Eldar on US Congressional Anger; Oren's New Republic Piece

Okay, this is quoting a story that is clearly classic Washington-style spin with lots of anonymous sources, but Haaretz' Akiva Eldar is a fine reporter (and no great friend of the Netanyhahu Government), and for what it's worth, it's at least worth noting: read the whole thing, but here's the gist:

The U.S. administration is furious over Israeli incitement against President Barack Obama, Democratic congressmen close to Obama told an Israeli source who returned from a visit to Washington this week.

The congressmen even hinted that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been personally involved.

The source, who met in Washington with administration officials and members of Congress, told Haaretz he was stunned by the level of anger there over attempts to portray Obama to the American public as an enemy of Israel because of his efforts to restart peace talks and freeze settlement construction. "There are people here who are playing with fire by damaging our relationship with the U.S.," the source said.

I know, it's a classic Washington no-named-source background leak/spin, but it also suggests that some folks "close to" the Administration are sending a message via "an Israeli source" (governmental? political? journalistic? academic?) that they don't appreciate some of what's been coming out of the Israeli governement lately. One exhibit for the prosecution: this piece by Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren in The New Republic that manages to link the Goldstone Report with Ahmadinejad and Holocaust denial.

As blogger Andrew Sullivan at The Atlantic noted on the Oren piece:

I thought ambassadors were supposed to smoothe over rifts, not inflame them. And I thought they were supposed to speak to the broadest number of citizens in the countries to which they have been appointed, not provide inflammatory rants to the already-persuaded. But this Michael Oren piece in TNR abandons any pretense of diplomatic balance.

The premise of Oren's piece is that Israel faces a new Nazism represented by Ahmadinejad and Holocaust deniers but, to an even greater extent, by the South African liberal, Richard Goldstone, and the United Nations. Oren seems to be arguing that Gaza was a war of survival for the Jewish state and that Israel had no choice but to launch a war that killed, by one conservative Israeli count, 320 children, destroyed 4,000 homes, and up to 80 government buildings. Even if one is sympathetic to the horrific barrage of Hamas rockets that Israeli citizens endured (and what decent human being wouldn't be?) - every single rocket being a war crime - it helps no one to use language this extreme or to distort history in this manner.

I'm not sure that this is the specific piece Akiva Eldar's story is aimed at: but it's a good example of the tone of some pretty official sounding Israeli criticism (e.g. by the Ambassador to Washington) that if not aimed directly at the US Administration, is at least rather inflammatory. I know Oren was an IDF spokesman during the Gaza war, doing reserve duty, but he isn't that anymore, he's the Ambassador to the United States. I've admired his historical works (the one on the US and the Middle East and the one on the 1967 war), but this is flat out propaganda. It reminds one of the old Victorian quip (Charles M. Doughty quotes it in the opening of Travels in Arabia Deserta) that "a diplomat is sent to lie abroad for his country," but come on.