Michael B. Oren > 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

“Employ hindsight but humbly, remembering that life and death decisions are made by leaders in real-time, and not by historians in retrospect.”
― Michael B. Oren, Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“The Middle East, that seductive region where [Herman] Melville had hoped to rekindle his inspiration and revive his diminishing career, had proved an egregious disappointment. "The whole thing is half melancholy, half farcical," he groaned, "like all the rest of the world.”
― Michael Oren

“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

“It is rather like arguing with an Irishman,” wrote Michael Hadow of his many conversations with Dayan. “He enjoys knocking down ideas just for the sake of argument and one will find him arguing in completely opposite directions on consecutive days.” Indeed, Dayan was a classic man of contradictions: famed as a warrior, he professed deep respect for the Arabs, including those who attacked his village, Nahalal, in the early 1930s, and who once beat him and left him for dead. A poet, a writer of children’s stories, he admitted publicly that he regretted having children, and was a renowned philanderer as well. A lover of the land who made a hobby of plundering it, he had amassed a huge personal collection of antiquities. A stickler for military discipline, he was prone to show contempt for the law. As one former classmate remembered, “He was a liar, a braggart, a schemer, and a prima donna—and in spite of that, the object of deep admiration.” Equally contrasting were the opinions about him. Devotees such as Meir Amit found him “original, daring, substantive, focused,” a commander who “radiated authority and leadership [with] … outstanding instincts that always hit the mark.” But many others, among them Gideon Rafael, saw another side of him: “Rocking the boat is his favorite tactic, not to overturn it, but to sway it sufficiently for the helmsman to lose his grip or for some of its unwanted passengers to fall overboard.” In private, Eshkol referred to Dayan as Abu Jildi, a scurrilous one-eyed Arab bandit.”
― Michael B. Oren, Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East

“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

“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

“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

“Before terminating at the Berlin Wall, the front in the Cold War ran through the hellish jungles of Vietnam to the oases and deceptively idyllic dunes of the Middle East.”
― Michael B. Oren, Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present

“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

“Wars in history invariably become wars of history.”
― Michael B Oren

“The USSR indeed had nothing more to gain from Zionism—the British empire was dying—and everything to gain in terms of placating the new, post-colonial governments, securing its vulnerable southern border, and threatening the West’s oil supplies.”
― Michael B. Oren, Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East

“The younger the Jews, statistics showed, the shallower their religious roots.”
― 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

“The antagonism sparked by Netanyahu, I gradually noticed, resembled that traditionally triggered by the Jews. 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. So, too, was Netanyahu declaimed as “reckless” by White House sources and incapable of decision making by many Israelis. He was branded intransigent by The New York Times, yet Haaretz faulted him for never taking a stand. Washington insiders assailed him for being out of touch with America, and the Tel Aviv branja—the intellectual elite—snubbed him for being too American. The Israeli right lambasted him for spinelessness, the left for intractability, the Ultra-Orthodox for heresy, and the secular for pandering to rabbis. All agreed in labeling Netanyahu disingenuous, imperious, and paralyzed by paranoia—qualities not uncommon among politicians.”
― 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

“his strongest desire was to return to farming, but Weizman had insisted that Hod replace him as air force chief early in 1966. Since then, he had concentrated on refining Focus, reducing the turnaround time for refueling and rearming jets to less than eight minutes. The Egyptian turnaround rate, by comparison, was eight hours. “He may not be able to quote [the Hebrew poet] Bialik or Shakespeare,” Weizman said of Hod, “but he will screw the Arabs in plain Hebrew.”
― Michael B. Oren, Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East

“And while generally loyal to the United States, ibn Saud displayed no reservations about negotiating with Britain and France in order to extract higher contract fees from the Americans. Indeed, when asked by American negotiators why he favored the United States over the Europeans, ibn Saud candidly replied, “You are very far away!”
― Michael B. Oren, Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present

“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

“He promptly commanded Sidqi Mahmud to provide air cover for the conquest of Israel’s coast (Operation Leopard) and to deploy Egypt’s newest Sukhoi jets, if necessary with their Russian instructors. ‘Amer then called Damascus and Baghdad and requested that they execute Operation Rashid—the bombing of Israeli airfields—at once. The Iraqis consented, but then complained of “technical delays.” The Syrians claimed that their planes were presently engaged in a training exercise. Such disappointments did little to dampen the mood in Egypt’s Supreme Headquarters which seemed to the Soviet attaché S. Tarasenko, “tranquil, almost indifferent, the officers merely listening to the radio and drinking coffee.” Throughout the capital, however, the citizenry was celebrating. “The streets were overflowing with demonstrators,” remembered Eric Rouleau, Middle East correspondent for Le Monde. “Anti-aircraft guns were firing. Hundreds of thousands of people were chanting, ‘Down with Israel! We will win the war!’” But Rouleau, together with other foreign journalists, was not allowed near the front. All international phone lines were cut. The sole source of information was the government’s communiqué: “With an aerial strike against Cairo and across the UAR, Israel began its attack today at 9:00. Our planes scrambled and held off the attack.”
― Michael B. Oren, Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East

“The Arabs always seem to accept yesterday’s formulations too late,”
― Michael B. Oren, Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East

“Surrounded by what Sidqi Mahmud called “a forest of Israelis jets,” ‘Amer’s plane could not land at all. It circled from base to burning base for nearly ninety minutes before touching down at Cairo’s International Airport. There, Col. Muhammad Ayyub, ‘Amer’s air force liaison officer, was waiting with a drawn pistol, convinced that a coup had been staged against his boss. “You want to murder him, you dogs!” Ayyub shouted as the other officers present also pulled out their guns. Sidqi Mahmud stepped between them, though, averting a firefight. “Fools,” he scolded them, “put your guns away! Israel is attacking us!”
― Michael B. Oren, Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East