The most explosive passage in Michael Oren’s new book on the frayed U.S.-Israel relationship is not about President Barack Obama’s repeated fights with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Rather, it is about Obama himself. Struggling to understand how Obama–who has genuine empathy for Israel, Oren says–could adopt policies and postures so hostile to the Jewish state, Oren turns to Obama’s first memoir, Dreams from My Father.
What he reads shocks him:
More alarming for me still were Obama’s attitudes towards America. Vainly, I scoured Dreams from My Father for some expression of reverence, even respect, for the country its author would someday lead. Instead, the book criticizes Americans for their capitalism and consumer culture, for despoiling their environment and maintaining antiquated power structures. Traveling abroad, they exhibited “ignorance and arrogance”–the very shortcomings the president’s critics assigned to him.
Speaking to Breitbart News last week, Oren recalled his impressions of Dreams. Obama said “nothing good about America” in his memoir, Oren says. Here was a man “without a word of praise or gratitude to America”–and yet “no one was listening” to what Obama truly believed.
“That said a lot to me about where America was” when Obama was elected, Oren recalls.
Oren, the American-born historian who served as Israel’s ambassador to the U.S. during President Obama’s first term, exposes shocking new details about the Obama administration’s treatment of Israel in his new book, Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide.
Some of the episodes, such as Obama’s “snub” of Netanyahu during a 2010 visit to the White House, are well-known. Others are not, such as an encounter between Oren and then-UN Ambassador Susan Rice in New York, in which she threatened to drop support for Israel at the UN if the Netanyahu government did not “freeze all settlement activity”:
“If you don’t appreciate the fact that we defend you night and day, tell us,” Susan fumed, practically rapping her forehead. “We have other important things to do.”
Other clashes are more subtle, but no less jarring, such as Obama’s decision to ignore Israel’s role in earthquake relief in Haiti:
“Help continues to flow in, not just from the United States but from Brazil, Mexico, Canada, France, Colombia, and the Dominican Republic,” the president declared. Omitted from the list was Israel, the first state to arrive in Haiti and the first to reach the disaster fully prepared. I heard the president’s words and felt like I had been kicked in the chest.
On another occasion, the White House blackballed several guests from the ceremony at which Obama awarded Israeli President Shimon Peres the Presidential Medal of Freedom–because they happened to have criticized Obama on television.
Oren, who was an historian before becoming a diplomat and politician, is uniquely placed to offer an authoritative explanation, in exacting detail.
At times, Oren writes, Obama adopted a friendlier posture. “Yet, for every reaffirmation of the alliance, the administration took steps that disconcerted or even imperiled Israel,” he writes.
The root cause, Oren says, applying the historian’s analytical tools to his personal observations, was Obama’s approach to America itself–not to Israel.
Because Obama sees nothing special about America, its dominance in the world presents a moral problem for him. As president, Oren notes, Obama set out to solve that problem by courting America’s enemies and shunning its allies.
Obama is not anti-Israel, Oren argues, much less antisemitic, but his beliefs about America have meant a change in relations with Israel, a country deeply invested in America’s military–and moral–superiority.
These are not the ravings of a right-wing Likudnik.
Oren supported the disengagement from Gaza in 2005. He ran against Benjamin Netanyahu’s party in the recent Israeli elections. He spoke out against Netanyahu’s speech to Congress in March. And he once admired Barack Obama.
Yet Oren, who served as Israel’s ambassador from 2009 to 2013, builds a powerful argument that Obama is to blame for the stunning decline in U.S.-Israel relations.
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