By Thomas Lifson, AMERICAN THINKER
I strongly recommend a long interview with Michael Oren, and American-born Israeli, who has served as Israel’s ambassador the United States and currently is a Member of the Knesset and Deputy Minister in the Prime Minister’s Office. He speaks veryfrankly on many issues, and provides perspectives that I found fascinating and useful.
I had never before seen the website Ocatavian Report that published the interview, but I am impressed with it and will be returning.
Here is a short sample of Oren’s perspectives on matters of current concern:
About five years ago, when Secretary of State Kerry was traveling back and forth between Israel and the Palestinians, he almost invariably paused before getting on a plane back to the United States to issue a not-so-veiled threat against the state of Israel. The threat was, and we understood it as a threat, that if Israel did not make concessions to the Palestinians, we would be isolated internationally. To quote the Secretary: “isolated on steroids.”
Today, you’ll find that Israel today is pointedly and emphatically less isolated than at any other time in its history. To the best of my knowledge, we’ve yet to make peace with Palestinians.
Our relationship with Latin America is at an unprecedented high. We’ve had the Prime Minister be the first Israeli Prime Minister to visit any country south of the United States of America. Now he’s visited four.
There are 51 countries in Africa, most of which cut off relations with us after the Arab boycott of the 1970’s, that have renewed relations with us. They’re standing in line to strengthen those relationships with us. Our relationships with Eastern Europe, the former Soviet bloc countries, are excellent.
We didn’t have relationships with China or India 30 years ago. They are our biggest trading partners outside of Europe today. With India, we also have a strategic relationship, an alliance.
And then we have the Sunni Arab world. I would venture to say that the Sunni Arab states no longer view us as an enemy state, but more to the point they view us as an allied state — an important ally.
These are sea changes. Much of the improvement in our foreign relations has been driven by Israeli technology, and our technology is in areas that everybody needs. Everyone needs water technology. Israel leads the world in water technology. Just in terms of reclamation, we reclaim about 90 percent of our water. The country that comes in second after Israel is Spain, with 13 percent.
We’re way ahead in water technology. Then there’s our smart architecture. But it’s also in the defense fields. In cyber security, we’re a world leader. Everybody needs defense today. Everyone’s behind in the quest for cyber defense, and we are there. I was previously the deputy minister for diplomacy in the Prime Minister’s office. I was meeting with foreign leaders almost every week, and they all came with the same requests: water and defense. Water, food, and defense. In those areas, at least, Israel’s forging the 21st Century.
It is doing so in some other areas as well. The economy’s thriving. There’s 3D printing. There’s biotech. There’s med tech. Most recently it’s been cannabis: Israel’s the only industrialized country that has been able to have human testing for cannabis. That puts us very much ahead.
Beyond that, Israel is perceived in the world today as a power. There was one international metric that had us as the eighth most powerful country in the world. This is a function of the IDF, which is today more than twice as big as the British and French armies combined. Add our ability to project power and to maintain close relationships with the leading powers of the world, whether they be Russia, China, or the United States, and Israel is uniquely positioned.
But the Sunni Arab world is a somewhat different dynamic. Because yes, it’s the power, and yes, it’s access to technology, but there it’s also Iran. Iran, Iran, Iran. Here again I have to go back to the latter years of the Obama Administration, when the President sought to bring Israel and the Sunni Arabs closer together through peace. He brought us together in the end, though not through peace. He brought us together through common opposition to his policies — particularly his policies toward Iran and the Iran nuclear deal, which strengthened, enriched, and legitimized Iran and has resulted in a major Iranian offensive across the Middle East. If you look at the map of the Middle East in 2016 and look at the areas under Iranian influence as blacked out, then a big chunk of the Middle East has been blacked out. Iran poses an existential threat to Israel; it poses an existential threat to the Sunni Arab region. This has created a confluence of interests. This is very intense and getting more intense every day.
@ Bear Klein: On this positive side, Bear, are the signs that some Arabs, at any rate, are becoming less hostile to Israel. Just in the last few weeks, Algerian TV, which of course is subject to government censorship, broadcast a documentary about the history of the Jews in Algeria, that praised the Jews for their many contributions to Algerian life, conceded they had lived in Algeria for two thousand plus years (before the Arab Muslims arrived), and sympathetically interviewed a small number of Jews who remained in Algeria, who described how they have been persecuted, or who hid their religion/ethnicity to escape persecution. (see http://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/2018/04/algerians-upset-over-documentary-that.html).
It sounds like the Algerian government is sending “smoke signals” that Algeria is inteested in a rapproachment with Israel. Many former Algerian Jews now live in Israel. THere does not seem to be any reason why the government would permit an effort to rehabilitate the reputation of Algerian Jews, unless they were contemplating an opening of relations with Israel, which is identifiied with Jews in general throughout the Arab world.
It also seems similar to statements by some Iraqi Muslims in recent months, who have said positive things about iraq’s former Jewish community, and who have expressed an interest in making contact with their descendants now living in Israe
THe Bad news is that Algerian journalists and writers were almost unanimous in condemning the film and in denouncing the Algerian Jews as traitors.
Michael Owen knows the enemies of Israel and what threats they provide. He has a vested stake in this as he has children in the IDF and has served himself.
The doomsday Obama/Kerry people did not succeed in isolating Israel. Israel in-spite of many problems also is having huge successes is what Oren is pointing out. Those that always gravitate to the negative unfortunately miss out on the many positive things going on in Israel. Most Israelis do not miss out on the positive that is why the happiness index of Israel is always so high.
Daniel Oren is living in a fool’s paradise. And it is basically Bibi’s fool’s paradise.
Bibi and Oren think that diplomacy trade and economic success can solve all of Israel’s problems. They believe that Israel can ignore the military threats that gathering around it. This is a disastrous mistake. Hamas and Hezbollah keep growing in strength. Israeli military experts report that Hamas operatives are gradually being transformed from a terrorist force to a regular army. Hezbollah has undergone this transformation years ago. They now have a pool of battle-hardened veteran fighters. Iran arms and trains both terror-military organizations, while developing it own missile systems and nuclear weapons. If in the future Egypt and Jordan come under the control of the mUslim Brotherhood (which everyone admits is a very real possibility), and if Assad or his succesor succeeds in reunifying Syria under his rule with the help of Iran, Hezbollah and Russia, Israel will be encircled, as it was in 1967–but with better armed and better trained and motivated enemies. And let’s not forget Hezbollah’s 100,000 missiles and several thousand more possessed by Hamas, and Iran’s Intermediate range missiles and probable future nukes.
The longer Israel waits to deal with these military threats, the greater they will grow, and the heavier the Israeli casualties when the inevitable attack comes. Israel’s survival will be very much in question. If Israel takes firm military and economic measures now, the danger will be reduced. But there is no evidence that the present government is contemplating this. On the contrary, it continuously appeases Hamas, iunder the delusion that it can buy “calm” with its mortal enemies. And it is unlikely that any possible new government that may emerge from the September elections will change this disastrous appeasement-cum-ostrich policy.