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.

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Having read enough of these bogus stories from Oren's book, I now agree with Kampeas who says he fully believes that Oren did feel kicked in the chest. The countries Obama name-checked "among others" were Brazil, Mexico, Canada, France, Colombia and the Dominican Republic, each countries with historic relationships with Haiti. Oren was actually wounded that Israel was not also mentioned with this select group among the numerous other countries that had similarly pledged relief because Israel had already announced that it was sending a team - one that did not go into operation until the day after Obama spoke.

Seeing this all in a greater context, the entirety of Oren's tenure in America and the impulse behind his book begins to come into focus. Oren's reaction makes perfect sense as that of a coddled child who is genuinely hurt when he is treated in a friendly and reasonable way along with peers as opposed to with extreme deference and preference. Only in this context would it make any sense for Obama to single out Israel, a country half way around the world with no particular or historic relationship with Haiti which was not even on the ground yet rendering aid. This isn't an example of a snub but painful evidence of an extremely unrealistic sense of entitlement. Again, I now believe Oren really did feel kicked in the chest. The Haiti anecdote perfectly captures the entirety of the book and Oren's critique of both Obama and American Jews. Looking back on Oren's time as Ambassador, he now looks like nothing so much as a self-awareness Mr Magoo walking through Washington, encountering entirely normal behavior or significant and serious critiques of Israeli policy by American Jews, all of which he was incapable of seeing on their own terms and, confounded, creating a fantasy world of Jewish self-hatred, conflicted identity and personal and national self-pity to fill in the blanks.