Mr. Oren Goes to Washington, Maybe

Gershom Gorenberg

Michael Oren is an old friend of mine. I respect his scholarship (his Six Days of War is the best history of June 1967). He wrote an endorsement for my last book, The Accidental Empire. And when we (rarely) discuss politics, the differences are also respectful. So a I am not an unbiased judge of the reports on his possible appointment as the U.S. ambassador to Washington.

I am however, an extremely bemused judge. Depending on which Israeli paper you’ve picked up, Mike is either too conservative for the job, or too dovish.  I hope Mike is getting a good laugh out of all this.

According to a Yediot Aharonot report earlier this week (which I haven’t found on line), Oren is pro-Republican and the Obama administration will take affront at his appointment. Yediot quoted a “senior source close to the [Obama] administration” as saying that “In light of the harsh criticism that Oren directed at Obama in the election campaign, appointing him as ambassador is an odd choice.”

The basis for that complaint, according to Yediot, is an academic article that Oren published last fall, in which he laid out the differences between Obama’s and McCain’s policies toward Israel, the Mideast and terrorism.  Yediot says that “Obama’s aides” (not identified by name) “said that in the guise of an academic study, Oren conveyed his personal opinions and published things that portrayed Obama as non-supportive of Israel.”

According to Yediot, “In his article, [Oren] stated that Obama had disregarded the Palestinian responsibility to halt terrorism…” The actual wording of the article is subtly but significantly different;

Take, for example, the issues of Israeli settlements and the borders of any future Palestinian state. While McCain has avoided criticizing Israel’s settlement policy and balked at delineating the contours of “Palestine,” Obama has impugned the settlements and taken up Bush’s call for a “contiguous” Palestinian state free of Israeli roadblocks and joined by West Bank-to-Gaza routes. McCain, who did not meet with Palestinian leaders during his Israel visit, has emphasized the Palestinian Authority’s duty to clamp down on terror in accordance with the road map. “We must ensure that Israel’s people can live in safety until there is a Palestinian leadership willing and able to deliver peace,” he stated. Obama, by contrast, has refrained from mentioning the Palestinian Authority’s responsibility in suppressing terror. During his stopover in Israel, Obama visited the Palestinian Authority’s headquarters in Ramallah and met with President Mahmoud Abbas.

South Jerusalem readers interested in doing a better job of reading the original article than the Yediot reporter did can find it here. It’s also worth looking at the shorter version that he wrote for Forbes. That McCain and Obama had very different views on the Middle East should not be controversial. Oren catalogued the differences. I’d conclude from this catalogue that Obama was a much better choice for Israel. But then, I reached that conclusion on my own, without reading Oren’s article.

The question is whether the wording of Oren’s catalogue leads a reader to conclude that he preferred McCain – and whether one would reach that conclusion if one hadn’t heard any political labels attached to Oren in advance. I leave that question of literary criticism for others to argue out. I would, however, point to the critical last sentences of Oren’s full article:

Ultimately, Israel is best served by a President capable of grappling with rapid and often turbulent change. Pro-Israel voters, then, should be less concerned with which candidate, John McCain or Barack Obama, favors or opposes settlements or is open or opposed to dialogue with Iran, but which is the ablest leader.

I don’t know what operative conclusion Oren drew from that when he cast his ballot. I have more than one centrist-to-neocon leading friend who tilted to voting Obama after the Palin nomination and McCain’s panicked response to the economic crash.

As for the possibility that Oren is too dovish for Bibi, that’s implied by Ha’aretz. That paper’s reporter was apparently watching a Youtube clip of a lecture that Oren gave earlier this year. Again, watching it for yourself could be useful. But Ha’aretz does quote him accurately. Oren does say that to for Israel to remain a Jewish state, it should withdraw its settlements unilaterally from the West Bank. That’s a lot closer to the position that Ehud Olmert held at the beginning of his term in 2006 than to the position that Bibi Netanyahu holds now.

Of course, someone could easily be more dovish than Bibi and more hawkish than Obama. There’s some space in between them, to say the least.  I don’t know if that’s relevant to appointing an ambassador.

The real problem that Oren could have as ambassador is Bibi that changes his mind a lot, especially under pressure. His office tends to send out emailed press notices that begin “clarification.” Like this one from earlier this week:

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is insistent in his approach that recognition of Israel as the national state of the Jewish People is a matter of substance and principle that enjoys wide recognition in the country and around the world, without which it will not be possible to advance the diplomatic process and reach a peace settlement.  However, the Prime Minister has never set this as a pre-condition for the opening of negotiations and dialogue with the Palestinians.

In other words, “Oops!” We didn’t really set a precondition that would really upset our friends in Washington.

An ambassador is Washington is likely to find himself defending Bibi’s position yesterday precisely at the same time that Bibi is clarifying, denying, correcting, rejecting or deflecting what he said yesterday.  This is part of the job description, for whoever gets the job.  But that’s easy for me to say. Nobody is ever going to offer me a job as a diplomat.