Fighting for Israel // A conversation with Israel’s former ambassador to the US and former MK Michael Oren

You’re a man on a mission.
I’m on multiple missions. I’m on my way to Philadelphia, where I’m going to be speaking on behalf of JNF (the Jewish National Fund), but I’m coming from Washington, where I brought a delegation of displaced people from the north for the Israel American Conference.

That’s a good place to start our conversation. The people of the north have been displaced for nearly a year. What took so long for Israel to launch this war it’s currently waging?
Don’t get me started on that. I wanted this to happen 11 months ago, in October. On October 11, I published an article in Israel Hayom saying that Israel was fighting the wrong war and that we should be focusing our military effort on the north, not on the south. Because Hamas is a tactical threat to the State of Israel that is trapped in Gaza and isn’t going anywhere, whereas Hezbollah is a strategic threat, and it can maneuver into many places. When we had half a million people called up by the army, an American aircraft carrier off the coast and a lot of international backing, we should have focused on attacking Hezbollah first. I wasn’t alone; it turned out that Defense Minister Gallant thought the same thing, but he was overruled by Netanyahu, under a lot of pressure from the US. My fear was that we would reach a point where our army would be tired from fighting in Gaza, we’d be low on ammunition, and we wouldn’t enjoy international backing, and that’s when we would have war with Hezbollah. That’s pretty much where we are right now.

When I spoke to Daniel Pipes, he said that you disagree with him, but he believes that the existential threat to Israel is from Hamas and the Palestinians, not Hezbollah.
He’s wrong. I don’t know what his rationale is. Hamas is not an existential threat to Israel; it’s a moral threat to Israel, which is very different.

I think that’s what he means by existential, though. Meaning, he feels that the Palestinian issue has a greater ability to rile up the world against Israel.
I’m purely policy driven. When you have half a million people called up and two aircraft fighter groups, you have to deal with your militarily existential threat first, and then you turn to Hamas. Now, we see what has happened with Hezbollah. I spent part of the summer on reserve duty, and I visited artillery emplacements. I know how low we are on ammunition, and that’s going to be an issue.

You said that there was a debate in the Israeli Cabinet as to whether to attack Hezbollah. We are talking about people who understand the situation, so there must have been some rationale to waiting this long. How do you understand that side of the argument?
The rationale was that the more military pressure they put on Hamas, the greater the chance of getting the hostages back, and that was the first priority. However, that’s a question now, because we have learned that if we put too much military pressure on Hamas, they execute the hostages. Another part of the rationale was that there were major cities in the south under rocket fire, such as Ashkelon and Ashdod, and the major anger of the people of Israel was directed at Hamas, not Hezbollah.

Yet nearly 100,000 people were displaced from their homes for a very long time—Israelis in exile in their own country.
Right, and they’ve become very embittered feeling that the state abandoned them. That’s where this has gotten us. Thousands of homes have been destroyed, tens of thousands of acres of farmland and forest have gone up in flames, dozens of people have been killed and wounded, and there was a terrible feeling in the north that no one was doing anything about it.

Do you feel that this is a new chapter? I don’t want to call it war, but it seems to be like one.
Why wouldn’t you call it war? It has been a war. The Americans are always telling me that they’re afraid of a regional war breaking out. I say, “I have some bad news for you: We’ve been in a regional war for 11 months.” What about this is not a regional war?

That’s true, so I’ll put it differently: Is it now Israel’s time to go on the offensive?
I hope so.

Yesterday, Israeli President Yitzchak Herzog claimed that Israel was not behind the beeper and walkie-talkie attack. Why would he do that? This seems to be the first significant deterrent attack since October 7. Why deny that Israel was behind it?
That’s very unusual. No one is taking credit for it, but there doesn’t seem to be a reason to deny it. We usually just say, “No comment,” because in my field “no comment” is also a comment. I also see that Leon Panetta, with whom I had a very good relationship when he was secretary of defense, is calling this an act of terror. In what moral universe is eliminating a designated terrorist, who had not just Israeli blood on his hands but a lot of American blood as well, an act of terror? It seems that Leon Panetta represents a moral implosion on the part of a certain segment of liberal America.

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