Michael Oren, were you disappointed by the state of American Jewry? A conversation

The storm surrounding Michel Oren’s new book Ally keeps raging. Oren has been subjected to criticism, praise, repudiation, and admiration by a few people who have already read his book and by many who have not. Last week, I posted the first half of a transcript of a long conversation I had with Oren. That part was about the Obama presidency and Israel. Today we are posting the second round of the conversation, in which we talk mostly about Oren’s understanding of the state of American Jewry and of Israel-Diaspora relations. A great portion of his book is dedicated to American Jewry, and in the conversation I wanted to delve into several topics: his complaints concerning Jewish writers that are highly critical of Israel; his view of Tikkun Olan; his relations with J Street; Israel and its reluctance toward progressive American Judaism.

I began the part of the conversation about American Jewry by asking about the notion that Oren’s book alleges that “Jewish journalists are largely responsible for American media’s anti-Israel coverage”. I asked him if this is what he really thinks.

Oren: This book deals with Jews. As much as it is about Obama and Netanyahu and our relationship during this period, it is about Israel’s relationship with the American-Jewish community, about American Jewry, to which I gave an immense portion of my time, whether it was working out the Western Wall arrangements, or dealing with the conversion bill… These took many hundred hours of work, trying to keep us all on the same Jewish page, even though we were going to occupy different parts of that page. And one of the issues I had to deal with was the fact that Jews were disproportionately represented in the US media. You just need to look at the op-ed pages. There is this anti-Semitic trope out here that ‘Jews control the media and that that’s why the media is pro-Israel’. They are disproportionately represented in the media, but the media isn’t necessarily pro-Israel. And there are certain Jews, I’m not going to go into names, who say ‘I’m Jewish and I disagree with what Israel does!’, and you encounter that phenomenon quite frequently. As an Ambassador I had to deal with a reality, and that reality is that there are a number of Jews in the media who will fight their Jewish identity to lend credibility to their criticism of Israel. To not deal will this would have been remiss as an ambassador, and I chose to discuss it because I want it out there, I want this as an issue we talk about with American Jewry.  

My discussion of Tikkun Olam is a big part of the book. First of all, recognizing that Tikkun Olam has become the dominant idea for a large part of liberal American Jewry, and progressive American Jewry, Israel can’t ignore that. But we have to see it, on the one hand, as an opportunity, but, on the other hand, as a challenge. Because Tikkun Olam, by nature, is a universalist notion. Zionism, Jewish peoplehood, is a particularistic notion. I put it in a very pedestrian way in the book – I say ‘if you have a hundred dollars, do you give it to Birthright, or do you give it to building a school in Guatemala?’ That’s the challenge of Tikkun Olam. And I propose ways in which you can reconcile it. My wife is on the board of IsraAid, a wonderful organization, you probably know it – they were the first on the ground in Haiti, they’re all over the world giving disaster aid. So you can do Tikkun Olam through Israel, through the Jewish people. That’s what I was stressing. But it was in no way an attack on Tikkun Olam. On the contrary. There is a lot of good about it – I just also recognize it as a challenge.

Rosner: Do you feel that Tikkun Olam, at least for portions of the community, is a way to get away from Jewish tribalism (and from Israel)?

Oren: That’s the challenge. It’s a universalist notion. If I remember correctly, you wear a Kippa. When I grew up and went to Hebrew school we never heard about Tikkun Olam. It’s in the Aleinu prayer, I know, but it’s originally a rather obscure medieval Kabalistic notion that has to do with the broken vessels and divine light of creation. It has been adapted to 21^st century liberal American Jewish thought, to mean that our purpose in the world is to light the world’s injustices, make the world a better place. It’s a beautiful notion. But you have to reconcile it with the fact that we have Jewish peoplehood, and that we have a Jewish state to support… Those are difficult notions to reconcile, but we have no choice. We have to. This book doesn’t have all the answers. This book is about identifying the questions.

Rosner: Were you in any way surprised or disappointed by the state of American Jewry that you found during you stay?

Oren: Yes, frequently.

Rosner: What surprised you and what disappointed you?

Oren: First of all, it’s very difficult for American Jews to understand the Israeli experience. People say they want a two-state solution. I understand that. What they have a very hard time understanding is that we withdrew from Lebanon in 2000 and withdrew from Gaza in 2005, that the entire Middle east has been unraveling, and that by creating a Palestinian state without national institutions, without  an economy and with a corrupt, unelected leadership, the chances of that state not turning into Hamas at best and ISIS at worst, in a very short period of time, are very very small. Try explaining that to American Jews, who haven’t gone through that process of running to bomb shelters and dealing with buses blowing up. It’s just not part of their experience. By the way, there are problems with Israelis who haven’t gone through the American experience. Israelis didn't live through the civil rights movement in the 60s, for instance. So getting American Jews to understand our position was difficult.

There were two other points of disappointment for me: one was a lack of appreciation for Israel’s democracy, not only as an incredible accomplishment for this state – I’ve always emphasized that we’re one of the few democracies in the world that have never know a second of non-democratic governance (a very small group) – but also respecting the choices of Israelis. You may not like the choices, but respect them. We’re constantly being asked to respect the choices of other governments, like the Egyptian government when they chose the Muslim brotherhood. Respect our choices. It doesn’t mean you can’t criticize them, but respect them.   

Rosner: And you feel that there’s not enough respect on the part of American Jewry for the choices of the Israeli people?

Oren: Well, first of all, we shouldn’t generalize – as I mention in the book, American Jewry is not one community, but many communities.

Rosner: So you think there are parts of these communities that have less respect for the choices that Israelis make?

Oren: Well, a mantra of the administration has been ‘Israelis don’t know what their interests are.’ Most Israelis would take issue with that… wouldn’t you?

Rosner: I would, and I have many times.

Oren: Well, we live at this extraordinary juncture in Jewish history, in which the two largest Jewish communities in the world – one is in a sovereign Jewish state, the other is in the world’s most powerful democracy – are both in enormously successful societies. And we did this in the aftermath of the greatest single disaster ever to befall the Jewish people, maybe any people. What used to so strike me about parts of the Jewish community was the lack of gratitude, of being alive at this moment. Maybe it’s just me, because I’m a sentimentalist.

Rosner: I doubt if many Israelis have this sense of gratitude as well.

Oren: Exactly – I don’t think Israelis have it either. You know, this is a funny story – the other day I was sitting in the Knesset, and I went to a lobby meeting focused on educating Israelis about transgenderism. And sitting on the dais there were representatives from Meretz and Labor, but also from Likud, Israel Beitenu, all the different parties. So we’re having this discussion, and there were about a hundred kids in this room who are transgender, or transitioning, and there are two extraordinary things going on here: one is that this discussion is happening just a two hour drive from ISIS. And the other is that I’m the only person in the room who thinks this is extraordinary. Cause I mentioned this to other people who were in the room, and they just said, ‘no, perfectly normal. This is the Knesset, it’s what we do.’

Rosner: Well, maybe it’s because you’re a newcomer…

Oren: I just feel that I have this deeper sense of gratitude. I really do. It animates so much of what I do…

Rosner: I’d like to now ask a more mundane question… You served in Washington during the rise of J Street. What was that challenge like? How did you balance your wish to engage with them with the need to not overdo it and to not damage other Israeli interests while doing it?

Oren: Well, first of all, it’s worth noting that an ambassador doesn’t make policy, an ambassador carries out policy. I had to convince people here, not always successfully, that we had to engage J Street on a certain level, for different reasons. I had no illusions about J Street or about what J Street was doing with Goldstone behind the scenes or about what it was doing, is doing, with the Iran issue, but there were three reasons to engage J Street:

One was that it defined itself as a pro-Israel organization. We have an interest in making the pro-Israel tent as wide as possible. I used to say, even tents have flaps, and we had to determine where the flaps were. To me, supporting its right to defend itself against terror, and its right to defend itself against an Iranian existential threat, those were flaps. BDS, supporting the de-legitimization, would be another flap. I used to always joke with the people of J Street by saying ‘you have a logo that shows a green arrow pointing upward; what is it about your logo that tells me you’re pro-Israel?’ Anyhow, that was one reason.

The other reason was that a lot of young people were attracted to J Street, and for many of them J Street was the last stop out of the Zionist camp. Not the window in, but the window out. This was our last opportunity to engage with them, before they became JVP or simply disinterested.

And the third reason – and this was the diplomatic reason – was that the administration saw J Street, and J Street saw itself, as the adminisration’s representative in the American Jewish community. In Obama’s first meeting with the American Jewish leadership he brought J Street in. As an ambassador, on a purely diplomatic level, you can’t ignore that.

So I met several times with the board of J Street and had a discussion with Jeremy Ben-Ami – we sat and talked. My message to them was ‘OK, you’ve made it now – you’re players. But being players means you bear a certain amount of responsibility and need to understand what the rules of that game are.’ And believe me, what I did with J Street did not earn me a lot of friends in certain segments of the American Jewish community. It was kind of thankless work, but I thought it was part of my job.

Rosner: Do you think it bore fruit?

Oren: I think my discussions with the board – certainly one of them – was very good. I talked about Jewish State, and about why the demand for Palestinian recognition of Israel as a Jewish state was not an attempt to obstruct the peace process, but was actually the only way to reach peace. This is something I believed when I worked with the Rabin government in the 90s, and I believe it now. I believe it was the core flaw in the Oslo process. Not that it can ever be achieved in the near future… But only if there’s mutual recognition of peoplehood and of the right to self-determination can you actually divide a land and not succumb to irredenta.

Rosner: But did you find them receptive to that idea?

Oren: They understood the argument. They understood it when I presented it to them. That’s all I can say. I don’t think it changed J Street’s position, but they understood it.

Rosner: Do you see any change or improvement in the way J Street looks at or talks about Israel?

Oren: No. I think J Street is under a lot of duress. I don’t want to defend J Street. They have been a under a lot of pressure, from BDS, from supporters of de-legitimatization. And J Street’s taken this position, ‘we’re not going to support BDS, but we’re open to a discussion about it.’ So, you know, ‘we’re not going to pose a movement that’s designed to destroy Israel, isolate it, kill it’s economy, take away its right to defend itself against thousands of rockets – but we’re willing to discuss it.’ That’s more or less where it is today.

Rosner: Let’s talk about the flaws that hurt Israel’s attempt to better communicate with the American community, the flaws on Israel’s side. The fact that Israel is unable or unwilling to better communicate with the streams of progressive Judaism.

Oren: Where should we begin? Do you have two hours?

Rosner: Well, what are the main things that Israel should be doing but isn’t?

Oren: Israel says that it is the nation state of the Jewish people. We don’t say we’re the nation state of Orthodox Jewish people, we don’t say we’re the state of agnostic or atheist Jewish people, we’re just the state of the Jewish people – a nation state. We have to live up to it.

We’ve been very fortunate over the years, for receiving sometimes unconditional love from large segments of the liberal American Jewish community (I mean ‘liberal’ in the Jewish sense, not in the political sense). And we have not repaid that loyalty, not sufficiently. I know you agree with me on this.

Rosner: I do agree with you. I just wonder if we are at a point in which they’ve had it. Do you think that the Americans are at a point in which we might, if Israel does not respond quickly, lose some of them, or see damage that will be very difficult to repair?

Oren: Well, I like the words ‘some of them’. That’s very important. Because AIPAC’s membership has doubled in recent years. I was Israel’s representative on the Birthright board. I know numbers are up this year again. So you want to be careful in generalizing, but we will definitely lose some of them. And it's not just because of us – there’s a general crisis of Jewish identity in the United States. The Reform movement is losing members at an alarming rate; the Conservative movement is constricting at an alarming rate. But other sectors of the Jewish population are growing at an astounding rate. New York, I think for the third year running, has had a positive net Jewish growth rate. It’s not because of the Reform Jews. Orthodox Jewry in America is flourishing, and their intermarriage rate, according to the Pew poll, is negligible. And they’re having large families.

Demographically, we’re looking at something like an implosion for liberal American Jews. Can Israel help? Yeah, that’s what Birthright was about, but that’s not enough. I think that when we factor in our policies, for example, towards Judea and Samaria, towards the West Bank, that’s one of the issues we have to factor in. One of them. You know, there’s out relations with Europe, our relations with the US, but there’s also our relations with key parts of American Jewry. Besides that, I would love to get to a point in which all forms of American Jewry, Reform Jewry, Conservative Jewry, are recognized by the state of Israel, that’s what I would prefer.

Rosner: A final, personal question I wanted to ask – did you have any hesitation about writing in such an honest way about the administration when you’re not just a historian, but also an active politician, perhaps hoping to be a minister one day. Were you not afraid that this might complicate things for you as a politician?

Oren: I think that writing this book was a process of introspection for me, and there was a sense of duty. It was not easy. Shmuel, I wrote 400 pages in one year. I took 50 days off of that year for Protective Edge, to defend Israel in the media. It was not easy. But we are approaching fateful junctures, the most crucial of which is the Iranian nuclear deal, and it was important to put this story out there. I put it out there as my story, as a Zionist Jewish story, a Zionist Jewish-American story.

Rosner: And clearly, considering the timing, you were also trying to change American minds by putting the argument out.

Oren: I want to create a discussion. I know that’s very difficult in politically polarized America. I see how the book is already being fitted in – ‘oh it’s a right-wing book; it’s an anti-Obama book’ – but in the book I really stress that Obama is not anti-Israel. I say there were times when Obama was very helpful to Israel, and I appreciated it. But I also understood the ‘kishke issues’ and the way they were going to impact Israel; I understood that the relationship between the President and the Prime Minister was not the relationship between Itzhak Rabin and Bill Clinton, I understood that. How do we look beyond these things and see the core communalities and interests that we have? The book is that. It’s a call for everybody to take a deep breath and look at what’s happened, it’s a call for American Jews and Israeli Jews to be grateful, and to begin a discussion.