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State of the Jewish State

(Yeshiva University Commentator) Michael B. Oren interviewed by Yigal Gross - Historian Michael B. Oren, a Senior Fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem, is the author of Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East. * Q: In your book, Six Days of War, you described how Israel delayed attacking and played out all of its diplomatic options in order not to lose American support. Is Israel's dependence upon an American diplomatic umbrella really such a good thing? Oren: It is a mistake for Israel to be completely dependent politically on the U.S. We have friends: there are a billion Hindus who love us and a couple of billion Chinese who like us a lot. It is extremely important that we diversify our political portfolio. We buckled to the U.S. on the Phalcon deal. We had attracted the Chinese to develop a reconnaissance aircraft. The U.S. was afraid that these aircraft had some of their technology in them. They were angry, cracked down on us, and we gave in. We broke our contact with the Chinese which impaired our reliability, and hurt us economically. We have to assert our independence and sovereignty to the U.S., even at the cost of irking it. Ultimately America will respect us more if we do it. * Q: You participated as a soldier in the withdrawal from Gaza. How did the actual withdrawal compare with your expectations? Oren: There were two things that I didn't anticipate. I did not anticipate the degree of efficiency and sensitivity of the Israeli army. The level of professionalism, training, sensitivity, and endurance was extraordinary. Every once in a while the strength of Israel surprises me. The second surprise was the trauma that I would endure taking people out of their homes. While I was helping a journalist onto a truck, a woman came up to me and said "Arur Atah" - that's a very powerful thing to say in Hebrew. I was unable to get it out of my mind for weeks. "Arur Atah" - accursed are you. * Q: You have said that, so far, the withdrawal seems to have been a success, but could there come a point in time when you would change your mind and be willing to declare it a failure? Oren: Yes. If America lowers the bar on Palestinian compliance with the road map, then we fail. If America looks at Abbas and says "he doesn't like terror, that's enough for us," and then orders Israel out of the West Bank and creates a Palestinian state, that would be a disaster. * Q: Do you believe that Abbas - or any Palestinian leader - is capable of waging war against the Palestinian terrorists? Oren: I don't. The world has been trying since the 1920s to impose leadership on the Palestinians that is capable of reaching a diplomatic solution and they have never succeeded. Abbas is a perfectly nice guy, but I don't see him waging a civil war to make peace with Israel, and that's really what it's all about. Arafat said he loved terror and did nothing to stop it. Abbas said that he doesn't like terror and does nothing to stop it. From Israel's standpoint, it's not a big difference. It's just much nicer to deal with Abbas than Arafat. * Q: Do you believe that Israel will ever see peace? Oren: The period of 1960-67 is considered one of the most peaceful periods in Israeli history. Do you know that per-capita more Israelis were killed every year in terrorist attacks during that period than today? We're in the Middle East, a very unstable and violent area, and, accordingly, we have to have realistic expectations of what peace means in our area. Peace for us really means the absence of active war. I'm confident that we can go through long periods of such peace. Keep in mind that we haven't had an attack by a large conventional army in more than 30 years. The reason we haven't is because the last time they tried it, we whooped them, even though they had a surprise attack on us. So we can have long periods of quiet, but quiet i
2005-11-23 00:00:00
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