Michael Oren

Michael B. Oren (Hebrew: מיכאל אורן; born Michael Scott Bornstein on May 20, 1955) is an American-born Israeli historian, author, politician, former ambassador to the United States (2009–2013), and current member of the Knesset for the Kulanu party and the Deputy Minister for Diplomacy in the Prime Minister's Office.

Oren has written books, articles, and essays on Middle Eastern history, and is the author of the New York Times best-selling Power, Faith and Fantasy and Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East, which won the Los Angeles Times History Book of the Year Award and the National Jewish Book Award. Oren has been a visiting professor at Harvard, Yale, and Georgetown universities in the United States and at Tel Aviv and Hebrew universities in Israel. He was a Distinguished Fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem and a contributing editor to The New Republic. The Forward named Oren one of the five most influential American Jews and The Jerusalem Post listed him as one of the world’s ten most influential Jews.

Oren retired as ambassador to the United States in 2013, replaced by Ron Dermer. In the 2015 Israeli election, Oren was elected to the Knesset for the centrist Kulanu party. His newest book Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide was published by Random House on June 23, 2015.

Oren has written many articles commenting on current political issues. Before assuming his diplomatic post, he published frequently in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and The New Republic, where he was a contributing editor. He appeared on Charlie Rose, The Daily Show,[54] the Today Show, and he John Batchelor Show. As ambassador, he has published nearly forty op-eds and has given dozens of television interviews, including Bill Maher, Colbert Report, The View, and The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer.

His two full-length articles "Israel: The Ultimate Ally"and "Israel's Resilient Democracy", were published in Foreign Policy magazine.

In July 2014 Oren argued against a ceasefire and for the continuation of the 2014 Israel–Gaza conflict, calling on the international community to leave Israel alone to defang and deprive Hamas of its heavy arms and make it pay a "prohibitive cost."

On June 15, 2015 Oren gave a speech at the Leonardo Hotel in Jerusalem, in which he said that the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement poses a "strategic threat" to Israel, which needs to fight it "like a war, which it is". He also warned that the U.S. is gambling with Israel's future over Iran, saying that the U.S. "can afford to make a mistake" with them, while "Israel has zero room for error", adding: "The United States has the most powerful army in all of history, they're thousands of miles away from Iran, and they don't feel any direct threat. Israel is in Iran's backyard, and faces a clear and direct threat from Iranian proxies such as Hezbollah and Hamas. The IDF is a strong military force, but does not have the capacity and magnitude the US Army has to deter aggression."

Also during June 2015, an op-ed piece by Oren published in the Wall Street Journal claimed that Barack Obama had deliberately sabotaged US-Israeli relations, resulting in Kulanu leader Moshe Kahlon distancing himself and the party from Oren's stated views.[59] Shortly afterwards another article by Oren was published by Foreign Policy, which argued that Obama's outreach to the Muslim world as highlighted by his Cairo speech was partly rooted in "abandonment" by his father and stepfather. Oren was criticised by Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League, who said that Oren's theorising "veers into the realm of conspiracy theories... with an element of amateur psychoanalysis", and characterised the Foreign Policy article as "borderline stereotyping".

In 2015, Oren published Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide (June 2015), which aimed to describe the recent state of Israel–US relations. The book