Should Israel Depend on the US? (with Michael Oren)

Michael Oren: Hey, Russ, good to be with you.

Michael Oren: Unclear. Unclear. If I’d been asked to define President Biden’s Administration’s policy in the Middle East–this is going back to the inception of his Administration till today–I can’t. There’s no clear line. There’s a tremendous amount of zigzagging.

For a small example, for several years the Administration cold-shouldered Netanyahu–for whatever reason. They cold-shouldered him. That was a fact. They didn’t invite him to the White House. They cold-shouldered the Saudis–because of the Khashoggi affair, they cold-shouldered the Saudis. And then suddenly, last summer, they turned around and started bear-hugging both the Saudis and Bibi [Netanyahu–Econlib Ed.] in an attempt to broker a peace agreement between Israel and Saudi Arabia. But, the total volte face, as they say: about face.

In this crisis, they started out unequivocally in support of Israel–the President’s astonishing speech of October 10th. I’ve never heard a speech like it in my many years of following U.S.’s relations. Unequivocal support for Israel, categorical condemnation of terror, and signing on to our goal of destroying Hamas.

Secretary Blinken came a few days later; he reiterated that pledge. But in both their remarks, they also stated they expected Israel to conform with international law regarding warfare. And then, over the coming months, criticism began to mount that Israel was, to quote Secretary Blinken, ‘killing entirely too many Palestinians.’ Which begs the question: How many Palestinians killed would have been enough? Okay, it’s a strange thing to say. And, one wonders, what did they expect in a brutal urban warfare against an enemy that’s deeply embedded behind a civilian population?

America has had similar experiences in Fallujah and Mosul. They know what it’s like. And in fact, in both those battles, as well in Kosovo, the civilian-to-soldier ratio of dead was much higher on the American side than it is on the Israeli side.

But the criticism kept on mounting. And then it was tied into the day after–whether we’re going to have a two-state solution, whether the Palestinian Authority would be involved in that, whether Palestinian refugees from in the south of Gaza would be admitted to the north, back to the north. It was like one issue after another.

And throughout, the Administration kept up two principle policies which were crucial for Israel’s security. One was casting vetoes in the Security Council [United Nations Security Council–Econlib Ed.] over attempts to impose a ceasefire. And, the second was to maintain a steady and a sometimes expedited flow of vital ammunition: we’d run low on ammunition.

And, those two core policies have remained, but everything around it is very confusing.

For example, if you’re a leader of Hamas and you’re dug in a tunnel and you hear the Secretary of State say this, what you would conclude is: I’ve got to dig in my heels and hold on for a little while longer, get Israel to kill more civilians. And that’s eventually going to cause a rupture. And, at that point, the United States will start demanding a ceasefire. And, that’s what I need as a leader of Hamas. Hamas needs a ceasefire in order to win the war. Ceasefire simply means Hamas wins. So, the message is very, very confusing.

And, with regarding Iran: So here, U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria have been attacked something like 135 times by rockets and drones. United States has for the most part withheld its fire. There’s been some return fire, but very little. The Houthis, backed by Iran, have closed international–all but closed–international shipping through the vital Bab al-Mandab waterway. The United States has returned fire, but ineffectively. With some Western allies. Today, the Houthis are firing again.

And, this Administration simply refuses to say the ‘I-word’–refuses to say ‘Iran.’ And, it’s extraordinary. Iran, I would say, bears something close to 97% of all the warfare interruption violence going on in the region today. And, it’s the one country that has paid zero price. Zero. And, I haven’t heard any utterances from Washington saying, ‘Iran, you’re going to pay a price if you keep on doing this,’ and backing up with the [inaudible 00:05:50].

So, if you ask me, I’m confused as an Israeli and as a person who personally knows Joe Biden fairly well–I worked with him. I’m deeply appreciative of the fact that he’s maintained these two core policies. But, I’m confused/deeply concerned. And I’m asked on the Israeli Press, ‘How long will that continue?’ And, my response is always, ‘Not indefinitely.’

Michael Oren: For one reason, and one reason only. They can serve as a basis for boycotts and sanctions. They could put further pressure on the Biden Administration to cease applying those two policies that are essential for our security. That’s why they are important.

Michael Oren: That’s about five different questions. So, let’s unpack it.

First of all, cards on the table. I was the only member of the Israeli government who in 2016 opposed the MOU–the Memorandum of Understanding–renewing the 10-year package of American Aid. The Obama package replaced the Bush package. It was slightly improved monetarily, but with harsher terms.

And I have long been opponent–me, Mr. America-Israel, right?–I’ve been an opponent of the aid. For many, many reasons. And, it’s everything from the fact that we are an affluent society. We’re a strong society. Receiving aid at this point is not consonant with our being. It sends the wrong message to the region of dependency and weakness–certainly at a time when America’s foreign policy is unclear, when America is withdrawing from many areas of foreign affairs. The value of the aid was always greater than its monetary [inaudible 00:10:26], the strategic value of that aid. It sent a message to everybody: Look, the greatest superpower in the world stands behind the State of Israel, and everyone should get that message. Well, how strong is that message today?

And, we pay a price for the aid. We pay a price in terms of opportunity costs. You’re an economist. And, we pay a price in the fact that we don’t actually get to buy what we want to buy. And, sometimes we buy things that we may not need that remain very costly. And, I’m thinking of one thing is the F-35 jet, which costs twice as much as any other jet to maintain. And, it is the last manned fighter aircraft in history. And, we’ve got it now for about 30, 40 years. Very, very expensive jet. Many issues like that.

But, the biggest issue now is the control it gives [?] over our foreign policy. It is a concession of sovereignty and the decision-making. And we see it now very poignantly. If you would have asked most Israelis on October 6th whether they believed that Israel could defend itself, by itself, against any Middle Eastern adversary or any combination of Middle Eastern adversaries, most Israelis would have said, ‘Of course, we can.’ Ask the same question to Israelis on October 7th, and you get the same percentage of Israelis saying, ‘We can’t do that.’ We can’t get these [?]–we can’t tell the aircraft carrier strike groups, ‘Okay guys, we got it. You can go home. We’re in control here.’ And, no one’s willing to say that.

And here we have the Secretary of State [U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken] sitting in our War Cabinet–which is an extraordinary concession of sovereignty. I think there’s a deepening realization in this country–and I hate being the person ahead of his time–that we’re going to have to move on to something else. That one of the great goals of Israel, post-Gaza War, will be to achieve strategic independence from the United States of America.

That doesn’t mean that America doesn’t remain our principal ally, that we don’t share the democratic values, that we don’t have close, close relationships with American Jewry.

But the relationship should be one of partnership. We should be cooperating in fields that are vital to both our security establishments: in cyber, in laser technology–it’s called reinforced energy–computer science, and joint maneuvers. We should continue that; but not on the basis of someone giving and someone receiving. Because as we know, there is no such thing as a free lunch. And, this lunch is anything but free.

Michael Oren: I also think it gives our enemies–even in the United States, they say, ‘We can criticize Israel because we pay taxes.’ And, ‘We pay Israel, and, our bombs–‘

Michael Oren: Well, actually, if you do the math, it comes out to something like $1 a month per American in aid to Israel. I mean, by the way, the aid is about $4 billion a year. And, you know what $4 billion buys you today in military terms? It buys you half of one Zumwalt-class destroyer. So, you’re paying a huge price for an aid package, which–okay, 40 years ago was 50% of our defense budget, but now it’s closer to 16%. And, you’re right.

Now, in the past, one of the reasons I opposed the Obama MOU–Memorandum of Understanding–as opposed to the Bush one, was because of three initials. Three initials, by the way, categorize all our relationship with the United States. There’s QME–Qualitative Military Edge. MOU–Memorandum of Understanding. And, there is OSP–OSP is Off-Shore Procurement. And, under the Bush package, Israel could retain more than 26% of the aid to do with that aid what we needed to do, of course[?first of all it?] [inaudible 00:15:08] created several tens of thousands of jobs in this country. But beyond that, our military has to create capabilities that the United States doesn’t need, that we need.

The Obama MOU eliminated the 26%. So, all of the aid has to be spent in the United States.

There were also [?] strings put on our request to get what’s known as plus-ups from Congress. We go back to Congress and say, ‘Listen, we got the $4 billion dollars, but we need more money for Iron Dome, for David’s Sling,’–which is an interim-level anti-ballistic system. And, Obama wanted to cut out our ability to go to Congress. Our friends–Lindsey Graham–taught us how to end-run that. But, there were a lot of strings attached–even more strings attached and[?] MOU–for $4 billion a year.

And, you ask yourself, is it worth it? And the answer, of course, is No.

Now we have a problem that we’re deeply dependent on the United States for ammunition. There is a global–certainly Western–depletion of ammunition because of Ukraine. Underneath where we’re sitting are station warehouses with pre-positioned American munitions and equipment, about $2 billion worth. They were put there by George Bush–beginning of the [21st–Econlib Ed.] century–to serve American military personnel in the Middle East. They have mostly withdrawn. And the myth remains that these munitions serve those forces, but everyone knows they’re for us.

And, what happens is when we run low on ammunition, we get the keys–literally the keys–to these warehouses. We go down, we take what we need, we write it down, we pay for it.

But in 2014, during an earlier war with Hamas, President Obama denied us the keys for certain forms of ammunition because, quote-unquote, “We were killing too many Palestinians.”

And, so that makes us dependent on American munitions.

I can give you one case in the Second Lebanon War. And I remember this very succinctly because I was there. In the army we were using American cluster bombs and the United States was criticizing us harshly for using cluster bombs. And so, after the war, we developed our own cluster bombs, and we became independent in terms of cluster bombs, which were an important part of munitions for fighting a deeply embedded enemy like Hamas. We’re going to have to do that. We’re going to have to do that with 105 millimeter tank munitions. We’re going to have to do that with 155 millimeter artillery. And, most important, we’re going to have to do that with missile–with jet-fired air-to-ground missiles known as JDAMs [Joint Direct Attack Munitions].

Michael Oren: Okay. First of all: ambassadorial day, okay–you can’t really talk about a day because it’s 24/7.

So, what it is: I mean, just on the surface that you are the nexus between 435 members of Congress, 120 members of Knesset, how many ministers we have here–the Cabinet, the President, the Prime Minister, the IDF [Israel Defense Forces], the American Armed Forces, the Pentagon, the CIA [Central Intelligence Agency], the Mossad, FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation], Shabak [Sherut haBitachon haKlali, General Security Services], the economic community, commerce, the scientific community, the Jewish communities in the state of Israel, various Christian communities, African-American communities, Latino communities, state governments, local governments, the Press, the Israeli Press. How should we go on? I mean, I could literally spend an hour telling you this. And that’s just the daily routine.

And then, of course, you do have a social schedule. And my social schedule was something like Superman. Why? You’d go to maybe two or three different events a night. Each one required a different change of clothing. So, you’d run in with a business suit, put on a tux, then run into something and put on tails; and back and forth and back and forth. The hardest thing for me was at seven o’clock when the rest of the Embassy went home, I began another day.

Then you come in at 11:00, 12:00 at night from having schmoozed professionally for several hours and being on your feet. Then the phone starts ringing because it’s morning in Israel. And you’re called in, you can be called in to the Embassy, 2:00, 3:00, 4:00 in the morning, to have a secure phone call there. And, you are constantly, constantly sleep-deprived and depressed.

Now, in my period, we didn’t have crises in U.S.-Israel relations. We had daily, revolving crises, and they sort of blended into one another.

And, the Obama period was the toughest period. I’ll tell you what, for someone who is a historian, it was the toughest period in U.S.-Israel relations. And so, it was constant. And then you’re also sitting on a volcano known as the Israeli Embassy, which has 125 people in it, and all sorts of interesting shenanigans going on there. And then, you try to get out of Washington as often as possible. There is a very big place called the United States of America, so you try to get out and travel and speak, get to campuses.

And, I was– this is to answer your question about Mike Herzog. I am very fond of Mike. We go way back. I’ve worked with all the Herzogs, by the way. I’ve worked with his brother, I worked with his father, and I worked with his uncle. I was the last adviser to Abba Eban. And so, I know the Herzogs very well and deeply respect them.

But, every ambassador is different. I can say that–Ron Dermer, my successor, he was very much Bibi’s ambassador to Obama and Trump. I was not that. First of all, I wasn’t[?] a member of the Likud. I was a professional appointment, not a political appointment. And, I saw myself as being the Ambassador of the State of Israel to the people of the United States.

Mike Herzog comes from the world of diplomacy and quiet diplomacy. He’s very much the diplomats’ diplomat. He’s not a person who is going to get on CNN [Cable News Network] or MSNBC [Microsoft-National Broadcasting Company] and start arguing with people and firing back.

There were days and nights where I would sleep in my vehicle outside the studios in Washington because I’d be going from one after another–and I continue to do that now–because I saw that the way to attain influence, because I wasn’t such a close protege of Netanyahu, which is a source of most ambassadors’ strength. You think it’s the Plenipotentiary idea: that when you’re talking to the Ambassador, you’re talking to the Prime Minister–the same guy. That was certainly the case of Ron Dermer. It was not my case. So, I had to get influence and achieve influence and access by constantly being in the press, constantly being on TV. And, the Obama Administration was an administration that was very sensitive to the media because it was actually composed of a lot of people from the media. And, it worked. It was a successful policy.

Michael Oren: As someone who has been representing Israel in one form or another literally for a half a century, that is the most frequently asked question: Why is Israel’s PR so bad? There’s almost never a meeting where that question isn’t asked.

And, there are many answers to it. It’s the old Ben-Gurion adage that it’s not important what the non-Jews think, it’s important what the Jews do. There is a parochialism here, provincialism, in Israel. Even–you look at what our military spokesmen are speaking to the world: They put on TV to speak to the world the same people they put on TV to speak to Israelis. And so, when you speak to Israelis, you want a gruff, tough officer. But, when you speak to the world, you may want a pleasantly-speaking woman officer from a different ethnic background. They don’t do that. They don’t understand they’re talking to different audiences. But, these are very technical things.

So, I must tell you what the conclusion after 50 years–and I bring this conclusion to government meetings–is: we can invest another billion dollars. We can train a generation of spokespeople. Something I tried to do many years at the Shalem Center was to train a generation of what I called the Cadet Program. Recently pitched it to Tel Aviv University as much as two years ago: that we’d have to get young people out of the army who speak different languages and come from different backgrounds. Not much interest. Okay.

But the basic reason our public diplomacy–I would call it–is so bad is because we are the Jewish State. And, as much as we like to think we’re not–that we’re a normal state, we’re just like any other state–we are far from being like any other state. e judged by a completely different set of criteria. Held under that microscope of a power that no other country is examined. And, much of the criticism leveled out of us, if you would look at it closely, echoes classic antisemitic tropes. Whether it be the Massacre of the Innocents from the Book of Matthew, whether it be the blood libel, whether it be deicide. And it just comes up.

Listen: How many times have you read since this war, first of all, that we’ve killed 23,000 Gazans? Which is an inflated number that includes the number of terrorists we’ve killed and the number of Palestinians killed by their own rockets. Okay? But no one says that. And, the source of that statistic is Hamas. How many times have you seen that cited multiple times a day? And then, they’ll always add, ‘Mostly women and children.’ Is that verifiable? or is someone just trying to say that Jews like killing women and children? Now, in the BBC [British Broadcasting Corporation] they’ll simply say, ‘Hey, you guys like killing women and children.’

I have to give a credit to AOC [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] in New York. She actually came out on Christmas and mentioned the Murder of the Innocents and attached it to what was going on in Gaza. She’s the first one to actually come out and do that. But, I’ve noticed this for years.

And, when we are dealing with the media, we are dealing with hatreds that go back 2,500 years. And so, we have to be humble and realistic, and noting that: Okay, we can respond to this. We must respond to this. We have to defend ourselves as best as we can. At the end of the day, we are Jews and we are up against–and a hatred that has very deep and ancient roots.

Michael Oren: Yes. Matthew.

Michael Oren: Yeah. We have to also add, Russ, that out of the 23,000, 9,000 are terrorists, but about 30% of the remaining 14,000 are casualties caused by Palestinian rockets.

So, you’re down to–I said it before–a ratio of about two to one, civilian to soldier. Soldier to combatant deaths: that is roughly half the ratio of United States and Iraq and Afghanistan, half the rate of NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organization] and Kosovo–something of a world record by the way. Certainly a world record for intense urban combat against an enemy that is dug in and using its civilian population as a shield.

The criticism in this country is not that we’re killing too many Palestinians. The criticism in this country is not doing enough to protect our soldiers and that we are taking unnecessary risks with our soldiers’ lives in order to curry favor internationally.

Now, that argument, of course, is more complex because we need that favor in order to gain time and space for the IDF [Israeli Defense Forces] to get ammunition, for example, from the United States. If we killed too many Palestinians, that supply of ammunition might be threatened.

So, even that–even the way we’re conducting this war and trying to minimize Palestinian deaths also has not just a moral component, but a strategic component.

And then, there’s the notion that we aren’t just any state, and we aren’t just any army. We are the Democratic Jewish State of Israel with that army, which has a strong moral code. I spent about 35 years in that army, and I’ve fought in Gaza. I know what that’s like. We are facing–you know, we are having this conversation with our nice libraries behind us. But, as we’re speaking, there are tens of thousands of Israelis who are engaged in week after week after week, 24/7 of intense combat. Now, I’ve been in several wars, but I’ve never experienced anything remotely like this.

And the soldiers I’m talking to are coming out and saying to me: Gaza is hell. Everything is booby-trapped. The cats are booby-trapped. The roosters are booby-trapped. The babies are booby-trapped. Every single second you don’t know if the last second is your last. You don’t know whether the entrance to a tunnel is behind you and someone’s going to come up and shoot you in the back. You don’t know this. You’re living in constant fear. You’re living in constant toxic environments, physical environments. And they say it’s hell.

And, if you say to these soldiers, ‘We should take greater care in trying to limit the number of Palestinian casualties,’ they’ll look at you like you’re crazy, you’re detached from reality. You’re dealing with the–and we don’t even have a word in the English language to describe Hamas and their barbarism and their Satanism–it’s pure evil. And, our soldiers will fire at anything. They’re just trying to stay alive. Anything that moves. That’s how, unfortunately, our own three hostages were killed and why no one was arrested afterward, because this is the state of our soldiers in Gaza.

So, we can have a nice academic discussion about this, but there’s a reality discussion. And that is: This is war. It’s a brutal war. It is a war of national survival for this country in which tens, and at some point, even hundreds of thousands of our citizens were involved defending us.

And yes, it’s painful. It’s agonizing to see the pictures. And I’m on the international presses all day. The press you’ve seen in Israel was completely different than what you see internationally. And, I go on the Israeli–

Michael Oren: Well, I go on the Israeli news every day almost. And, their coverage is about heroism, stories of survival, stories of bereavement.

The stories in the international press are almost uniformly about Palestinian suffering–in great detail. Particularly the suffering of children, children, children. It’s always children. Right? And, they are detached from that reality.

The question is, you know, in order to sort of placate that international opinion, do we have to risk the lives of our soldiers?

This is one of the many grueling, fundamental dilemmas we face. We face a whole series of dilemmas around the hostages. But, this is one of them. And, go tell the parents who have just lost their 21-year-old son or daughter, that that son or daughter had to die in order to take greater care to limit Palestinian casualties.

This was the lesson of the Jenin Battle in 2002 where we lost something like 24 paratroopers trying to limit civilian casualties. And afterwards we were accused of perpetrating a massacre, the Jenin massacre. So, we lost the 24 soldiers and we still got blamed for producing a massacre that never occurred, by the way–completely fabricated.

And within Israeli society–that was within the IDF–in the Israeli society, people said, ‘Enough. We’re not going to do this anymore.’ And, those 24 were reservists with kids and we’re just not going to do this anymore.

So, we have a moral code. We have a strict moral code. We are not leveling Gaza. Many people would like to. We have the ability: Sure, we have the military ability to level Gaza. We’re not going to do that, because we are the IDF. Because we are the Jewish state. And because we have to, yes, function in the world.

But, I don’t think you can say to the Israeli Army–as the Americans have been saying to us, I think unfairly and disingenuously–that we have to slow down and be more precise: ‘You get into Gaza, and be more precise.’ You send your soldiers in there and see how precise they’re going to be: about as precise as they were in Fallujah and Mosul.

By the way, the Americans are giving us–and as I told you earlier about mixed messages–the mixed message from Washington yesterday is: ‘The operation is going too slowly.’ Okay? ‘It should be going faster.’ But they want us to slow down. Go figure that one out. All right. [More to come, 39:02]