Israel Matzav

'A tectonic shift, not a tectonic rift'

For what it's worth, Israel's ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, continues to try to backtrack from comments attributed to him in the Hebrew press on Sunday and in the English press on Monday, which characterized Israel's relations with the United States as being in a 'tectonic rift.' Here are remarks he made to the JPost editorial staff. Here is a direct transcript of what Oren told the Post:

“Let’s take it back, and talk about Obama and where we are in our relationship with the US,” he said, framing the discussion.

“It is a different administration than an administration we have known before. It is an administration with a president who comes in promising change, and he is not a status quo president in any way. He is very serious about the change. He is serious about the change domestically; he is serious about the change in foreign policy. Domestically it is a greater role for government, it is more services. The health care debate was sort of the iconic debate, and there will be more debates like it.

“One of my favorite comments from the health care debate was by [Speaker of the House] Nancy Pelosi, who said that for the first time in American history, family care and child care have been put on the same level of priority as foreign policy and defense. For me that basically says it all. That is a sea shift.

“There has been much talk of various crises in our relationship with the Obama administration, and I am always going out there saying there is no crisis, there is no crisis. What often looks like a crisis is in fact a product of the shift. Like, you know you have tectonic shifts and they can create a tsunami. But the tsunami is symptomatic of the shift, and not vice versa. So the shift in the foreign policy is a shift – you all know the outreach to the Muslim world, the Cairo speech, the Turkey visit. It is a greater emphasis on cooperation with international organizations, a greater emphasis on outreach negotiation, engagement.”

And then, to illustrate the shift in foreign policy, Oren suggested reading a paper written two years ago by two State Department officials, James Steinberg and Anne-Marie Slaughter.

“Where do we fit in all of this? We are a small pixel in the general picture of change,” Oren went on at his meeting with the Post. “We tend to see everything through our prism, but we are one dot, although a relatively central dot, as the administration itself will say.”

Nothing in those words about a tectonic or seismic shift creating a geological chasm between the two countries, rather about how the Obama administration was shifting its own emphasis, and how that was impacting on everything else around it.

The Post then goes on to speculate about how Oren might have been 'misinterpreted.' Read the whole thing and judge for yourselves. While "shift" and "rift" sound very similar in English, they sound very different in Hebrew (ma'avar and shessa), and since I assume Oren's briefing to the foreign ministry staff was in Hebrew, I find it hard to believe that someone could have mixed the two up.

And if the foreign ministry is as petty as it's being described (which would not be much of a surprise unfortunately - I've said many times that the Leftists from previous foreign ministers ought to be purged) then that's awfully sad.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 2:28 AM