Ally Quotes

“Fortunately, as Jews, we were never short of excuses for entertaining. Most Jewish holidays, an old joke goes, can be reduced to nine words: “They tried to kill us. We survived. Let’s eat.”
― Michael B. Oren, Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide

“Who was the only U.S. president with less managerial, military, financial, and foreign policy experience than the current one?” Netanyahu, though a proficient historian, looked stumped by the answer: “Abraham Lincoln.”
― Michael B. Oren, Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide

“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.”
― Michael B. Oren, Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide

“While I fully supported the prime minister’s position on Iran, I disagreed with his decision to present it in Congress. This would insinuate himself—and Israel—between Republicans and Democrats and exacerbate our differences with the White House. I felt the confusion and hurt of those American Jews torn between their devotion to Israel and their allegiance to the president. The same speech could have been given at that week’s AIPAC conference, I suggested, or postponed until after the Israeli elections, removing the impression of grandstanding.”
― Michael B. Oren, Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide

“The younger the Jews, statistics showed, the shallower their religious roots.”
― Michael B. Oren, Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide

“Perhaps more than the prospect of an Iranian bomb, I realized early in my term, Obama feared the impact of a preemptive Israeli strike.”
― Michael B. Oren, Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide

“One night of strategic bombing will restore all your lost prestige in the Middle East,”
― Michael B. Oren, Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide

“This is the Middle East, George, where one-sided concessions don’t build trust. They build the demand for the next concessions.”
― Michael B. Oren, Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide

“And what makes you think anybody in the White House still cares about American hegemony in the Middle East?”
― Michael B. Oren, Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide

“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.”
― Michael B. Oren, Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide

“That combination, perhaps, deterred me from telling Netanyahu the most difficult truth of all. Simply: that he had much in common with Obama. Both men were left-handed, both believed in the power of oratory and that they were the smartest men in the room. Both were loners, adverse to hasty decision making and susceptible to a strong woman’s advice. And both saw themselves in transformative historical roles.”
― Michael B. Oren, Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide

“Portentously, one of Obama’s first acts on entering the White House was to replace a bust of Winston Churchill, America’s unflagging World War II ally, with that of Abraham Lincoln. Netanyahu reentered the Prime Minister’s Office and promptly hung Churchill’s photograph on the wall behind his desk.”
― Michael B. Oren, Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide

“My friends, you don’t need to do nation building in Israel. We’re already built. You don’t need to export democracy to Israel. We’ve already got it. And you don’t need to send American troops to Israel. We defend ourselves.”
― Michael B. Oren, Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide

“History is not just a flat chronicle of events. History is an understanding of the forces that work, the values that shape present action and direct the future. If you have that knowledge, you are empowered in ways that you can’t get by watching the nightly news or reading the morning editorials. We live in an ahistorical age when many people’s memories go back to breakfast, but if you’re armed with that insight you have immense power for good.”
― Michael B. Oren, Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide

“His pervasive belief in the power of words, instilled by his legal studies, reminded me of the ancient Aramaic incantation “Abracadabra,” meaning “I speak therefore I create.”
― Michael B. Oren, Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide

“attitudes toward America. Vainly, I scoured Dreams from My Father for some expression of reverence, even respect, for the country its author would someday lead. Instead, the book criticizes Americans for their capitalism and consumer culture, for despoiling their environment and maintaining antiquated power structures. Traveling abroad, they exhibited “ignorance and arrogance”—the very shortcomings the president’s critics assigned to him.”
― Michael B. Oren, Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide

“Negotiating with a representative of the Libyan pirates in 1786, Thomas Jefferson was told that the Quran commanded the destruction of all nonbelievers, Americans included. And yet, when President Thomas Jefferson later made war on Libya, he dreamed of transforming it into a democracy.”
― Michael B. Oren, Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide

“At the height of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln pledged that he, too, would work to restore the Jews to their homeland once America was reunited.”
― Michael B. Oren, Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide

“I read about how the United States waged its first foreign war against the Barbary Pirates of Libya, Tunisia, and Morocco, and built its first overseas universities in Istanbul, Cairo, and Beirut. I learned that the Arabs were once dependent on American oil.”
― Michael B. Oren, Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide

“Israel sells. Arabs massacring Arabs in, say, Syria, is a footnote, while a Palestinian child shot by Israeli soldiers is a scoop.”
― Michael B. Oren, Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide

“We were always the ultimate Other—communists in the view of the capitalists and capitalists in communist eyes, nationalists for the cosmopolitans and, for jingoists, the International Jew.”
― Michael B. Oren, Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide

“The violent tension between honor and shame, so central to Middle Eastern cultures and tragically familiar to Israel, was alien to most Americans.”
― Michael B. Oren, Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide

“In the Middle East, no one gets credit for a preemptive cringe.”
― Michael B. Oren, Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide

“Being an ally, for example, means not insisting that Israel, a sovereign country with a globally renowned judicial system, conduct “swift and transparent investigations” of security incidents. Americans would surely be offended if such demands were leveled at them by a foreign government, yet the United States routinely makes them of Israel. But being an ally also means that Israel should not repay America for supporting it in the Security Council by building in isolated settlements. Being an ally, on the one hand, means releasing Jonathan Pollard and recognizing Israel’s capital in Jerusalem, and on the other, respecting American Jewish pluralism and the prerogatives of the world’s mightiest power. Allies respect the decisions of one another’s democratically chosen leaders, even when they disagree. They back one another on principle and not merely to placate domestic constituents. Their bonds are elemental, meaningful, and mutually, enduringly beneficial.”
― Michael B. Oren, Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide

“The notion of the need to revise America’s global role, to palliate Islam, and achieve diplomatic distance from Israel had become conventional by the time I arrived in Washington.”
― Michael B. Oren, Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide

“The problem with the “no daylight on security but daylight on diplomacy” tactic was that, in the Middle East, it did not work. Unlike in the West, where security is measured in tanks, jets, and guns, security in this part of the world is largely a product of impressions. A friend who stands by his friends on some issues but not on others is, in Middle Eastern eyes, not really a friend. In a region infamous for its unforgiving sun, any daylight is searing.”
― Michael B. Oren, Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide

“And still my research continued. Foreign diplomatic sources informed me that, in spite of his stated rejection of any containment of an Iranian bomb, Obama would settle for capping Iran’s ability to make a bomb within one year—the so-called threshold capacity. Other analysts claimed the president regarded Iran as an ascendant and logical power—unlike the feckless, disunited Arabs and those troublemaking Israelis—that could assist in resolving other regional conflicts. I first heard this theory at Georgetown back in 2008, in conversations with think tankers and former State Department officials. They also believed that Iran’s radical Islam was merely an expression of interests and fears that the United States could, with sufficient goodwill, meet and allay. Such ideas initially struck me as absurd. After all, even irrational regimes such as Nazi Germany could take rational steps to reach fanatical goals. But Obama, himself, now began describing Iran’s behavior as “strategic” and “not impulsive.” The ayatollahs, he told Jeffrey Goldberg, “have their worldview, and they see their interests, and they respond to costs and benefits….[They] are not North Korea.” Suddenly, it seemed plausible that an America freed of its dependence on Middle Eastern oil and anxious to retreat from the region could view Iran as a dependable ally. The only hurdle remained that pesky nuclear program.”
― Michael B. Oren, Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide

“Ultimately, though, neither refocusing on the Holocaust nor reenergizing Tikkun Olam could dilute the lure of the melting pot. Assimilation, according to surveys, soared, with as many as 70 percent of all non-Orthodox Jews marrying outside the faith. The younger the Jews, statistics showed, the shallower their religious roots. The supreme question asked by post–World War II Jewish writers such as Bernard Malamud and Philip Roth, “How can I reconcile being Jewish and American?” was no longer even intelligible to young American Jews. None would feel the need to begin a book, as Saul Bellow did in The Adventures of Augie March, with “I am an American, Chicago born.” Bred on that literature, I saw no contradiction between love for America and loyalty to my people and its nation-state. But that was not the case of the Jewish twenty-somethings, members of a liberal congregation I visited in Washington, who declined to discuss issues, such as intermarriage and peoplehood, that they considered borderline racist. Israel was virtually taboo. For Israel had also changed. From the spunky, intrepid frontier state that once exhilarated American Jews, Israel was increasingly portrayed by the press as a warlike and intolerant state. That discomfiting image, however skewed, could not camouflage the fact that Israel ruled over more than two million Palestinians and settled what virtually the entire world regarded as their land. The country that was supposed to normalize Jews and instill them with pride was making many American Jews feel more isolated and embarrassed. I shared their discomfort and even their pain. Yet I also wrestled with the inability of those same American Jews to understand Israel’s existential quandary, that creating a Palestinian state that refused to make genuine peace with us and was likely to devolve into a terrorist chaos was at least as dangerous as not creating one. I was frustrated by their lack of anguish in demanding Israel’s withdrawal from land sacred to their forebears for nearly four millennia. “Disagree with the settlers,” I wanted to tell them, “denounce them if you must, but do not disown them, for they—like you—are part of our people.”
― Michael B. Oren, Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide

“Viewing an American University art exhibition dedicated in my honor, the last thing I expected was to be accosted by a ninety-year-old Jewish woman whose head barely reached my belt. “I like you, but I don’t like everything your country does,” she growled. “Excuse me, ma’am,” I courteously replied, “but do you like everything your country does?” “No.” She wagged her finger in my face. “But your country must be perfect.”
― Michael B. Oren, Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide

“I had to pull columnist George Will out of a baseball game—like yanking Hemingway out of a bar—to correct one misattributed quote, and berate blogger Josh Rogin for recording a public talk between Jeffrey Goldberg and me in a synagogue, on Yom Kippur. Most miffing was the book This Town, a pillorying of well-connected Washingtonians by The New York Times’s Mark Leibovich. The only thing worse than being mentioned in Mark’s bestselling book was not being mentioned in it. I merited much of a paragraph relating how, at the Christmas party of media grandees Ben Bradlee and Sally Quinn, I “hovered dangerously over the buffet table, eyeing a massive Christmas ham.” But Nathan Guttman, a reporter for The Jewish Daily Forward, changed the word “eyeing” to “reaching for,” insinuating that I ate the ham. Ironically, the embassy employed Nathan’s caterer wife to cook gala kosher dinners. George Will graciously corrected the quote and Josh Rogin apologized. The Jewish Daily Forward printed a full retraction. Yet, in the new media age, old stories never vanish. A day after the Forward’s faux pas, I received several angry phone calls from around the United States. “You should be ashamed of yourself!” they remonstrated. “The Israeli ambassador eating trief? In public? On Christmas?” I tried to defend myself—“I didn’t eat it, I eyed it”—but fruitlessly. Those calls reminded me that, more complex than many of the issues I faced in the press, and often more explosive, was the minefield of American Jewry.”
― Michael B. Oren, Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide