With his nuclear deal with Iran still hanging in the balance, President Obama is trying to convince Congress and the American people that he hasn’t completely abandoned Israel. The latest sign that the administration is trying to rebuild relations with America’s sole democratic ally in the Middle East is the story that the president is planning to invite Prime Minister Netanyahu back to the White House sometime this summer. If true, it’s a sign that Obama knows he’s in trouble in a negotiation where Iran appears to be insisting on a deal that is even more of a sham than the weak framework that was announced in April. But it also illustrates just how bad relations with Israel are that Obama is treating a meeting between the two leaders as a major concession. It is in that context that former Israeli ambassador Michael Oren’s article in today’s Wall Street Journal proves instructive. Oren, whose forthcoming book Ally, about his four years dealing with the administration is due out next week, gets to the heart of the problem with the U.S.-Israel alliance. Though the Jewish state’s leaders have sometimes made mistakes, the Obama administration’s blunders were not similarly inadvertent miscalculations. To the contrary, they have been deliberately aimed at creating distance between the two allies to the detriment of both Israel’s security and U.S. influence and interests in the region.
Though he was Netanyahu’s envoy for four years, Oren is no apologist for the prime minister, a point that was underlined by his decision to run for the Knesset this year on the ticket of the Kulanu Party. Though that makes him a member of Netanyahu’s current slender governing majority, his views have always been more centrist on territory and settlements, something that comes through clearly in his memoir. Indeed, both Oren’s diplomatic skills and his decidedly unenthusiastic attitude toward Netanyahu’s Likud come through clearly in the Journal article. He even-handedly apportions some of the blame for tensions between Washington and Jerusalem to Netanyahu and his government.
But despite his desire to repair the damaged alliance, Oren can’t avoid the facts about an Obama administration that came into office determined to create more “daylight” between the two countries. Though Oren isn’t the first to note that the president believed that the U.S. had become too close to Israel during the administration of George W. Bush and that more distance would make peace possible. But Oren offers an eyewitness accounts of how the president and his foreign policy team undercut Israel’s position at almost every turn. That not only soured the alliance, it also had the unintended consequence of strengthening the conviction of the Palestinians that they don’t need to compromise or even to recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state — no matter where its borders might be drawn — in order to get independence and peace.
Just as damaging is Obama’s decision to cease coordinating strategy with Israel. The president chose not to consult with the Israelis when it came to diplomatic endeavors relating to both the peace process and to the nuclear threat from Iran. At every key point in the last six years, Israel wound up being surprised, if not completely ambushed by Obama’s initiatives. That was true of Obama’s diplomatic attacks on Israel’s hold on Jerusalem and his attempt to establish the 1967 lines as the starting points for future peace negotiations, not to mention his discarding of Bush’s pledges that Israel could hold onto the West Bank settlement blocs (in exchange for which Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005). It also was the case with the secret negotiations with Iran that led to the interim nuclear agreement signed in November 2013. As Oren writes, it was these surprise attacks, as much as the misguided belief in daylight that degraded relations to their current low point.
While crediting the administration with some help, Oren’s book provides copious details of the animus for Israel that is the core explanation for everything that has gone wrong with U.S. policy in the Middle East in recent years. Loyal Jewish Democrats who have sought to rationalize or minimize the administration’s predilection for picking fights with Israel need to read Oren’s book carefully to understand just how wrongheaded their apologies for Obama have been. As our John Podhoretz wrote last week in the New York Post, the one thing you won’t get in Oren’s book is an attempt to draw the obvious conclusion about Obama’s ideology from all these slights and attacks.
As I noted last month, even now as he seeks to seduce the pro-Israel community into supporting his appeasement of Iran, the president continues to talk of his admiration for a mythical Israel of the past and his dislike of the real Israel of today whose people have rightly come to understand that the Palestinians don’t want peace. Obama’s disdain for the reality of an embattled yet vibrant democratic Israel has little or nothing to do with Netanyahu and everything to do with his own ideological affinity for its foes. As we face a future in which a U.S. seal of approval will be given to Iran’s becoming a threshold nuclear power and to its quest for regional hegemony, there’s little doubt that blame for the disasters that are likely to follow will belong to Obama.
Oren, however, is right when he seeks to remind Americans and Israelis of their mutual need for each other and the necessity of charting a new path for the alliance, a path that rejects Obama’s tactics of daylight and surprise attacks. That’s a message that all of the 2016 presidential contenders should take to heart. It’s also a message that those friends of Israel who helped elect Obama should remember before they try to elect another American leader who might further damage the U.S.-Israel relationship.
