No one confirmed that assessment more authoritatively than Henry Kissinger. Arguably the twentieth century’s towering diplomatic figure, the mastermind of Cold War strategies and architect of the Pax Americana in the Middle East, he had previously invited me to his New York office to discuss history and his place in it. But in my new position, the topic was no longer the past but rather the current diplomatic situation and the state of U.S.-Israel relations.
Sympathizing with Netanyahu’s predicament, Dr. Kissinger urged him to navigate cautiously between the shoals of the peace process and the Iranian nuclear issue. He seemed skeptical about Obama’s ability to effectively mediate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and pessimistic about his eagerness to reconcile with Iran. “But surely the White House understands that Iran with nuclear capabilities means the end of American hegemony in the Middle East,” I protested. In his legendary Bavarian accent, deepened and graveled by age, he asked, “And what makes you think anybody in the White House still cares about American hegemony in the Middle East?”
In between listening and absorbing, I read and took notes. Among the most enlightening sources I consulted was a 2008 paper titled “Strategic Leadership: Framework for a 21st Century National Security Strategy,” published by Jim Steinberg and other international relations professors soon to occupy senior administration posts.
The authors began by rejecting the notion that “America must always be in charge.” Rather, they held, the United States should adopt a collegial approach to world affairs, working with other nations and international bodies to resolve disputes. Among these was the Iranian nuclear threat, “which should not be underestimated nor overhyped,” and that could be addressed through a dual-track policy of deterrence and engagement. They also advocated a new approach to the Muslim world based on economic development and democratization, but also on “improved relations with more moderate elements of political Islam” and a “narrative of pride in the achievements of Islam.” While keen to preserve Israel’s security and Jewish identity, the authors do not list it among America’s strategic partners. Rather, they describe the Jewish State as a party to the peace process that America must—in contrast to other global issues—lead.
The paper served as a primer on the administration’s foreign policy. “Our destiny is shared,” Obama told the UN General Assembly in 2009. “No balance of power among nations will hold.” Similar sentiments informed Obama’s Cairo speech, his high regard for the UN, and his policy toward Iranian nuclearization. They resounded in the administration’s respect for the “international community,” a grouping that included North Korea, Pakistan, and Sudan, and which many Israelis considered an oxymoron.
As someone who had spent several years on American campuses, all of these ideas rang familiar to me. They echoed the sixties’ revulsion to military strength, the romance with developing societies, and the questioning of American primacy. Regarding the Middle East, in particular, one could discern the reverberations of Edward Said’s Orientalism, which had become the single most influential book in the humanities. Teaching at Harvard in 2006, I was stunned to hear students tell me that they had read Orientalism several times in courses as diverse as French colonial literature and Italian-African history.
Also while at Harvard, several students urged me to look at the website of the university’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, which had posted a new paper by reputable scholars Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer. The article lumped American Jewish organizations together with The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, evangelist Jerry Falwell, and the progressive Howard Dean, labeling them collectively as “The Israel Lobby.” This nebulous cabal made support for Israel, portrayed as a militantly theocratic and colonialist state, the centerpiece of America’s postwar Middle East policy and the primary source of Muslim rage against the United States.
Devoid of archival sources and tainted with inaccuracies—oil, of course, and not Israel, was America’s Middle East priority—“The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy” was even less academically sound than Orientalism. Utterly ignored were the vast advantages that Israel afforded the United States in intelligence sharing, weapons development, and high tech. Israel’s indispensable role as America’s sole democratic and unreservedly pro-American ally in the Middle East also went unmentioned. Instead, Walt and Mearsheimer—disciples of the so-called Realist School, which sought a foreign policy detached from values and domestic opinion—advanced a conspiracy thesis of undue Jewish influence on Congress and the media. Even Christopher Hitchens, a frequent Israel critic, dismissed the article as “smelly.”
Nevertheless, the assertion that U.S. support for Israel had precipitated 9/11 and other jihadist attacks against Americans, and that, far from an asset, Israel represented a strategic liability for the United States, tapped into strong campus currents. Graduates of those universities naturally gravitated toward the press and government service. So “The Israel Lobby,” refined into a bestselling book, penetrated the Beltway.
This did not mean that Obama had internalized the views contained in either Orientalism or “The Israel Lobby.” Still, there was no gainsaying the books’ impact on the academic and policy-making worlds from which his administration’s attitudes sprung. The notion of the need to revise America’s global role, to palliate Islam, and achieve diplomatic distance from Israel had become conventional by the time I arrived in Washington. Even the term “Israel Lobby,” once confined to racists such as Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, entered the mainstream media. Israel’s own policies no doubt accelerated these trends and endowed them with a moral pretext. As David Rothkopf often reminded me, Obama’s first memory of Israel would not be the heroic Six-Day War, but rather its 1982 invasion of Lebanon.
My goal, though, was not merely to understand the origins of Obama’s policies but to anticipate how they would shape the course of U.S.-Israel relations. My goal was to never be surprised. Achieving that objective, though, required deeper research into the president’s personal outlook. I needed to dig beneath the layers of articles for and against him, below the rumors of his friendships with sixties radical Bill Ayers and Palestinian professor Rashid Khalidi, a protégé of Edward Said. I needed to reach the bedrock Barack Obama.
The excavation took me to the two most authentic sources, the books he had written about himself. Alas, The Audacity of Hope, composed when Obama was already a presidential candidate, served more as a grandstand than as an intimate window into his thinking. A far more penetrating glimpse was accorded by Obama’s stirring and remarkably candid memoir, Dreams from My Father, published nearly fifteen years before.
Frankness, for me, was the book’s principal asset, for it traced a young man’s search for self from laid-back Hawaii to religiously stringent Indonesia and then on to the Kenyan villages where he seemed to feel most at home. En route, he cultivated the aversion to tribalism later cited in his inaugural speech as well as his empathy for Islam. Yet it was only in the cauldron of inner-city America that Obama’s identity was finally forged. There he became, for the first time, conscientiously African-American and adopted the internationalist and social justice ideas long popular at the urban universities where he studied and taught—Columbia, Chicago, and Harvard. His pervasive belief in the power of words, instilled by his legal studies, reminded me of the ancient Aramaic incantation “Abracadabra,” meaning “I speak therefore I create.”
Most people form their identities in childhood, but Obama learned who he was and what he stood for relatively late, in his twenties. His early years were plagued by instability; he was raised by a twice-divorced mother and a grandmother Obama later described—dispassionately—as “a typical white person.” That same sangfroid characterized a chilling chapter in the book in which the nine-year-old Obama sees his Indonesian stepfather decapitating a chicken:
Blood shot out in a long, crimson ribbon. [The chicken] landed with a thud, then struggled to its feet, its head lolling grotesquely against its side, i
ts legs pumping wildly in a wide, wobbly circle. I watched as the circle grew smaller, the blood trickling down to a gurgle, until finally the bird collapsed, lifeless on the grass. [We] ate quietly under a dim yellow bulb—chicken stew and rice….Later…I listened to the crickets chirp under the moonlight and remembered the last twitch of life that I’d witnessed a few hours before. I could barely believe my good fortune.
The fact that the young Obama was dazzled by this grisly sight revealed a remarkable degree of emotional detachment. At a similar age, I went fishing with my father and watched as he caught a carp and mangled it. But instead of being fascinated, the experience traumatized me. Years passed before I could even look at seafood.
More alarming for me still were Obama’s attitudes toward 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.
From Obama’s autobiographical works arose the image of an individual who had overcome adversity early in life, who displayed resilience and contempt for weakness but also a cold-blooded need for control. Projecting that need, not surprisingly, made his administration the most centralized since World War II, with many key decisions made in the Oval Office. At the risk of armchair psychoanalyzing, I wondered whether Obama had replicated his rearing by his dominant mother and grandmother by surrounding himself with powerful women advisors, including his formidable wife, Michelle. Perhaps, too, his rejection by not one but two Muslim father figures informed his outreach to Islam.
Passionate about his community, Obama was less enthused about other aspects of America, especially the bankers and businessmen he was compelled to bail out or those in the working class whom he later said “cling to guns and religion.” And while sincere in his commitment to cooperate with international actors—some pundits labelled him “the first post-American president”—Obama’s personal detachment inhibited him from forming close friendships with foreign leaders. In spite of his declared sympathies for the downtrodden, Obama became the first president in twenty years to refuse to receive the Dalai Lama for fear of alienating China.
But what did any of this mean for Israel? Instinctively, human beings seek order in the universe and, in politics, a clear formula for decision making. In reality, though, randomness—whims, quirks, gaffes—determines much of the relations between individuals, just as it does among nations. This observation, born of a career trying to make sense of historical processes, did not absolve me of the need to get inside Obama’s mind and try to see the world as he did. Accordingly, I culled his memoirs, extrapolated from all that I had heard and read, and formulated several basic assumptions.
The first was that Obama was not anti-Israel. He cared for Israel certainly as much as he cared about most other foreign countries and understood the deep affection for Israel felt by his many American Jewish supporters as well as by the large majority of Americans generally. Contrary to his detractors’ claims, I believed that he would stand by Israel if ever we were attacked. But Obama admired an idealized Israel—not the Israel of the settlers and their right-wing backers, a state that was part of the solution, not the problem. Repulsed by the colonialist legacy he encountered in Kenya, he may also have shared the sense of identification felt by some African-Americans—among them Condoleezza Rice—with the Palestinians. “For centuries, black people in America suffered the lash of the whip as slaves and the humiliation of segregation,” he said in his Cairo speech, and then segued to the plight of the Palestinians. By contrast, the Zionist narrative of an indigenous people returning to our homeland did not as yet resonate with the president.
Though of relatively recent provenance, Obama’s outlook nevertheless contained what I called his kishke—Yiddish for gut—causes. These included creating a Palestinian state, reconciling with Islam, and preventing nuclear proliferation. All three intersected with Israel’s interests, and in potentially abrasive ways. The president’s cold-bloodedness, while perhaps a plus in fighting terrorism, could also lead to browbeating us. Overseas, I saw an Obama who sought to depart from America’s century-long reliance on Western alliances and the projection of military power. Rather, he gave preference to soft power and peaceful cooperation with international bodies. The fact that Israel was a traditional ally, heavily dependent on American might, and at odds with many of those international organizations, compounded my concerns.
More than policy, I concluded, Barack Obama was about ideology and a worldview often at variance with Israel’s. Yet he was the president with whom our leaders would have to interact for the next four years and, I already believed in the summer of 2009, for another four after that. Millions of Americans read the same books and heard the same opinions I had but rather than recoiling from them, raved in approval. Israel remained the essential ally of the United States—of that I was certain—its only stable and unconditional Middle Eastern friend. But Israel would have to remind some Americans of that reality. And the president would have to be convinced.
No less vitally, I had to persuade Israelis of the need to make their case to America. Many Israeli leaders were American-educated and remembered the much different country of decades past. For them, the Obama phenomenon could seem like a momentary detour from an otherwise unbroken path of American preeminence and exceptional-ism. As I saw it, a crucial part of my job was unearthing American truths and conveying them to Israeli power. The homework I began in August 2009 never really ended. The time I could devote to it dwindled, however, as the U.S.-Israeli alliance was sorely tested by—who could have guessed?—a deluded Jewish judge.
Blood Libel
On paper, at least, Richard Goldstone was the paragon of righteousness. A Johannesburg-born magistrate who rose to the bench during the harshest years of South African apartheid, he wielded his gavel to break that racist system and presided over the reconciliation between blacks and whites. He subsequently prosecuted those accused of committing war crimes in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. In return, he won the friendship of Nelson Mandela and academic appointments to Harvard, Cambridge, and the Hebrew University. But Goldstone’s nondescript and seemingly guileless mien masked strata of self-righteousness. The UN Human Rights Council played to that egotism when it invited him to head its fact-finding mission on “grave human rights violations” by Israel during the 2008 Gaza operation. Flattered, Goldstone readily accepted. The possibility that the UNHRC chose him because he was a Jew who could shill for the biased inquiry apparently eluded him.
The Israelis, by contrast, viewed the mission as a travesty and Goldstone as its dupe. The UNHRC never condemned even one of the thousands of Hamas rocket strikes on Israel, but rather blamed Israel for provoking those attacks and for perpetrating war crimes. The three other judges accompanying Goldstone previously denounced alleged Israeli atrocities; one claimed that Israel had been struck by “something like two rockets, likely fired by dissident groups,” and compared Israel’s actions in Gaza to the fascist bombing of Guernica, Spain, during the Spanish Civil War. In his defense, Goldstone implored both sides, Israeli as well as Palestinian, to investigate all human rights violations, but the UNHRC ignored that symmetry and deplored only Israel.
Israelis, meanwhile, wondered whether their government should cooperate with Goldstone. Netanyahu held—and I strongly agreed—that the mission’s findings were foregone and that any Israeli input would serve only to legitimize them. Those charges would contribute immensely to the international campaign to deny Israel the right to defend itself and, eventually, the right to exist.
The administration’s thinking, though, was less categorical. No American official pressured us to receive Goldstone but, then again, no one backed our decision not to. Less opaquely, Deputy Secre
tary of State Jack Lew urged me to spur Israeli leaders to expedite our own investigation of purported war crimes. I lashed back—“That’s like telling medieval Jews to investigate charges of blood libel”—unfairly, since Jack, a devout Jew who cared avidly about Israel, was merely trying to help. He knew what we all feared: that Goldstone was no mere PR disaster, but potentially the basis for international sanctions against Israel.
Most egregiously from our perspective, Goldstone’s mission equated Israel, a democratic state with an independent judiciary, and Hamas, a terrorist organization with a covenant calling for Israel’s destruction and the annihilation of every Jew worldwide. Hamas, moreover, would handpick the Gazans who appeared before the mission and carefully vet their testimony. “Israel is being summoned to a court in which its guilt was already presumed, in which the jurors have already declared Israel guilty, and in which the witnesses for the prosecution are the murderers,” I told Gwen Ifill on PBS NewsHour. “No country in the world would participate in such a farce.”
Goldstone published his 452-page report on September 15, between the holiest Jewish holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. On these Days of Awe, a Jewish judge condemned the Jewish State. As predicted, the fact-finding mission faulted Israel for triggering the clash with Gaza through its blockade of the Strip and—outlandishly—its occupation of the West Bank. The findings also accused Israeli soldiers of shooting civilians who waved white flags, of shelling a crowded mosque, and of bombing family homes and a UN school. “Unprecedented in their severity,” Israel’s Gaza operations, the report concluded, deliberately and disproportionately sought to “humiliate and terrorize a civilian population, radically diminish its local economic capacity both to work and to provide for itself, and to force upon it an ever increasing sense of dependency and vulnerability.”
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