Josh Marshall on the Clown at the Center of the Latest Israel-Obama Controversy

The Ridiculous Mr Oren

My friend Jeff Goldberg goes to great lengths in this new article to get us to take Michael Oren and his new book ('Ally') seriously and not be led astray by the book's publicity campaign or the opeds Oren himself has written in support of it, which are apparently far less nuanced than the book itself. And yet, in Jeff's interview, Oren comes off as precisely the over-clever asshole Goldberg wants him not to be. We hear again and again from Oren's defenders (and to be clear, Goldberg isn't really defending him, as much as he'd clearly like to) that the former Israeli ambassador wanted to write a book about the fatal shortcomings of President Obama's Iran diplomacy and yet somehow accidentally wrote a book in which he not only psychoanalyzes President Obama but all of American Jewry. The latter are too conflicted and defensive about their identity as Jews not to give thanks that they were born in the same era as Benjamin Netanyahu, the embodiment of the Jewish people who brings together both Maimonides and Herzl into one unified, deluxe Jewish person. (I hate it when that happens!) Because there is no possible reason other than a psychological one why American Jews might not genuflect at the Netanyahu altar.

If this all seems a bit boisterous and over-the-top, welcome to the world of former serious person, journalist and ambassador to the US Michael Oren. If we take this new argument on its face, Oren's adoption of the kind of claptrap we American Jews are used to hearing from right wing talk radio freaks (Obama's outreach to the Muslim world is due to being rejected by two Muslim fathers) has obscured whatever it is in the book Oren might have had to say about the Iran deal. (Perhaps he can release those pages as a Kindle single? And we can all read that?) This clown deserves every ounce of derision he is receiving. His turnabout, as someone who professes to be concerned about mending the US-Israel relationship, really exposes him as a hypocrite and/or a fraud, and probably both.

When we last discussed the Oren book I noted among other things his taking long-time New Republic back of the book editor Leon Wieseltier to task as an example of the sort of American Jewish writer captured by an ingrained and pathological animus toward Netanyahu which mimics the anti-Semitic stereotyping and attacks gentiles have visited on Jews for millennia. Wieseltier, from his new post at The Atlantic, has now responded. And the result is predictably delicious, both in style and substance. You should read it. In my rougher hands I can summarize it thusly. A lot of Israeli Jews and a lot of American Jews simply disagree on some basic points about the future of Israel and the future of the Jewish people. Once you can accept that disagreement on its own terms, there's no need to come up with embarrassingly clumsy armchair psychological explanations or deify the all-to-human Mr. Netanyahu into some sort of Jewishness made flesh.

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