Departing as Ambassador, Michael Oren Is Still Working To Bridge Obama-Bibi Gap...

Perhaps the most important job that the Israeli ambassador to the United States performs is to provide the American context that will allow Israeli policymakers to understand the concerns, goals, and fears of its superpower ally. Yesterday, in the middle of his last week holding the job he’s dreamed of since childhood, Michael Oren was still busy explaining Barack Obama to Jerusalem.

Obama was in New York, addressing the opening session of the United Nations’ annual General Assembly. The speech was familiar, invoking the same Middle East themes that Obama has pushed ever since he took office in 2009: “Resolving the Iranian nuclear issue, settling the Israeli-Palestinian problem, and crafting a multilateral diplomacy for a U.S. that is withdrawing from ‘a perpetual war footing.’ ” The speech amounted to little more than a reprise. “America’s diplomatic efforts will focus on two particular issues: Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons, and the Arab-Israeli conflict. While these issues are not the cause of all the region’s problems, they have been a major source of instability for far too long, and resolving them can help serve as a foundation for a broader peace.”

The problem is that it’s now 2013, and the Arabs have seen plenty of other sources of instability much more dangerous than the peace process. There’s Egypt, for instance, where Washington’s main Arab partners, like Saudi Arabia, were keen to get rid of the Muslim Brotherhood and back military strongman Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. Even more important, there’s the Syrian civil war, which has already seen more than 100,000 killed while virtually all of America’s allies who have an abiding interest in the outcome—the Gulf Arab states, Jordan, Turkey, and France—have clamored for Obama to take a more active role in bringing down Bashar al-Assad.

So, who was Obama’s intended audience for the message that the Iranian nuclear program is no more important than the Arab-Israeli peace process? Jerusalem. Obama was telling the prime minister of Israel that the game is over and that there will be no more threats to use military force against Iran, whose nuclear program, in his view, has been downgraded to an annoying regional problem, like Israel’s continuing inability to give the Palestinians what they want.

In effect, Obama was also speaking to Oren, who after four years in his post may have come up against the realization that there are some American contexts that are difficult even for an American-born diplomat to understand, never mind explain. Shortly after Obama finished his speech at the meeting of the U.N. General Assembly, Oren was on the phone with his boss, Benjamin Netanyahu, who goes to New York next week to deliver his own address in front of the General Assembly on Oct. 1.

I sat down with Oren at the Israeli Embassy in Washington just after Obama’s speech, and during the course of our hourlong interview, he left the office several times to speak with Netanyahu. What, I asked, was he telling him? “Everyone over there sees it in a different way, and I can contextualize it,” Oren replied. “I convey the fact that there’s a lot of public excitement in the U.S. about Rouhani,” he went on, referring to the reception the Iranian president’s recent charm offensive has gotten from American journalists and Iran experts. The hope, Oren explained, is that the ostensibly moderate Rouhani’s rhetoric and demeanor presage an agreement with the administration that may help to preclude a regional conflagration that might suck in the United States. At the same time, there are other circles in Washington less sanguine about a deal, or Rouhani’s intentions. “Within Congress,” Oren said, “there’s a very sober and somber assessment regarding Rouhani, and I convey that, too.”

So, what is the Israeli assessment of Rouhani? “Israelis,” said Oren, “see Rouhani as another Middle Easterner smiling and playing the world while he’s spinning enriched uranium.” In other words, not even the New Jersey-born Oren is capable of bridging the huge gap between what the government of Israel perceives as a strategic, perhaps existential, threat, and what the White House sees as an opportunity for a new beginning with its decades-long foe.

As a document leaked to the Washington Post yesterday explains, Israel remains highly skeptical of Rouhani’s “charm offensive.” “Iran’s negotiation strategy,” reads the document, “is entirely consistent with Rouhani’s policy of ‘smile and enrich.’ Rouhani has boasted that when he was Iran’s nuclear negotiator, he engaged the West in futile negotiations to buy the time needed to complete the uranium conversion facility at Isfahan, an indispensable part of Iran’s military nuclear program.”

When Oren returned to his second-floor office to resume the interview, he shrank his large frame into an armchair across from me. (During his time in Washington, the 57-year-old former rowing champion has stayed in shape either at the gym or on the Potomac, and speculates that he may have even lost some weight.) “Americans and Israelis have to draw different conclusions about the Middle East,” Oren told me. If America’s iconic image of failure in war is leaving Vietnam with helicopters pushed from the roof of the U.S. Embassy, said Oren, “for Israel, there’s no going home from the Middle East, we can’t even indulge in the illusion. It’s our backyard.”