Ally

by Michael B. Oren

  Back then, when still in high school, my interest in ancient Israel led me to ask a local Baptist minister—Pastor Miller—for lessons in the New Testament. The one condition was that he teach me the Gospel solely as Jewish history and not try to proselytize me. The sessions with the young pastor were enlightening, but none of them prepared me for the labyrinthine task of liaising with Israel’s Christian communities. Dozens of churches competed over holy spaces, even over procession time during holidays. The Catholic and Orthodox clergy often shunned their Protestant counterparts, but also jostled with one another. In one macabre case, a Russian Orthodox priest murdered a nun from a competing order. Israel, though, afforded Christians freedom and security rarely enjoyed by their coreligionists elsewhere in the region. And they had access to a neutral intermediary—ironically, a Jew raised in New Jersey.

  In addition to churches, my job description also included mosque affairs and brought me into contact with many Muslims. Sensitized to their views, I became more convinced of the need to take small but concrete steps toward reconciliation. One such step took place on August 21, 1995, when I supervised the first-ever pilgrimage of Israeli Muslims to Mecca. As the buses trundled over the Allenby Bridge to Jordan, news arrived of another first. A Palestinian bomber had blown himself up inside a Jerusalem bus, killing several people. Next came an anxious call from Sally. Her sister, Joanie, was missing.

  Unlike her parents and three sisters, Joanie did not make aliya. She remained a dedicated teacher at a Jewish school near New Haven, Connecticut. Receiving a one-year scholarship to Hebrew University in 1995, she moved to Jerusalem and commuted each morning to the Mount Scopus campus. But that day her bus never completed its route. After frenetic hours of combing emergency rooms, Sally’s family and I were taken to the national morgue. Having seen so much death in Lebanon, I insisted on making the identification. She had died instantly, I saw with some solace, and then went out to inform my wife and in-laws of the excruciating news. Israel granted a state funeral for Joanie and a pension to her daughter, Maya. Each year, when gathering around the grave site in Jerusalem, we still find thank-you notes from the students whose lives Joanie enriched.

  The suicide bombings multiplied, stoking opposition to the Oslo process. Rabin’s twin platforms of peace and security grew violently incompatible. Outside the Prime Minister’s Office, protesters bombarded us with tomatoes. Posters depicting Israeli leaders in Arab kaffiyehs, even SS uniforms, proliferated. “They’re going to assassinate someone,” I told Sally, suggesting Foreign Minister Shimon Peres as a likely target. I could not conceive of anybody harming Rabin.

  On the evening of November 4, Rabin penned a condolence letter—his second—to Sally’s parents. It remained on the prime minister’s desk, though, unsigned, as he left to attend a peace rally in Tel Aviv. After leading the crowd in a classic Hebrew peace song, he descended the rostrum and was shot to death by a radical right-wing opponent of the peace process.

  The next night, I joined with hundreds of thousands of mourners filing before Rabin’s casket, displayed outside the Knesset. Countless memorial candles fought back the darkness, but my dream of Israel dimmed. We had survived wars and surmounted towering challenges, I knew, but could we overcome the prime minister’s murder by an Israeli Jew? More than any other national trauma, Rabin’s assassination cast doubts over the state’s raison d’être. The life that embodied Israel’s luminous story had been extinguished.

  Two thousand years before, while a Roman legion besieged Jerusalem, the Jews inside the city fought one another. That hatred, the Talmud taught us, rather than the Romans’ torches, destroyed the Second Temple. Rabin’s assassination threatened to ignite yet another internecine inferno, I feared, and consume our modern state.

  Six Days Re-created

  The need I felt to regain a sense of Israeli unity brought me back to June 1967—the Six-Day War—the moment Israelis stood most indivisibly together. The declassification of formerly secret diplomatic files from the period afforded fresh and unprecedentedly detailed insights into the war and its origins. And the need for such a perspective was urgent. The same revisionist historians who previously condemned Israel’s “original sin” of 1948 now claimed that Israel precipitated the 1967 war in order to expand territorially. I set out to preempt that assault and received the backing of the Shalem Center, a dynamic research institute founded in Jerusalem by several Princeton graduates. “Great wars in history invariably become great wars of history,” I wrote, and launched a four-year research campaign across four continents.

  In libraries in Washington, London, Paris, and Moscow, I pored over official cables never before viewed by historians. I interviewed major players from the period, among them U.S. defense secretary Robert McNamara and White House advisors Eugene and Walter Rostow, senior Israeli and Arab commanders, even the former head of the KGB’s Middle East desk. I secured access to private archives in Cairo and Amman, and, with the help of Arab middlemen, discreetly purchased Syria’s war records.

  The sources showed me that, in 1967, Nasser again threatened America’s friends in the Middle East and clamored for Israel’s destruction. Most of his attacks were merely rhetorical, though, and not intended to trigger war. But they created a combustible atmosphere in which mere border flare-ups eventually ignited a regional conflagration.

  Shorn of allies, short on basic commodities and ammunition, Israel did not anticipate the war, much less provoke it. Levi Eshkol, Israel’s owlish prime minister at the time, did everything he could to prevent hostilities and stood up to the generals who insisted on attacking immediately. No, Eshkol responded, Israel must first exhaust all possible diplomatic options. By proving beyond a doubt that the Arabs could not be mollified, he succeeded in convincing Israelis—and the world—that Israel had no choice but to fight.

  Beginning on June 5, Israel fought for six days and gained one of the greatest triumphs in military history, expanding territorially nearly fourfold. The victory eventually brought peace with Egypt and Jordan but also unending conflict with the Palestinians. And the war had another, fateful, outcome. American leaders who previously balked at aiding the Jewish State suddenly saw it as a crucial Cold War asset in a region vital to America’s security. So arose the U.S.-Israel strategic alliance. Six years later, during the Yom Kippur War, President Richard Nixon—whose private tapes were riddled with anti-Semitic slurs—ordered the airlift of game-changing armaments to Israel. Later, America fortified Israel with billions of dollars’ worth of military aid, enhanced its tactical and intelligence capabilities, and defended it diplomatically.

  One has to work hard to dull the drama of the Six-Day War, which ranks among history’s most spellbinding epics. Taking the advice of Roger Hertog, head of the Shalem Center board, that “people love to read about heroes,” I focused on the roles of Eshkol, Dayan, Abba Eban, and even Nasser. I wrote furiously, reliving from the inside the saga that, as a kid, I could only watch on TV. The concluding chapter was nearly complete when the ultimate thunderbolt struck.

  Major Steve White, a U.S. Marine friend at the American embassy, called to inform me that a civilian airliner had just struck one of the World Trade Center towers in New York and that it looked like a terrorist attack. Less than a half hour later, Steve called back and said that the second tower had just been hit in the same way and certainly by terrorists. I was, of course, shocked, but then even more horrified when I remembered that our eighteen-year-old son, Yoav, was on a pre-army trip to lower Manhattan. That very day, he and several Israeli friends had agreed to meet on the center’s roof. The international phone lines collapsed and it took hours to reach him—safe but severely shaken. His rendezvous was set for 11:30 A.M., by which time both towers had collapsed. Instead, he photographed the massacre from a Brooklyn rooftop. I told him to go down into the basement—who knew how and when the terrorists would strike next—and not come out until the confusion cleared.

  The trauma of that September 11 day would remain
with me always. The twin skyscrapers that as a youth I glimpsed from a ridge in my hometown, and later wandered awestruck as a New York student, had vanished. So had the lives of nearly three thousand innocent civilians and the sense that America—unlike Israel—was beyond the terrorists’ reach.

  The viscous cloud raised by the towers’ destruction might have obscured the events that occurred in the Middle East in 1967, but in fact it highlighted their relevance. About to embark on Middle Eastern wars, Americans were ravenous for background. After decades of receiving only rejection notices, I could scarcely believe that the prestigious Oxford University Press agreed to publish my manuscript. Never in my dreams did I imagine that Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East, as I titled it, would sell out in a week.

  The book was a life-changer. For the first time, Sally and I were able to buy a car that was not thirdhand and to give our three children rooms of their own. Overnight, I became a commentator on news programs, a frequent op-ed contributor, and a guest on The Daily Show and Charlie Rose. The lecturer once snubbed by academia was now a visiting professor at Yale and Harvard. And the editors who once rejected me with form letters now published two of my novels—Sand Devil and Reunion—and inquired about my next work of history.

  Throughout this period, the trials and the successes, I remained an Israeli. I thrilled at the mass aliya from Ethiopia and the former Soviet Union, and watched as the once-agrarian state astonishingly evolved into a science and high-tech hub. I followed the strengthening of our alliance with the United States. Through successive presidents, in spite of continuing differences over the settlement and Jerusalem issues, the ties further burgeoned, advancing seamlessly from Cold War challenges to the war on terror. I remained the proud holder of two passports, but only one uniform. I wrote largely for an American audience, but fought for Israel’s people.

  Firing Line

  My life was indeed double, divided not only between Israel and the United States but also between the literary and the military. Serving in the reserves in the 1980s and ’90s meant protracted stints patrolling the wind-lashed hills of South Lebanon and trading fire with the Iranian-backed terrorists of Hezbollah. I saw fine Israeli soldiers, veterans of elite units, break from the physical and psychological strain. There was one phone per firebase, placed atop a sandbagged trench from where I could see incoming rockets. “Hold on,” I would say to Sally, “I need to duck.” Returning home, I experienced the sense of disconnect that affects so many combat veterans. How can people sit in cafés—I’d ask myself—shop for shoes, argue over parking spaces, when there’s a war going on? How could I be one moment playing with my children in the living room and then drive only a few hours to a bunker where total strangers tried to shoot me?

  The Lebanon war dragged on, but for me and many Israeli reservists the terrain changed in 1987 when the Palestinians in the territories rose in revolt. The Intifada—Arabic for “shaking off”—saw crowds of Palestinian youths hurling rocks and Molotov cocktails at Israeli troops. Leading squads down fetid Gaza alleyways or through the lightless casbah of Nablus, I became a target for concrete blocks dropped from rooftops, slingshotted steel balls, and, once, even a grenade. These assaults only steeled my conviction that the status quo in the territories had to change.

  By the summer of 1990, the Intifada was sputtering out when, suddenly, Iraqi forces under Saddam Hussein occupied Kuwait. A U.S.-led coalition expelled the invaders, spurring Saddam to fire Scud missiles—some rumored to have chemical warheads—at Israel. The IDF prepared to fight back, but, at America’s request, held its fire in order to appease the coalition’s Arab members. Instead, the U.S. and Israeli militaries joined in an unprecedented effort to defend the Jewish State. My role was to sit with U.S. Navy pilots in a bunker beneath the Kiriyah—Israel’s Pentagon—and monitor the search for Scud launchers in the Iraqi desert. When the sirens whined, we all put on our gas masks and waited for the impact. Serving shoulder-to-shoulder with these airmen gave me a deep sense of fulfillment. We were fighting the same enemy, upholding identical ideals. There, in the bunker while the sirens outside wailed, I saw the alliance at work. And I saw it later, too, when I helped bring in U.S. Patriot missile batteries to shield Israel against the Scuds. In their first encounter with American soldiers, Israelis nearly buried those Patriot crews beneath mounds of flowers and cakes.

  Despite its perils, army service still offered the opportunity to live a soldier’s life, protect the country, and escape my writer’s solitude. With the new century, though, I reached mandatory retirement age from the reserves. By that time I had become active in media and the IDF suggested that I sign on as a spokesman. “Why not,” I figured, picking up the pen I thought would replace the sword. Who could have guessed that the post would prove no less hazardous?

  The dangers became apparent in September 2000 as a Black Hawk helicopter transported me and my combat gear across the West Bank. The previous night, I looked out from our Jerusalem balcony and saw crimson fireworks bursting over the West Bank. Arafat had recently met with President Clinton and Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak at Camp David and turned down their offer of Palestinian statehood in Gaza, virtually all of the West Bank, and half of Jerusalem. The Palestinians were now celebrating the failure of peace. “Sally,” I called from the balcony, “I think we’re in trouble.”

  The depth of that trouble, though, was as yet unimaginable. After opposition leader Ariel Sharon visited Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, holy to both Jews and Muslims, the Palestinians rioted. Rather than curbing the disturbances, though, Arafat and other Palestinian leaders exploited them to mount a Second Intifada. Ambushes and suicide bombers eventually killed a thousand Israelis, eight of them in the restaurant right under my office. And I was called up to serve as a spokesman for the Israeli brigade fighting in the northern West Bank.

  The Black Hawk landed in the middle of a vicious firefight, soldiers scrambling in all directions. The brigade commander—unfazed by the enemy bullet lodged in his helmet—ran toward me, shouting above the din, “You’re supposed to be dead!” Two other reservists who reported to my base had made a wrong turn into a Palestinian crowd that beat them to death and mutilated their bodies. The army assumed I was one of them.

  That evening, the brigade commander took me to a ramshackle settlement—a trailer park—perched on a desolate hilltop. Suddenly, a pregnant Jewish woman came running toward our jeep, arms flailing. The IDF guards had disappeared, she screamed, and the settlers, including her husband, had gone looking for them. Hundreds of women and children from other settlements awaited us back at the base, protesting the army’s alleged failure to defend them.

  I ended the night hunched with the brigade commander in a sandbagged mountain position as an IDF gunship fired bursts into terrorist positions below. Palestinian gunmen shot back—not at the helicopter but at us. Tracer bullets, like some angry code, pulsed over our heads.

  If the First Intifada was not sufficiently convincing, the Second thoroughly persuaded me that Israel had to change the status quo in the territories. Yes, these were our tribal lands. The Bible speaks of the West Bank cities Bethlehem, Shiloh, and Hebron, not of Tel Aviv or Haifa. And many of the settlements helped thicken our pre-1967 lines, which were as narrow as nine miles across. But Israel had to weigh its historic rights and security needs against the moral and political costs of dominating another people. It had to reconcile its real fears of the West Bank becoming a terrorist haven similar to South Lebanon, with its need to preserve its right to defend itself and its international legitimacy as a sovereign Jewish state.

  That same calculation apparently preoccupied Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. Shortly after Israel prevailed over the Intifada’s terror, in August 2005, Sharon ordered that Israel would uproot all its military bases and civilian settlements in Gaza. The operation, Israel’s largest since the Yom Kippur War, involved fifty-five thousand troops, an elite corps of which was assigned to evacuate some nine thousan
d settlers. Accompanying that corps, I filed through blazing barricades only to be met by children dressed as concentration camp prisoners and denouncing us as Nazis. Women cursed and spat at us. Men bolted themselves into synagogues from which they had to be hauled, wailing. From such a synagogue, I carried a Torah-bearing rabbi, Menachem Froman, famous for his attempts to forge peace with Palestinian imams. Caught by cameras, the image of my face—as white as the rabbi’s skullcap—flashed globally.

  More than any war, the Disengagement from Gaza scarred me. While recoiling from the extremism displayed by some of the settlers, I mourned the memory of Jews dragging Jews from their homes. Israel should not return to Gaza, I felt, but neither could it ignore the hundreds of rockets that Hamas—the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood—and other terrorist groups proceeded to fire at southern Israeli towns. Israel’s reluctance to retaliate for those atrocities emboldened the terrorists. Exploiting a truce to tunnel under the border, Hamas gunmen killed two Israeli soldiers and kidnapped a third, Corporal Gilad Shalit.

  Israel’s failure to deter Hamas also bolstered Hezbollah in Lebanon. There, too, a hasty Israeli withdrawal—in May 2000—encouraged the terrorists to seize control of the area and launch attacks against northern Galilee. On July 12, 2006, Hezbollah gunmen ambushed an Israeli border patrol and then battered northern Israel with missiles. Thousands of Israelis fled south, among them close Arab friends of ours who took shelter in our Jerusalem home. Meanwhile, the IDF reacted massively, with ground operations and air strikes, in what Israelis later dubbed the Second Lebanon War.