu's left and the Republicans to his right. But the calm was shattered as the Democrats and Republicans began shout- ing at each other and pounding the table until they were told to cool it. "The chastised representatives fell silent and finally acknowledged Netanyahu's presence, but their near brawl demonstrated that Washington's political schizophrenia also split American Jews" - or so the former Israeli ambassador to the United States and current Knesset member Michael B. Oren reports in his remarkably frank new memoir, "Ally." Since then, tensions have only heightened. After the maladroit Israeli ambassador Ron Dermer (a protégé of the former House speaker Newt Gingrich, who himself dismissed the Palestinians as an "invented" people in 2011) arranged with Speaker John Boehner for Netanyahu to address a joint meeting of Congress in March without informing the Obama administration, dozens of Democratic lawmakers decided to boycott the speech. Next came Netanyahu's demagogic warning on the eve of the recent Israeli election that Arab voters were flocking to the polls, along with his rejection of a two-state solution. After his victory, he apologized for the first and grudgingly backtracked from the second statement. Most recently, Oren himself triggered a controversy around his book's release by accusing President Obama in a June Wall Street Journal op-ed of deliberately sabotaging relations with Israel, an accusation that Dan Shapiro, the American ambassador to Israel, asked Netanyahu to repudiate, only to be rebuffed by him. And in Foreign Policy magazine, Oren piled on with an essay claiming that being abandoned by his Muslim father and stepfather explained a proclivity on Obama's part to soft-pedal terrorism in an effort to be embraced by "their coreligionists." The AntiDefamation League warned that Oren's lucubrations about Obama's Muslim heritage resembled "conspiracy theories" and "amateur psychoanalysis." Oren was undaunted. Speaking at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan to publicize his book, he explained that it is designed to help sound alarms about a nuclear deal with Iran, and he demanded that the Obama administration stop its "ad hominem" attacks on Netanyahu. "We shouldn't," he said, "be treated this way." According to Haaretz, he also mused that non-Orthodox and intermarried American Jews in the administration "have a hard time understanding the Israeli character." These acrimonious charges not only underscore the longstanding frictions between Obama and Netanyahu, but also the extent to which Israeli-American relations have become the subject of what amounts to an intramural debate. In an earlier era, the American foreign policy establishment was dominated by Arabists from the Ivy Leagues. Now, as the names of various Washington officials, scholars and journalists whiz by in Oren's memoir, it seems clear that the older WASP establishment has been supplanted by the very ethnic group it once disdained. Far from easing disputes about Israel, however, this development appears to have further envenomed the debate over its destiny. On the one side are traditionally liberal Jews who continue to see Israel as an egalitarian version of America. Their lodestar is the famous credo enunciated by Louis Brandeis, one of the founding fathers of American Zionism: "To be good Americans, we must be better Jews, and to be better Jews, we must become Zionists." On the other side are more conservative Jews and Christian evangelicals who believe that this is sentimental piffle. Instead of lecturing Israel, Americans should unflinchingly stand by it - by which they really mean Netanyahu's Likud - and recognize that peace is an illusion. It is here that Oren's memoir is most illuminating. Oren was by no means Netanyahu's most truculent adviser, but his personal odyssey exemplifies the shift from a liberal and secular Zionism to a more belligerent nationalism. A gifted historian whose account of America's interventions in the Middle East, "Power, Faith and Fantasy," was a best seller, Oren grew up an American in West Orange, N.J., and emigrated to Israel in 1979, abjuring his American citizenship three decades later to become ambassador. Oren traces his devotion to Israel to meeting Yitzhak Rabin briefly in May 1970 in Washington, as a 15-year-old member of a Zionist youth group. According to Oren, "his life remained a model for mine. Following his example, I would devote myself to Israel, fight in its wars and defend it from critics. I shared his vision of peace in spite of disappointments and bloodshed." As a child, Oren, who was born in 1955, had to wear a leg brace at night and suffered from learning disabilities. After Israel triumphed in the 1967 war, he writes, it "appeared to be everything to which I - at age 12 still incapable of learning the multiplication tables or of running around the bases without tripping over my own pigeon-toed feet - aspired." This fierce attachment to Israel was fortified by the anti-Semitism he encountered in his blue-collar neighborhood. "The only Jewish kid on the block," he writes, "I rarely made it off the school bus without being ambushed by Jew-baiting bullies." After each incident, Oren says, his father showed him an album that his brother, a World War II veteran, had given him. It contained yellowing pictures of concentration camps and corpses. According to Oren, "The ovens of Auschwitz, I often felt in high school, were still smoldering." Oren wanted to fight back. As an Israeli, he volunteered in 1982 for the dangerous assignment of traveling through the Soviet Union to meet and assist members of the Zionist underground. Later that year he fought in Lebanon during the Israeli invasion. But there was also another battle that Oren ended up fighting, which was on the campuses of American universities. In September 1982, he enrolled in a Ph.D. program at Princeton, where he studied with the legendary Middle East scholar Bernard Lewis, who was depicted by academic foes like Edward Said as dripping with condescension and contempt toward the Arab world. Oren wrote and lectured to denounce Said's claim that a Western Orientalist academic tradition viewed the Arabs through imperialist spectacles. After years in the academic trenches, however, he ended up isolated, unable to land a job. "Perhaps I had never fully escaped my high school role of Don Quixote," Oren says. His fortunes turned when his idol Rabin was elected prime minister in 1992. He secured a position in the prime minister's office as an adviser on interreligious affairs. Then came 9/11 and the publication of his book on the 1967 war, "Six Days of War," which sold out in a week. "The lecturer once snubbed by academia," Oren writes, "was now a visiting professor at Yale and Harvard." It's difficult to avoid the impression that Oren continues to carry a large chip on his shoulder. He complains, for example, that "The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, both Jewish-edited, rarely ran nonincriminating reports on Israeli affairs." The odd formulation "Jewishedited" suggests that Oren views everything through the lens of ethnic identity. In addition, Oren hastily dismisses the historian Tony Judt as someone who "opposed Israel's existence." If anything, Judt's apprehensions about Israel's future seem more cogent than ever. To criticize Israel is not tantamount to being anti-Israel, a tiresome tactic that too many of the country's would-be defenders have adopted. Might it not even be pro-Israel, in the sense of pointing out failings that any Israeli government would be prudent to rectify? Oren, however, elides any discussion of Israel's actions - other than to refer euphemistically to its settlements around Jerusalem as "robust construction projects." What's more, Oren sees the ghost of Said everywhere, including in the Obama administration. Oren depicts Obama's uplifting but vacuous June 2009 Cairo speech, which called for outreach to the Muslim world, and his desire to reach a nuclear agreement with Iran as part of a wider pattern that reflected "the '60s revulsion to military strength, the romance with developing societies and the questioning of American primacy. Regarding the Middle East, in particular, one could discern the reverberations of Edward Said's 'Orientalism.'" OREN SEEMS STUCK in a time warp. Obama has never sought to resuscitate warmed-over pacifist ideas from the 1960s. As it happens, Obama ramped up the drone war and attacked Libya. Nor has he extricated the United States from either Afghanistan or Iraq. So much for the bogus notion that Obama reviles military power. The pity of it all is that Oren has been a political moderate, at least in the context of Netanyahu's inner circle. According to Oren, he often counseled prudence in dealing with America. Netanyahu would have none of it. Oren says, "my approach ran counter to Netanyahu's personality - part commando, part politico and thoroughly predatory." But what Oren, much like Netanyahu himself, refuses to countenance is that Obama's focus on reaching a deal with Iran isn't based on wishful thinking but on cold strategic considerations. Oren concludes by saying that Israel should not take America for granted and that he wants to help restore ties between the two. If so, he has a funny way of going about it. "Ally" does not strengthen the alliance but could further erode it. Oren's story reflects the shift from a liberal Zionism to a more belligerent nationalism. JACOB HEILBRUNN is the editor of The National Interest.
Excerpts
Excerpts
The Perforated Passport The Embassy of the United States to the State of Israel should be a majestic structure. After all, it is the hub of America's most special relationship with any foreign nation. And yet the building--squat and colorless--looks like a bunker. Perhaps the purpose is to discourage the hundreds of Israelis who daily line the sidewalk outside to apply for tourist visas, or to confound any terrorist who managed to skirt the concrete obstacles girding the grounds. Whatever its purpose, the bleak exterior reflected my mood as I entered the compound in early June 2009 and presented my passport. That Yankee-blue document announced that I had been born Michael Bornstein, in Upstate New York and had been a U.S. citizen for more than half a century. With a faded cover and pages tattooed by customs, it had accompanied me on innumerable transoceanic flights. Presenting that passport at Newark's Liberty International Airport, a twenty-minute drive from where my parents raised my two sisters and me, I beamed each time the inspectors wished me, "Welcome home." I believed in that passport--in the history it symbolized, the values it proclaimed. Awareness of the nation's darker legacies, such as slavery, did not make me less sentimental about America. My eyes still misted during the national anthem, brightened at the sight of Manhattan's skyline, and marveled at the Rockies from thirty-five thousand feet. Once, when reading aloud the inscription on the Lincoln Memorial and already choking at "four score and seven years ago," my children rolled their eyes and sighed, "There he goes again. . . ." My affection for America sprang naturally. Growing up in the northern New Jersey town of West Orange, I played Little League baseball, attended pep rallies, and danced--in a lamentable banana tux--at my senior prom. My father, who fought in World War II and afterward served in the army reserves, took me to his unit's reunions and to summer maneuvers to watch the color guards parade. I, too, marched, albeit across halftime gridirons puffing into a baritone horn. At Boys State, the American Legion's semimilitary seminar, Vietnam vets put me and other selected seventeen-year-olds through a basic training in American democracy. The following year, I starred as Don Quixote in our high school's production of Man of La Mancha, the musical based on Cervantes's classic. Arrayed in rusted armor, I tilted at windmills and strained for the high notes while enjoining the audience to "Dream the Impossible Dream." Yet there were handicaps. Like many in our working-class neighborhood, my parents struggled financially. They could not afford to send me to the pricey Jewish summer camps, and instead packed me off to a rustic YMCA program with mandatory church services and grace before meals. Overweight and so pigeon-toed that I had to wear an excruciating leg brace at night, I was hopeless at sports. And severe learning disabilities consigned me to the "dumb" classes at school, where I failed to grasp elementary math and learn to write legibly. Yet, fervently determined, I managed to overcome these obstacles. At fourteen I went on a draconian diet and slimmed down, forced myself to run long distances while keeping my feet straight, and forged myself into an athlete. Meanwhile, my mother lovingly showed me how to type on an old Fleetwood on which I began to peck out poetry. After publishing my verse in several national magazines, I was transferred into a "smart" class, taught myself grammar and spelling, and ultimately attended Ivy League schools. All the hallmarks of an American success became mine, I acknowledged, thanks in part to uniquely American opportunities. If sentimental about the United States, I also felt indebted. From the time that all four of my grandparents arrived in Ellis Island, through the Great Depression in which they raised my parents, and the farm-bound community in which I grew up, America held out the chance to excel. True, prejudice was prevalent, but so, too, was our ability to fight it. Unreservedly, I referred to Americans as "we." Now I was about to forfeit that first-person plural. The Marine behind the glass booth at the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv examined my passport and wordlessly slipped it through the window. The coolness of his reception would soon become routine. Landing at Liberty Airport, I would never again be greeted with "welcome home." Americans, I would often remind Israelis, are painstakingly nice--until they are not. "Have a nice day" can become "screw you" in an instant. That morning, officials at the U.S. embassy were in courteous mode, expediting the security check, escorting me between the cubicles of the consular section. There passports are extended and new ones issued. Mine would be neither. My knees felt rubbery and my shirt, already dabbled by the humidity outside, stuck to my flanks. Relief came in the teddy-bearish form of Luis Moreno, the deputy chief of mission, an old acquaintance. Luis brought me into the office of U.S. Consul General Andrew Parker, who sat behind his desk surrounded by mementos from his previous postings and fronted by a gold-trimmed Stars and Stripes. We exchanged pleasantries, griped about the khamsin--the gritty desert wind plaguing Tel Aviv--but could not ignore the reason for my visit. Bespectacled, neatly goateed, Parker could be mistaken for a kindly professor if not for his undertaker's tone. Raising my right hand, he asked me to repeat after him: "I absolutely and entirely renounce my United States nationality together with all rights and privileges and all duties and allegiance and fidelity thereunto pertaining." I repeated those words while gazing at the flag to which I had pledged allegiance every school day from kindergarten through high school. Then, across his desk, Parker arrayed several copies of an affidavit. This reaffirmed "the extremely serious and irrevocable nature of the act of renunciation," acknowledging that, henceforth, "I will become an alien with respect to the United States." I signed each copy, swearing that I knew precisely what I was doing and that I was acting of my own free will. I must have appeared shattered because Luis Moreno leaned over and gave me a hug. But the ordeal was not yet complete, Consul General Parker indicated. Officiously, almost mechanically, the consul general inserted my American passport into an industrial-sized hole puncher and squeezed. The heart of the federal eagle emblazoned on the cover of the document was pierced. Growing Up American How did I reach this unnerving moment? Back in the sixties, young radicals burned their passports and cursed their fascist country, "Amerika." But my reverence for the United States had always been deep--deeper than any hole puncher could bore. No, renouncing my American citizenship was not an act of protest. It reflected, rather, a love for another land--not that of my father, but of my forefathers. That love could not be presented in a passport, nor could it be renounced. When did it begin? There was the distant cousin who arrived one day from a far-flung place and gave me, an eight-year-old numismatist, a shiny coin inscribed with letters I recognized from Hebrew school. Somewhere, I intuited, people actually spoke that language. There were the nerve-fraying weeks of May 1967, when the enemies of those people amassed and my parents murmured about witnessing a second Holocaust. Then, the miracle. A mere six days transformed those victims into victors. Draped in belts of .50-caliber bullets instead of prayer shawls, paratroopers danced before the Western Wall in Jerusalem. They were our paratroopers, suddenly, our people. Because Israel was young and righteous and heroic, I fell in love with it. The country appeared to be everything to which I--at age twelve still incapable of learning the multiplication tables or of running around the bases without tripping over my own pigeon-toed feet--aspired. Even then, I had a keen sense of history, an awareness that I was not just a lone Jew living in late 1960s America, but part of a global Jewish collective stretching back millennia. Already I considered myself lucky to be alive at this juncture, when my existence coincided with that of a sovereign Jewish State. I fell in love with Israel because I was grateful, but also because I was angry. The only Jewish kid on the block, I rarely made it off the school bus without being ambushed by Jew-baiting bullies. Those fistfights left my knuckles lined with scars. One morning, my family awoke to find our front door smeared with racist slogans; one night our car's windshield was smashed. Then, when I was a high school freshman, the phone rang with horrendous news: a bomb had blown up our synagogue. I ran to the scene and saw firemen leaping into the flames to rescue the Torah scrolls. The next day, our rabbi stood with Christian clergymen and led us in singing "We Shall Overcome." But no display of brotherhood could salve the pain. In the post-World War II, WASP-dominated America in which I grew up, anti-Semitism was a constant. Hardly confined to my blue-collar neighborhood, it festered in the elite universities with their quotas on Jewish admissions, and pervaded the restricted communities and clubs. Superficially, at least, we American Jews ranked among the nation's most successful minorities. We took pride in the Dodgers' ace pitcher Sandy Koufax, in folksinger Bob Dylan, and actors Tony Curtis and Kirk Douglas. It tickled us that Jewish humor became, in large measure, America's humor, and the bagel grew as popular as pizza. Jewish artists wrote five of America's most beloved Christmas songs and practically invented Hollywood. One could hardly imagine a community more integrated, and yet we remained different. Alone among the hyphenated ethnic identities--Italian-American, African-American--ours placed "American" first. And only ours was based on religion. No one ever referred to Buddhist or Methodist Americans. As Jews and as Americans we were sui generis, as difficult for us to define as for others. A graffito on the wall of my bathroom at school asked, "Are Jews white?" A different hand scrawled beneath it, "Yes, but . . ." Anti-Semitism completed that sentence. Whether being beaten up for my identity or denied certain opportunities because of it, I often encountered hatred. And after each incident, my father took me down to our basement. There, in a cubbyhole behind the stairwell, he secreted a musty album that his brother, another veteran, had brought home from World War II. Inside were yellowing photographs of concentration camps, piles of incinerated corpses, and snickering Nazis. "This is why we must be strong," my father reminded me. "This is why we need Israel." Those photographs needed no captioning, as the Holocaust haunted our lives. The ovens of Auschwitz, I often felt in high school, still smoldered. Yet American Jews hesitated to talk openly about the murder of six million of their people, as if it were a source of shame. Then, in my sophomore year, survivor and world-acclaimed author Elie Wiesel visited our community. He spoke of his ordeals in Romania's Sighet ghetto and the Buchenwald concentration camp. In a voice at once frail and unbroken, he challenged us to face the Final Solution publicly, not only in our basements. We did, but confronting the horrors of Jewish helplessness also forced us to face the harrowing truth that America did nothing to save the Jews. Worse, America sent thousands back to be murdered and closed its doors to millions. That knowledge alone would have sufficed to make me a Zionist. This meant, simply, that I believed in the Jews' right to independence in our ancient homeland. But there was more. Zionism was not merely a reaction to discrimination, but an affirmation of what I felt from an early age to be my fundamental identity. For deep-rooted reasons, Zionism defined my being. Though I was not raised religious--I read my Bar Mitzvah in transliteration--the Jewish story of the Exodus from Egypt to the exodus from Europe resounded with meaning. Our story was the vehicle for our values: family, universal morality, social justice, and loyalty to our land. Half of humanity believed in the one God we introduced to the world nearly four thousand years ago and refused to relinquish, even under unspeakable tortures. God owed us an explanation for the Holocaust, I insisted. But Zionism offered a way of saying "we're finished with you, God" and "thank you, God," simultaneously. It allowed us to assert our self-sufficiency, even independence from formal religion, but in the one place that our forebears cherished as divinely given. Zionism enabled us to return to history as active authors of our own story. And the story I considered the most riveting of all time was that of the Jewish people. I belonged to that people and needed to be part of its narrative. Being Jewish in America, while culturally and materially comfortable, felt to me like living in the margins. The major chapter was being written right now, I thought, and not in New Jersey. History, rather, was happening in a state thriving against all odds, thousands of miles away. How could I miss it? That is why I joined the Zionist youth movement that brought me to Washington in March 1970, when I shook Yitzhak Rabin's hand. That is why, throughout that year, I mowed lawns and shoveled snow from neighbors' driveways to raise the airfare. And why I made repeated trips into New York City, alone, to browbeat kibbutz movement representatives into accepting me as a volunteer despite being two years short of the minimum age. The representatives relented and, in the summer of my pivotal fifteenth year, I finally purchased my ticket. I acquired my first U.S. passport and boarded a plane for Israel. Rising to Israel Descending the ramp, the Israeli heat hit me, hammering-hot. But even more fazing was my encounter with the country I had only imagined: smelling the citrus-scented air, seeing trees alien to New Jersey and all the signs in Hebrew. This was Israel of 1970, before serious talk of peace or the Palestinian issue, when fighting still raged on the Egyptian and Jordanian fronts. The hourly news, announced with a series of beeps, had passersby running ear-first for the nearest radio. Behind the tension, though, lay a raffish élan and self-confidence. Toughened old-timers could still recount how they drained the swamps, battled malaria and British occupation troops, and struggled bitterly for independence against invading Arab armies. Along with its valorous past, Israel's present was scintillating. The streets thrummed with shoppers, beggars, policemen, workers, stunning young women and men in olive army uniforms, almost all of them, inconceivably to me, Jewish. A few days after my arrival, a wobbly Israeli bus dropped me into the dust of Kibbutz Gan Shmuel. Invented by Zionist pioneers at the turn of the twentieth century, the kibbutz--in the Hebrew plural kibbutzim--was an utterly revolutionary concept. Members of these hardworking agricultural communities shared all their worldly possessions, ate every meal in a common dining room, and raised their children in separate "houses" managed by nursemaids. Ideologically utopian, the kibbutzim fulfilled the practical goal of settling the land and absorbing Jewish immigrants. In wartime, the farms served as fortified redoubts. Excerpted from Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide by Michael B. Oren All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.