Lloyd Green reviews Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide by Michael B. Oren (“Michael Oren’s Problem With American Jews“):
Ally, Michael Oren’s political autobiography, is an indictment of the Obama administration’s Middle East policy, or more precisely, its stance toward an Israeli government led by Benjamin Netanyahu. It is also a lament that American Jews have morphed into an iteration of modern-day Quakers, educated and mercantile but not hyper-ethnocentric…
All this is to be expected from Oren, who served as Israel’s ambassador to the U.S. and made aliyah, immigrating to Israel, after growing up in New Jersey and graduating from Columbia University.
Okay, let’s pause for a moment.
Oren was born here in the U.S., and so is a U.S. citizen. But he then went on to become ambassador of another country and is now a member of that other country‘s ethnocentric Knesset party.
Okay, I just wanted to make sure I got that straight.
And, remember, should a Gentile-American broach the whole ‘dual loyalty’ thing… well, to even bring that up as a subject is anti-Semitic.
Green continues:
The fact is that Jews have carved a niche in America’s mainstream, just as other hyphenated Americans before them did. And if New England’s Puritans ultimately succumbed to the temptations of the figuratively forbidding forest, Oren offers no answer as to why Jews would be different…
As Oren admits, while Israelis went to the polls last March, Netanyahu was busy warning Jewish voters that Israel’s Arabs—who are Israeli citizens—were voting “in droves.” To many, including Obama, Netanyahu’s 11th-hour campaign pitch sounded like, “OMG, blacks are voting! How dare they?”
Funny how that parallel sits there, glaring, festering, like a raisin in the sun.
In Ally’s concluding pages, Oren calls for releasing convicted spy Jonathan Pollard from prison because that’s what “allies” should do.
Now, I wonder why Oren would make such a call?
