Interview with Former Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren

Earlier this month, IAR’s Managing Editor Ben Nelson spoke with Michael Oren about the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks and U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. An award-winning scholar and diplomat, he is the author of Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East from 1776 to the Present and Six Days of War, both New York Times best sellers. He has been an Israeli Defense Force spokesperson and advisor for the Israeli delegation to the United Nations. Dr. Oren most recently served as Israel’s Ambassador to the United States (2009-2013), and is currently the Abba Eban Chair of International Diplomacy at the Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliya at the Lauder School of Government, Diplomacy, and Strategy.You have been a close observer and participant in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations before. What, if anything, strikes you as different or unique about this latest attempt by the United States to broker a peace deal?Well, I will tell you what’s not different is the amount of time that the Secretary of State has spent trying to advance the process. He has come to this region 12 times in the last year and a half, and Condoleezza Rice came 23 times in less than two years. So this is not the first time that a secretary has spent this much time on the peace process. Warren Christopher back in the 1990s came 35 times between Jerusalem and Damascus. This is not the first time that these talks have not succeeded.What else is similar? Well certainly they are talking about a very similar type of peace plan that was originally envisioned by the Oslo framers in 1993. It’s not fundamentally different. And you’re still dealing with a Palestinian Authority that was created by Oslo and an Israeli government - now the 6th Israeli prime minister to deal with the peace process, none of them successfully so far, unfortunately.What is different is the environment. The Arab world is in disarray. The Palestinian Authority does not control all of its own population or all of its own territory. Forty percent is under the control of Hamas, which is an organization which is hostile both to the Palestinian Authority and to Israel. [It is] a terrorist organization. That, I think, plays less of a factor now, because Hamas is very much weakened since the downfall of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Hamas is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. But the core issues remain the core issues. What we know - and we don’t know everything that goes on this process - is that there hasn’t been significant progress on the core issues.What is your take on Hamas and the role of the Gaza Strip? It’s been largely ignored because it’s almost too difficult an issue to deal with. What do you think? I don’t think it’s been put off because it’s too difficult an issue to deal with; I just don’t think you can deal with it in any way. I don’t think there’s a solution there. It’s not as if Hamas wants to join the peace talks. Hamas is opposed to the peace talks. The Quartet, made of the United States, Russia, the European Union and the United Nations, has established three criteria for joining the peace talks. Hamas has to accept the existence of the state of Israel; Hamas has to disavow terror; and Hamas has to accept all previous agreements between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, like the Oslo Accords. And Hamas rejects all three of those. So if it’s rejecting all three of them it’s not as if it’s a partner for the peace process. It opposes the peace process. That creates a different situation. It’s not as if there can be resolved or improved relations with Hamas.In a talk at the Atlantic Council in February, you expressed skepticism that Abbas had the power to bring the Palestinians along in a peace agreement. Now, it looks like Netanyahu is the one who hasn’t been able to deliver - I’m speaking of the last group of prisoners that Israel did not release. Why do you think he came all this way if he wasn’t prepared to follow through?Well I don’t know how far all this way is, right? The fact that they’ve stayed negotiating for all these months doesn’t mean that anything was actually done. I don’t know if any real progress was made on Jerusalem, on refugees, on mutual recognition - these are the core issues. Remember I’m not in the process now, and I’m always very humble saying what I know and what I don’t know. What I understand is that the Palestinians would not commit to remain at the negotiating table after the release of the prisoners, and that would have been unacceptable to Israeli society. The fear was that they’d get the prisoners and then they’d leave the talks, which would have been horrible. And it would have been terrible for the Palestinians too.I’m still very skeptical of whether Abbas is capable of actually making an agreement. I’ve just come from a meeting of the Israeli left, and more and more people on the Israeli left are reaching that same conclusion. The reason is that Abbas doesn’t control his own population or his own people in their entirety - a real problem if you’re trying to negotiate with a sovereign state. One of the fundamental definitions of sovereignty is that you control your people and control your territory, and they don’t meet the criteria for sovereignty. If you’re treating the Palestinian Authority as a sovereign entity, Mahmoud Abbas is not only the president of the Palestinian Authority, he is the chairman of the PLO. Now the PLO represents all Palestinians everywhere, including the five million Palestinians who live in the diaspora. They don’t want to go back to Jenin and Jericho; they want to go back to Jaffa and Haifa. If an agreement involves giving up what Palestinians call their right of return - and any agreement would have to do that; no agreement is possible without doing that - how does Abbas sign on that agreement? He doesn’t have the authority to sign on the agreement, to say nothing of the personal dangers he’d run. So that’s why I reach that conclusion. It’s not an ideological position; it’s a position I simply arrived at by looking at the reality, and I think it’s becoming increasingly acknowledged. it doesn’t mean he can’t do other things. He could reach an interim agreement if he wanted. Right now they don’t want interim agreements.What is the view from the Israeli side? We know that Netanyahu is feeling pressure from the right, but what about the left?Well, there are different lefts. There’s more extreme left, more center left. I was talking to people on both sides today, and heard increasing frustration with all sides in the peace process. They’re critical of the prime minister’s handling of this, but there are issues that are very complex for the left. For example, among the Palestinian prisoners who are going to be released are Israeli Arabs who killed Israeli Jews in terrorist acts. Now, that is a very difficult issue for the left because they stand for social equality between Jews and Arabs. So let me give you the example: if the Taliban had an American soldier as a captive, and if the Taliban came along and said, ”We’ll release this soldier but you have to release from federal prison 50 American Muslims who have committed very serious crimes.” Do you think the United States would go along with that? And do you think that the people who would most oppose that [a U.S. refusal to release] would be American Muslim leaders and civil rights groups? So that’s precisely the problem the Israeli left has. On the one hand, they’re for social equality. On the other hand, how do you stand for social equality when you are basically acknowledging that the Israeli Arabs are a different type of citizen? So the prisoner release issue was very difficult for them.How about how the negotiations are being perceived in the Israeli street? What does the public think? There is tremendous support for how the government is handling this. The polls are kind of strange. Eighty percent of the Israeli population supports a two state solution, but 78 percent of the population would not accept a two-state solution unless the Palestinians recognized Israel as a Jewish state. The vast majority of the population wants the talks to succeed and continue, but the same overwhelming majority is against prisoner release. Generally the prime minister has gotten high marks on how he’s handled the process. You wouldn’t get points from the Israeli public for moving ahead very fast, because there’s tremendous skepticism about the Palestinians’ willingness to actually negotiate. That is the reality of it.Americans tend to discount the importance of Israeli domestic politics to the peace process. Can you provide some context on what is really important in Israel domestic politics right now, especially regarding the peace process?The peace process is not that important to domestic politics. As a matter of fact, in the last election the peace process barely figured as an issue. It’s a very interesting question you’re asking, because the agenda here is much different. The biggest issues in the last election were whether the ultra orthodox Jews will serve in the military; whether young people can afford housing; and whether the middle class will have a livable wage. These were the issues. Peace process was way down the line. And it’s one of the things you had to explain to policymakers in Washington. I know this issue is important for you guys, but getting Israelis to be very motivated about it is different. They’re worried about whether their kids can buy an apartment. It’s not whether the Palestinians are going to have a state. I think the peace process has gone up a bit in the national priorities, but not that much. I think still the issues are housing, ultra orthodox service, and the economy. It’s all about the economy.What do you think about the orthodox jews serving in the military? It’s not just good, it’s absolutely necessary. It’s the only way we can maintain our citizen army, which I think is a vital part of our democracy. And it’s the only way we can get the orthodox men into the workforce, because the majority of them don’t work. They study. And it’s become a prohibitive drain on our economy. The army teaches them skills. We know that 94 percent of those who do join army will go into the workforce. So that’s what it’s really about.Let’s shift gears a little bit and talk about the United States. There has been a lot of talk in recent years of waning American influence in the Middle East. At the same time, serious issues continue to emerge - Iran’s nuclear program, security in the Gulf, Arab-Israeli peace - and it is unclear who else could or would step up to provide leadership on these issues. What is your sense of America’s continued role in the region? As I said at the Atlantic Council, it’s complicated. On the one hand, yes, American influence has waned and American power has retreated. But on the other hand, there’s no replacement and there’s no other power that comes close. There’s no other country that maintains two major fleets in the Middle East. The U.S. has the 5th and 6th fleets and the largest, most powerful naval forces in history. So that’s one consideration. America has close to 40,000 soldiers in the Middle East. No one comes close to that. European defense budgets are being slashed left and right. So the story is not black and white.There is a school of thought that maintains America has spent too much time and effort on its relationship with Israel and received, perhaps, not enough in return. What would you say to those people?I’d say they are emphatically wrong. The United States gives Israel about $3.1 billion in aid. In return it gets a military that is Western, modern, motivated, and loyal to a democratically elected government - and that military is more than twice as large as the French and British militaries combined. It gets intelligence sharing at a level that’s not equaled by any other countries’ intelligence sharing with the United States in an area that’s crucial to American security. It gets port of call rights; it prepositions something in the order of a billion dollars of military equipment here in Israel. It gets joint maneuvers. It gets special ops cooperation. The fact that neither the 5th or 6th fleet is here near Israel nor are there any American forces near Israel shows that if Israel is here and strong, the United States doesn’t have to be here. Now what I just told you anybody in the Pentagon will tell you. They all get that. I’m aware that there are different narratives out there, but all that is unassailable. The case is sometimes made that American support for Israel causes Arab rage or Muslim rage. But we’ve seen in recent years how the Secretary of State gets rotten tomatoes thrown at her in Egypt not because she supports Israel but because she was perceived as supporting the Muslim Brotherhood. Or Benghazi, for example, was not because of American support for Israel.