Oren’s memoir reveals Israel’s elite is hyper-sensitive to U.S. criticism

[R. Daneel Olivaw]

http://mondoweiss.net/2015/07/israels-sensitive-criticism

Michael Oren’s new book about his years as Israel’s ambassador to the United States will — accidentally for him — turn out to be a big boost to the nonviolent movement for justice in Israel/Palestine. I have read every word, and I hope it reaches the best-seller lists and stays there, as an inadvertent but accurate account of how Israel’s power elite truly thinks and acts. The book is an extraordinarily revealing look into the highest echelons of the Israeli government, and Oren’s own animosities have prompted him to tell more than he may have intended.

The book is called Ally, and subtitled My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide. A better subtitle would be How Israel’s Government Disrespects Americans, Particularly American Jews, But Is Still Ultra-Sensitive to Criticism.

First reports have already jumped on a couple of Oren’s more ludicrous assertions, such as that President Obama is too soft on “Muslims” because his two Muslim fathers abandoned him, and that American Jewish journalists are too hard on Israel because they are afraid of anti-Semitism if they don’t criticize it. But there are plenty more juicy cherries to be picked from this particular tree.

Let’s start with Oren’s clash with the late Bob Simon, the CBS reporter who stood out as genuine and honest amid the timid mediocrity of most television journalism. Simon, who died too young in a car crash earlier this year, is right at the top of Oren’s long enemies list.

[Israeli]

1. Oren’s love affair.........

The intense controversy and criticism of Michael Oren’s new book, “Ally,” in recent weeks have focused on his assessment of Barack Obama’s foreign policy and attitudes toward Israel and the Arab world and his rather dim view of American Jews, whether Obama administration officials or media pundits, who are critical of Israel. There is another aspect of the book which has been left unmentioned. While the main chapters are on Oren’s four years as Israel’s ambassador in Washington, “Ally” is also a personal account of one man’s love affair with a country. The story of a how a Jersey boy, from his teens, decided to dedicate his life to Israel, fits neatly into a genre of Jewish literature which has not been sufficiently researched – the Aliyah story.

Some Aliyah stories are grittily realistic tales of trial and tribulation and sometimes triumph spanning Zionist history. Others are bitter reckonings of love spurned, written usually in the why-I-was-once-a-Zionist but have now awakened to reality tone. Oren’s belongs to a third sub-genre, that of the Hollywood love-story.

Whatever you think of Oren’s opinions on U.S. foreign policy and the psychological complexes of American Jews, it can’t be argued that these are not detailed and nuanced, if rather misguided. But the chapters which deal with his years in Israel could have been lifted from Leon Uris’ “Exodus.” Oren’s Israel is a country constantly at war while valiantly seeking peace and his Israelis are one-dimensional caricatures, summarised in a few, glowing adjectives – so different from the conflicted American Jews he mercilessly dissects. He glosses over the less pleasant chapters in the country’s recent history, and the few Israelis he doesn’t like, usually career diplomats who leaked his private musings to equally devious Haaretz journalists, all remain nameless and obscure (this is probably the place for full disclosure – Oren omits from his list of career accomplishments the period he spent working as a translator at Haaretz).

There are dozens of examples of this sanitized, non-Israeli Israel in “Ally,” here is just one: He claims that Israeli politicians “usually avoid expletives, perhaps because biblical Hebrew supplied them with none.” Oren obviously assumes that none of his credulous readers have spent five minutes with the average MK or are capable of reading the bible in Hebrew.

Oren has spent his entire adulthood “standing up” for Israel, on campuses, in op-eds and books, as a reserve officer in the IDF Spokesman’s Unit and as ambassador. Largely sidelined from Israel’s inner dealings with the Oval Office and Pentagon by Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak, his main role was chief hasbarist. In the process, he has created an infantilized version of the state he loves. Whether he truly believes his own narrative or has created it out of an immigrant’s desire to be accepted by prickly Sabras, is already psychoanalysis.

But ultimately, Oren is doing our country no favors. Israel needs politicians, writers, diplomats and historians capable of looking at it without rose-tinted spectacles and demanding that at 67 it finally grows up. He fails us by spinning fairy tales.

Source: http://www.haaretz.com/blogs/jerusalem-babylon/.premium-1.664171