Former Israeli ambassador to the United States Michael Oren probably won’t be invited back to the White House anytime soon.
The widely respected historian, who served as Israel’s top diplomat in Washington from 2009 to 2013, is out with a new book, “Ally,” that skewers President Barack Obama and his administration’s foreign policy. In an extensive interview, Oren told The Daily Caller that he published the book now to try to influence the debate over the impending Iranian nuclear agreement.
Israel is “a highly diverse and often rambunctious political system, which is a multi-party system where nobody agrees on anything,” Oren said. “But on the Iranian nuclear issue, there’s something close to a national consensus, which is very, very rare in Israel. We all agree that this is an exceedingly bad deal, a perilous deal for us.”
Unlike much of the American foreign policy establishment, Oren says he is not convinced that the Iranian regime is a rational actor.
“From Israel’s perspective, the Iranian regime is fundamentally irrational, though it may take rational steps to achieve irrational goals,” he said. “Hitler did something very similar. Conquering Poland, for example — rational goal to reach an irrational end.”
As ambassador, Oren said he tried to understand President Obama’s worldview by reading, among other things, the president’s memoir, “Dreams From My Father.” Oren said he was surprised to discover Obama didn’t “have any positive things to say about America.”
“One of the interesting notes was that he didn’t seem to have very nice things to say about America, which was unusual for someone who was actually aspiring to be president,” Oren explained. “It showed a certain worldview. I was trying to understand his worldview.”
Oren, who was recently elected to the Israeli Knesset, also says the Palestinian cause is what he calls a “kishke,” or gut, issue for Obama and that he suspects the president will continue to push it over his remaining months in office.
See TheDC’s full interview with Oren below:
The Daily Caller: Why did you decide to publish the book now instead of waiting until President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu were out of office?
Michael Oren: I think right now Israel, the Middle East and the United States are at a critical juncture. The specific issue is the pending nuclear agreement with Iran, which for Israel is truly fateful issue. We come from a highly diverse and often rambunctious political system, which is a multi-party system where nobody agrees on anything. But on the Iranian nuclear issue, there’s something close to a national consensus, which is very, very rare in Israel. We all agree that this is an exceedingly bad deal, a perilous deal for us. And there is a debate in this country as well and I thought it important to get this story out now as part of that debate.
TheDC: The foreign policy establishment in the United States believes that the Iranian regime is inherently rational and that it would never actually use a nuclear weapon if it ultimately obtained one. Are you as confident?
Oren: The answer is no. And I talked about how this went, in many ways, to the core of Israel’s dialogue with the United States over the Iranian issue. You know, we all have excellent security communities and intelligence communities, and we’ve looked at similar data, we arrived at similar conclusions about the nature of the program, about the state of the program, the details. Where we disagreed the most fundamentally was about the nature of the regime, in whose hands this program lay. And the president has come out and said publicly that he sees the Iranian regime as a rational regime, though it is anti-Semitic, that it operates at a cost-benefit analysis, that if it is sufficiently engaged it can become a productive and positive regional actor. It can even help reconcile Sunnis and Shiites. The president has been on record saying that. By the way, you should know in my book I almost always exclusively quote the president. I’m not making up things the president says.
From Israel’s perspective, the Iranian regime is fundamentally irrational, though it may take rational steps to achieve irrational goals. Hitler did something very similar. Conquering Poland, for example — rational goal to reach an irrational end. It is the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism around the world. It is a country that openly says it wants to destroy a neighboring state — us — repeatedly. It is a country that is arming organizations like Hezbollah with 100,000 rockets that can hit every home in the state of Israel. It’s an organization that is trying to undermine even pro-American governments throughout the Middle East. So that’s a fundamental difference. In the book I always brought it down to one line: President Obama says that Iran is not North Korea, Prime Minister Netanyahu says Iran is worse than 50 North Koreas.
TheDC: Earlier this year former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani got a lot of flack from the media for saying that he doesn’t believe that President Obama loves America. Don’t you more or less come to the same conclusion in your book?
Oren: No, I just note it. I think the president does love America. I was just surprised to see in his initial memoir that he doesn’t have any positive things to say about America. And I had to note it.
I approach my position as ambassador sort of harnessing some of the skills I had developed over the years as a historian. So what do you do when you’re a historian? You go to the sources, always. When in doubt go to the sources. So one of the more authentic sources I had to understand the president — and I viewed that as a critical part of my job, understanding the president — is to go to his memoir “Dreams From My Father.” And I made some notes about it. One of the interesting notes was that he didn’t seem to have very nice things to say about America, which was unusual for someone who was actually aspiring to be president. And I noted it down. It showed a certain worldview. I was trying to understand his worldview.
TheDC: You say in the book that the Palestinian cause is one of President Obama’s gut issues. What do you mean by that and how do you think it came to be such an important issue for him?
Oren: Well I discussed this at length. I used the Yiddish word “kishke,” which means gut. And the president has certain gut issues, “kishke” issues. One of them, for example, was outreach in the Muslim world. Non-proliferation was a “kishke” issue. Now this is only foreign policy issues. Obviously healthcare was a “kishke” issue too, but that was less important to me, far less important than the Middle East.
But another “kishke” issue was the Palestinian cause, which he writes about extensively and in the Cairo speech of 2009 he devotes a major share of his speech to the Palestinian issue. And he comes back to it again and again. Even when the peace process appears to be inextricably log jammed, he’s going to come back to the Palestinian issue. And he sees the Palestinians as an oppressed people, an occupied people, that they should receive “justice.” That’s his word. That’s also a Palestinian word, but it’s also his word. It’s a word that’s actually used in a speech when he visited Jerusalem in 2013. “Justice for the Palestinians.” I think that is a “kishke” issue for him and will continue to be. And I think my assumption — and I’m not ambassador — but my assumption is that he will continue to be active on the Israeli-Palestinian issue.
TheDC: Did you get the sense that President Obama believes, not unlike an insignificant number of left wing academics and activists, that it would have saved the world a lot of trouble if Israel was never created in the first place?
Oren: No. I never thought that. And I never thought the president was anti-Israel. I think he had an attachment to a certain Israel. It wasn’t the Israel of the Likud, it wasn’t the Israel of the settlers. He himself has spoken about having an emotional attachment to a pre-1967 Israel. I’m of the personal opinion that that image was mythic. Israel today is far more open and democratic than it was until 1967.
TheDC: I read your interview with David Horowitz in The Times Of Israel and I got the sense from the answer to one of his final questions that you might have ambitions to be Israeli Prime Minister one day.
Oren: [Laughter] I didn’t even get that far in the interview, I’m sorry. What did he say, just remind me, because I didn’t read it. Tell me, I’ve been on the road.
TheDC: I think he asked you a question, “do you have ambitions one day to be Prime Minister?” And you kind of laughed and said something along the lines of “whatever the Israeli people want I will serve my country.”
Oren: That’s my answer. It’s my answer. The laugh was, it’s just a funny question. I’m talking about a book and all of a sudden I’m running for prime minister.
TheDC: Some of your critics have said you didn’t write this book as a historian but as a politician. So let me ask you, is this book written by Michael Oren the historian or Michael Oren the politician?
Oren: You’re reading Michael Oren the person. I wrote this book before I got into politics. The elections in Israel came upon us quite suddenly.
TheDC: There’s a year and a half left in President Obama’s presidency. Outside of the Iranian issue which we disused, what concerns you that could happen over the rest of President Obama’s tenure that could further harm the U.S.-Israel relationship?
Oren: Well I think it’s important to state, and I do throughout the whole book, again I need to reiterate this, it is not an anti-Israel administration or this is not an anti-Israel president. They’ve stuck by us at some very important times. There’s a chapter in the book, which unfortunately I couldn’t get published anywhere, that talks about how the president came to our aid during the disastrous Carmel fires of December 2010. And I talk about the military aid and there were just times we needed the United States to be with us and they were there. During the Egyptian revolution when the Israeli embassy in Cairo was in danger of being overrun.
This is not an anti-Obama book. Yes, it has criticisms. Yes, it very much relates to the Iranian nuclear issue. But, again, we’re going to have to come back to the worldview that I talked about, the kishke issue. One of those kishke issues, as I said earlier, is the Palestinian issue. And it may come again, it looks like it is coming again to the fore in the [United Nations] Security Council in the form of several possible international initiatives. One of them is from New Zealand, which would impose a sort of framework for a peace agreement, which would not reflect Israel’s position to say the least. And there’s a big issue about what will be the United States’ position be vis-a-vis that resolution? And I have strong feelings about what is Israel can do about it, not all of them are reflected with the positions of Netanyahu.
If you have time, look up an article that I published in the Wall Street Journal about two months ago called “The Two State Situation.” That’s my position on the peace process. I think that Israel should be proactive in meeting this threat. But having said that, again, it is a core issue, a kishke issue to the administration and it is our responsibility as Israelis and as America’s ally to take that deep concern of the president for the Palestinian issue, we have to take it seriously.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.