How Israel Got Taken

“More than [about] policy…, Barack Obama was about ideology and a worldview often at variance with Israel’s.” These words constitute the thesis statement of Ally: My Journey across the American-Israeli Divide, the new memoir by the historian Michael Oren, who served as Israel’s ambassador in Washington from 2009 to 2013. Given the grave urgency of the regional and international challenges facing the Jewish state, and given what is widely perceived today as a severe crisis in America-Israel relations, the book couldn’t be timelier—as the instantaneous media ruckus attending its publication amply testifies.

Not that Oren is breaking new ground in his claim that the American president is less concerned with pragmatic results than with fidelity to a preconceived ideology. Nevertheless, as a well-placed, first-hand observer, his validation of the claim is in itself a highly welcome and noteworthy event. Oren tempers the statement by assuring his readers that Obama doesn’t roll out of bed every morning to ask, “How can I undermine the Jewish state today?” But from the moment the ambassador took up his post in 2009, it was obvious that Obama had (in Oren’s term) his “kishke” obsessions—and these gut obsessions included, among other things, creating a Palestinian state and reconciling with Islam.

And that wasn’t all. In general, Oren writes, Obama also sought to downplay the military dimension of American foreign policy, to distance the United States from traditional allies, and to work through international organizations. Taken together, all of these inclinations, the ambassador understood, spelled trouble for Israel: “a traditional ally, heavily dependent on American might, and at odds with . . . international organizations.”