The president knows that the truth about his hostility to Israel is not only politically damaging but extremely ill timed.
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In a statement, Kahlon said that his Zionist party holds up Israel-US ties as the “greatest asset” for his country, Kahlon explained that the views expressed by Oren are his alone and don’t reflect the views and values of the party.
Oren’s insults don’t stand alone.
USA Ambassador to Israel, Dan Shapiro, phoned the prime minister Tuesday following the publication of the op-ed, but according to Israeli daily Haaretz, Netanyahu turned down the request and stated that he wouldn’t be publicly commenting on Oren’s accusations.
To seal the deal and reveal what this cockamamie Times-er is all about, you need to have a peek at what accompanies the listing of her article as a Times website search result: “Israeli apologies were in order after the ex- envoy, Michael B”. Boaz Atzili, an Israel scholar at American University, called Oren’s piece “full of historical misrepresentations”. There is a case for this attitude but surely – especially in light of the additional revelations by Oren – quietly sitting on the sidelines has proved to be and remains the wrong approach.
President Obama “said openly that he was going to put daylight between Israel and the United States, which means in the past when we had disagreements with [President Bill] Clinton, [or President G.W.] Bush, we tended to try to keep them behind closed doors, these were out front”, Ored added.
In his Foreign Policy article, Oren speculates that Obama’s abandonment by his mother’s Muslim husbands prompted him in his later life to seek acceptance from their co-religionists..
That Oren would criticize Obama is hardly surprising, though his psychoanalysis is both condescending and borders on an accusation of divided loyalty – something that is rightly regarded as off-limits among many Jews who know where such accusations can lead. He published articles in the left-wing media and the liberal Jewish weekly The Forward named him as one of the five most influential American Jews in the world. These sorts of Jews, “who haven’t gone through that process of running to bomb shelters”, don’t appreciate that experience. The six-disc DVD set offers a perspective on the history of the Jewish people from Abraham to Armageddon.
Though there’s been a lot of nastiness between the United States and Israel under the Obama and Netanyahu administrations, the relationship is still fundamentally solid.
“All of us”, as Oren’s book makes clear, was really code for “Israel”, and, specifically, Netanyahu. Pro-Israel resolutions pass Congress by overwhelming margins, and polls show that the American public is still overwhelmingly sympathetic to Israel’s narrative of its conflict with the Palestinians. “When I came into office, Iran was united and the world was divided”, Oren quotes the president asserting.
In itself, this should be fine for Israel.
He also opined that the president wouldn’t likely have trusted Iran’s leaders with the ability to one day achieve nuclear weapons had they been anti-black racists, as opposed to anti-Semites bent on destroying Israel.
Needless to say, the liberals are now up in arms, shrieking against an ambassador whom they admired and considered had been appointed to the post because of his liberal inclinations. And they’re also, by the way, a group that is highly important for the degree to which this polarization plays out.
The most consistent rebuttal of Oren by the administration and liberals are pathetic attempts to personally besmirch him as a hedonist and opportunist willing to sell his soul to promote sales of his book to conservative Republicans who despise their president.. That’s not a healthy choice for Israel to force on American politics.
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