These verdicts evoked an onslaught of criticism from Israel. President Peres castigated Goldstone for failing to distinguish between brutal aggression and legitimate self-defense, for sanctifying terror and tying democracy’s hands. “Members of the Goldstone Mission would have never compiled such a report if their children resided in Sderot and suffered daily rocket fire,” Peres wrote. Moshe Halbertal, a brilliant Israeli jurist associated with the left, derided the report as “false and slanderous…biased and unfair.” Both he and the ever-articulate Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz took Goldstone to task for applying separate methodologies for Israel and Hamas, ignoring evidence of Israel’s innocence while explaining away or even ignoring proof of Hamas’s guilt. Said Dershowitz, “the conclusions reached in the Goldstone Report are not worthy of consideration by people of goodwill.”
Halbertal and Dershowitz were both respected friends and I admired their courageous responses to Goldstone. The report, nevertheless, remained a threat to Israel’s standing in the world and even in Washington. Though J Street refrained from formally endorsing the report, activists in the organization escorted Goldstone to Congress for meetings with progressive members. Assistant Secretary of State Michael Posner told the UNHRC of America’s disappointment with the document’s double standards. But he also cited Goldstone’s “distinguished record of public service,” and called on the Palestinians to investigate Hamas abuses. This, for Israelis, was tantamount to asking al-Qaeda to investigate 9/11.
Like Jack Lew, Mike Posner cared earnestly about Israel, yet to Israel’s detriment, his remarks in the council fell short of distinguishing between racist thugs who hid behind Palestinian civilians while striving to kill ours and a democratic state trying to defend itself in a morally ambiguous environment. “This unjust report is a clear-cut test for all governments,” Netanyahu declared. “Will you stand with Israel or will you stand with the terrorists?” Privately, on the phone, his voice took on greater urgency: “The council wants to create a situation where our fighter planes can’t take off. It wants Israel’s hands tied while our cities are destroyed.” His tone conveyed his cabinet’s opinion, formulated in a series of emergency meetings, that Goldstone constituted a strategic threat.
There was little I could say to assuage him. The administration’s response to Goldstone had actually exceeded my expectations, much reduced by my research into Obama’s worldview. But then, more in line with my assumptions, the White House intimated to me that Israel could not expect a more rigorous American stand against the report until we made more concessions in the peace process. Under the circumstances, I could do little more than second Jack Lew’s request that Israel refute Goldstone’s accusations as swiftly and exhaustively as possible.
Israel eventually launched an internal probe, examining 150 instances of alleged misconduct by IDF soldiers—many more cases than those cited by Goldstone—and bringing thirty-six of them to trial. Interestingly, the report also refuted the bulk of Goldstone’s conclusions. A Palestinian flour mill that, according to Goldstone, Israel targeted in order to starve civilians turned out to have been a Hamas firing position. A sewage treatment plant that he claimed had been destroyed to poison Palestinian fields had, in fact, been sabotaged by Hamas to impede IDF movement. The inquest mounted by Israel’s attorney general and its military advocate general surpassed the highest international standards. Yet this did not prevent the UN General Assembly from endorsing Goldstone’s charges of war crimes.
More than a year later, Richard Goldstone publicly recanted. In an op-ed article published in The Washington Post—and rejected by The New York Times editors who welcomed his original findings—the judge admitted that subsequent revelations exonerated Israel of deliberately targeting civilians. While he repeated the preposterous regret that “there has been no effort by Hamas to investigate the allegations of…possible crimes against humanity,” he upbraided the UNHRC for its anti-Israel slant and upheld Israel’s “right and obligation to defend itself against attacks from abroad and within.”
This mea culpa was extracted by Shmully Hecht, an enterprising Chabad rabbi who once hosted me at Yale and who later ushered Goldstone toward atonement. Shmully asked me to meet Goldstone and accept his penitence but, rather coldly, I refused. I had seen too many Israeli soldiers risk and even lose their lives in an attempt to avert civilian casualties. I remembered my son Yoav, wounded by a Hamas leader shooting from behind his own family. Not only my conscience but duty too prevented me from acceding to Shmully’s request. Richard Goldstone endangered the safety of the Jewish State, and its ambassador held no authority to forgive him.
Autumn of Malcontents
Goldstone represented my introduction to knotty Middle East diplomacy. That initiation proved timely as I entered my first autumn in office. The issues swiftly grew more combustible, as I learned from the first of several predawn phone calls from Rahm Emanuel.
“I don’t like this fucking shit,” he began, not untypically. While slicing lunch meat as a teenager, Rahm had lost half of his right middle finger. The accident, Obama once joked, also cost him half of his vocabulary. I heard the other half. Groggily, I croaked, “Well, I don’t like this fucking shit, either.” The White House chief of staff went on to stress the need for the settlement freeze, which, he believed, would unthaw the gelid peace process. “And it’s time for the Arabs to step up to the fucking plate as well.” Rahm reiterated his deep concern for Israel’s fate and his readiness to work seriously with Netanyahu. “Tell your boss he’s going to get a victory,” he assured me. “It’s a win-win.”
Rahm, I knew, was not enamored of my boss or of the American Jewish leaders whom he faulted for backing Netanyahu unconditionally. That Yom Kippur, he buttonholed one of those leaders at synagogue and told him—notwithstanding the fast—just what he should eat. Their rabbi, the wise and saintly Jack Moline, learned of the incident and demanded that Rahm apologize. Now. And he did. Rahm could be both a misanthrope and a mensch, but I never doubted his commitment to Israel.
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Rahm, though, would have been surprised to learn the lengths Netanyahu was ready to traverse in order to renew negotiations. Over the coming years, much debate would surround the depth of the prime minister’s seriousness about peace. A conventional wisdom held that Abbas was willing but unable to end the conflict while Netanyahu was able but unwilling. Some commentators believed that Netanyahu was torn between his desire to achieve an historic accord and his opposition to territorial concessions. Others, though, remained convinced that he at best paid lip service to the two-state solution. They cited his consistent demand for Palestinian recognition of Israel as the Jewish State, accusing him of placing an artificial obstacle to compromise.
I disagreed. Palestinian acceptance of Israel’s Jewishness was essential for peace. Speaking on campuses, I often compared the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to an argument between two families over a single house. The only answer was to divide the house. But what would happen, I asked, if one family accepted the other’s legitimate claim to its half, while the second family still demanded ownership over the entire dwelling? The result would be an unending dispute. Israel recognized the existence of a Palestinian people endowed with the right to self-determination in its homeland—its side of the house. Genuine peace can only be attained, I concluded, once this recognition was mutual.
In addition to the Jewish State issue, Netanyahu was adamant about security. “We have to preserve the peace if the peace treaty unravels,” he frequently said, referring to the need for a prolonged IDF presence in sensitive parts of the West Bank even after the creation of a Palestinian state. Here, too, I concurred with the prime minister. Our problem with Lebanon was not Israel’s border with the country, but Syria’s border with Lebanon, and our problem with Gaza was not our border with the Strip, but Egypt’s. Tens of thousands of rockets had been smuggled across those porous Arab borders—despite the presence of international peacekeepers. Similarly, Israel could not
afford to sit idly while a West Bank Palestinian state became a launching pad for countless missiles aimed at our heartland. Only Israeli forces could prevent the flow of missiles from Iran and Syria across the Jordan River. Should peace ever be achieved, I knew, Israeli troops would need to preserve it.
Yet, along with his commitment to Israel’s security, Netanyahu was also concerned about Israel’s future as a Jewish and democratic state. Both were threatened by continued Israeli rule over more than two million West Bank Palestinians. Some Palestinians and anti-Israel activists abroad were already calling for the creation of a binational state incorporating all people living in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank. The country would soon have a Palestinian majority, compelling Israelis to choose between maintaining a minority-rule government and relinquishing their dream of a Jewish state. Netanyahu understood that the “one-state solution” meant Israel’s dissolution, and that we somehow had to detach ourselves from the Palestinians.
Either way, by creating a Palestinian state or maintaining the status quo, Israel faced existential risks. That was Netanyahu’s—and Israel’s—dilemma, not between peace and occupation but between two potentially lethal options. That was why the prime minister insisted on obtaining Palestinian recognition of Israel as the Jewish State and guarantees for its security. In exchange, he was willing to make far-reaching concessions.
At the same time, the prime minister was aware of the need to mollify Obama. To this end, he delivered the Bar-Ilan speech. The president’s demand for a settlement freeze proved tougher to meet, though, given Likud’s settler constituents. “We will simultaneously advance the diplomatic process while allowing you to lead normal lives,” Netanyahu reassured them, signaling his willingness to consider a time-limited “moratorium” on Israeli construction in the territories.
While fully behind any effort to shore up the alliance, I was ambivalent about the moratorium. It created a precedent of paying for the peace talks Israel should have received gratis and prevented Mahmoud Abbas from ever negotiating without a moratorium. Preferably, I thought, Israel should have unilaterally applied the Bush-Sharon letter, building only within those areas we could keep in any peace deal—Jewish Jerusalem and the settlement blocs—and signaling our seriousness about creating a viable West Bank Palestinian state. We could have shown more openness toward the Arab Peace Initiative, ignoring its demands for a withdrawal to the 1967 lines and for the return of Palestinian refugees to Israel, and embracing its call for normalization with the Jewish State. We could have done more, but Netanyahu was constrained by a right wing that opposed both Bush-Sharon and the Arab Initiative, and Obama was fixated on the freeze. Facing up to Israel’s political realities and eager to ease tensions with Obama, I put my reservations aside and supported the moratorium.
And, as feared, Abbas called for a building freeze not only in the West Bank but also in East Jerusalem. This accorded with Obama’s position but posed a precondition that no Israeli prime minister could meet. Further damaging to peace prospects, Abbas called on the International Criminal Court to try Israeli leaders for war crimes in Gaza. Pressing such charges might have satisfied Palestinian opinion, but it incensed Israelis. The Goldstone Report, launched by the United Nations, now received a tailwind from the Palestinian Authority.
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The diplomatic gulf separating Israel and the Palestinians was no deeper than the political abyss between Republicans and Democrats. This, too, became one of the thornier challenges confronting me that fall. For the first time, angry Americans took to the streets and called themselves the Tea Party.
All societies have their fault lines. Israel’s runs through Jews and Arabs, religious and secular, Jews from Western backgrounds and Jews originating from the East. In the United States, the fissures divide black and white, church and state, and what I often referred to as “San Francisco and Boston”—the sexually-free frontier versus the pilgrim tradition that makes America at once one of the world’s most prurient and puritan nations. Perhaps the widest gulf, though, separates centralized government and individual freedoms. Israelis, very few of whom own firearms, frequently asked me why Americans needed so many guns when they had such a powerful army. “They need guns to protect them from the army,” I explained.
That same impulse to defend liberty from big government gave rise to the Tea Party, named after the revolutionary-era protest against British tyranny. Aware of these historical roots, I instructed my congressional liaisons to undertake a thorough analysis of the group. They sniggered at the request—“the ambassador’s wasting our time,” carped one email that accidentally crossed my desk—but I stuck by it. The Tea Party, I concluded, was yet another symptom of the deadlock gripping the nation.
More shocking evidence of the impasse appeared on September 9, when the president unveiled his health-care plan. Together with other ambassadors, I filed into the Capitol, where both houses of Congress sat in seemingly respectful civility. If America is a Roman-style republic, Israel is an Athenian democracy. Compared to Israel’s raucous Knesset, Congress is prim. But no sooner did Obama start speaking than Republican members began heckling him and one of them, Joe Wilson of South Carolina, shouted out, “You lie!” It was a troubled moment for American politics and a potentially problematic one for me. I was seated only a few feet from Wilson and feared the cameras would couple us.
My concerns were not groundless, I discovered, as the season progressed. After addressing a Rosh Hashanah reception at the Residence, a Democratic congresswoman called and rebuked me for merely praising the administration and not the Obama administration. “You couldn’t bring yourself to say the word ‘Obama,’ could you?”
Also irksome was the embassy’s continued imbroglio with J Street. Unlike my predecessor, Sallai Meridor, who had shunned the lobby, I initially engaged it in a dialogue. I had no illusions about the group, which received funds from anti-Israel contributors, supported every legislator critical of Israel, and stridently attacked mainstream American Jewish leaders. Though J Street defined itself as “pro-Israel” and “pro-peace,” its logo bore no connection to Israel whatsoever, not even the color blue, and portrayed other pro-Israel organizations as anti-peace. Before becoming ambassador, I chanced to meet one J Street board member and asked him why he had joined. “I’m uncomfortable with the special relationship,” he told me. “I want to normalize U.S.-Israel ties.” Yet I knew that other J Street members, particularly students, genuinely cared about Israel. Reaching out to them, I believed, was in Israel’s interest.
But then, outrageously, J Street members hosted Goldstone in Congress and began lobbying against sanctions on Iran. These actions were deeply deleterious to Israel’s security—“they endangered seven million Israelis,” I said—and made interacting with J Street virtually impossible. Both the prime minister and the foreign minister vetoed any official participation in its annual conference.
Jewish groups critical of Israeli policies periodically appear in the United States, I knew, and just as frequently disappear. J Street differed only in contributing to its preferred candidates’ campaigns and in fashioning itself as the administration’s wing in the American Jewish community. Obama acknowledged that fact by sending his National Security Advisor Jim Jones, one of Washington’s most powerful officials, to greet the organization. “I’m honored to represent President Obama at the first national J Street conference,” Jones ebulliently declared. “And you can be sure that this administration will be represented at all other future J Street conferences.” The media, meanwhile, criticized my absence from the gathering. Obama’s newly appointed advisor on anti-Semitism, Hannah Rosenthal, an early J Street supporter, issued her first denunciation not of anti-Semites, but rather of me for boycotting the summit. Hannah eventually became a friend and I never took her comment personally. Nor did I believe that she acted on her own, since I later learned that some of the criticism emanated directly from the White House.
Such scuffles did not discourage me fro
m trying to keep open channels with the administration. I reached out to Hillary Clinton, asking for a private meeting, only to be rebuffed. The secretary, I was told, did not receive ambassadors. Nevertheless, remembering Sallai’s frequent meetings with Secretary of State Rice and his axiom that “No other country has Israel’s relationship with America,” I renewed my requests. In a testament to her humor, Clinton once approached me and socked me in the arm, laughing, “Michael Oren! I’ve been calling you and calling you but you never return my messages!” But still no meeting took place.
Less entertaining but even more estranged were the conversations held with General Jones. Beginning as a platoon and company commander in Vietnam, he rose to the four-star command of the Marine Corps and of NATO. This dour former officer was of a type well known to Israelis, the majority of whom serve in the IDF. In America, though, where less than half of a percent of the population volunteers for the armed forces, the gap between the military and civilian cultures can be glaring. And the Obama White House had the lowest proportion of veterans of any administration in history. Jones, then, acted as a one-man bridge across the Potomac, between Pennsylvania Avenue and the Pentagon. Similarly, he could traverse any fissure between Washington and Jerusalem—or so one might expect.
In reality, Jones often seemed ill-disposed toward Israel. Though he had trained with the IDF as a young Marine and, as Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, oversaw the U.S.-Israel military alliance, the State Department mission he headed to the West Bank in 2007 left him questioning Israel’s commitment to peace. He returned convinced that resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would end all other Middle East disputes. “Of all the problems the administration faces globally,” he told the J Street conference, “I would recommend to the president…to solve this one. This is the epicenter.” The notion of “linkage”—all Middle Eastern disputes are tied to that between Israel and Palestinians—became doctrine in the Obama administration and Jones’s belief in it bordered on the religious. As he once confessed to an Israeli audience, “If God had appeared in front of the president and said he could do one thing on the planet it would be the two-state solution.”
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