Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide. By Michael Oren. Random House; 412 pages; $30.
DIPLOMATIC memoirs usually come out long after events, when the main players have left office and the crises and controversies they handled are entering history. Michael Oren has broken this convention with “Ally”, his account of being Israel’s ambassador to the United States, less than two years after leaving Washington in September 2013. Few in the political establishments of either country are pleased. The leader of his political party even called him in for an official rebuke. But do readers have cause to be thankful to a historian-turned-diplomat and now junior parliamentarian for lifting the veil from one of the most intriguing alliances?
For all the anger Mr Oren has caused in Jerusalem and Washington, “Ally” is lean on new details about the rocky relationship between the prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, and President Barack Obama, the main factor poisoning ties between the two countries. If anything, it attests to the limitations of formal diplomacy in a technological age where governments and leaders have little need of official envoys to convey messages. Not a professional diplomat, Mr Oren was appointed mainly to argue Israel’s case to the American public. Never a close confidante of Mr Netanyahu, of whom he seems in awe, he provides little insight into his thinking. In Washington he rarely gets to meet the president and resorts to pop-psychoanalysis drawn from the president’s memoirs in an attempt to divine Mr Obama’s true intentions.
As a historian, Mr Oren wrote two richly detailed books about the six-day war and the roots of America’s involvement in the Middle East. Here he is reduced to revealing snippets, such as the fact that at their first White House meeting, Mr Netanyahu gave the president a mint edition of Mark Twain’s “Innocents Abroad” and that for security reasons an Israeli prime minister rates the third-largest motorcade when visiting Washington (the second after the president is the pope).
Mr Oren remains a pained, wistful and helpless bystander as the two headstrong leaders clash ever more in a flurry of diplomatic snubs and contradicting initiatives. At one point, following an Obama-Netanyahu summit, Mr Oren speculates that the media’s description of a frosty reception “most likely spun by the White House, could just as well have sprung from Jerusalem”. He is sidelined by both sides.
American-born Mr Oren, who emigrated to Israel nearly four decades ago, vents frustration at what might be termed America’s “soft Jews”; officials and pundits who criticise Israel in order to gain acceptance with their non-Jewish peers. Throughout the book he professes undying love for both his countries. But he is nostalgic for an America that never existed and the Israel he purports to defend seems equally unreal. Mr Oren portrays his country of choice using the language of his idealised country of birth. He calls the member of a not particularly powerful political family “Israel’s equivalent of a Kennedy”; a reporter he favours is “Israel’s Walter Cronkite”. The incongruity of these comparisons along with his unrealistic expectations of America emphasise Mr Oren’s position as a perennial outsider, an eager immigrant who has lost his homeland but has not completely arrived in the promised land.
