Netanyahu’s Man In Washington Offers a Preview in New York

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The New York Sun

Reports that Prime Minister Netanyahu will appoint Michael Oren as ambassador to the United States had guests at last night’s dinner in New York of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America listening especially carefully to Mr. Oren’s keynote address.

If it was intended as a preview of how Mr. Oren will conduct himself as the top Israeli diplomat in America at a time when many are predicting tense relations between Mr. Netanyahu and President Obama, than at least this listener was left with the impression that Israel will be well represented.

Mr. Oren, originally from New Jersey, speaks flawless American English, charismatically delivered without any evidence of a written text or notes. While his talk was full of history and strategy, it also was full of disclosure of the sort of humanizing personal details that could help make him an effective spokesman. Listeners learned that Oren’s wife’s sister, Joan Davenny, a Connecticut schoolteacher, was killed by a suicide bomb attack on a bus she was riding while visiting Jerusalem. They learned that Mr. Oren’s son was wounded while conducting anti-terrorist commando operations for the Israel Defense Force, but has since recovered and is now studying Chinese in New York. They learned that Mr. Oren himself, now a professor at Georgetown, served as an Israeli paratrooper before joining the IDF spokesman’s unit to which he is attached as a reservist.

The topic of Mr. Oren’s talk — scheduled long before talk surfaced of his serving as ambassador to Washington — was “Overcoming Existential Threats to Israel.” Oren described terrorist bombings, rocket attacks, Iran’s nuclear ambitions, the nuclear ambitions of 13 other states that neighbor Israel, international delegitimization, the erosion of the Zionist ethos, and the ecological threat to Israel’s water supply as all being existential threats, but he said Israel was making advances in confronting those threats.

[The prospect of Mr. Oren acceding as Israel’s envoy in Washington was welcomed last week by Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic.]

The other news of the night came when Senator Lieberman announced that on Tuesday he will join Senators Kyl, Bayh, Mikulski, Thune, Feingold, and Boxer in introducing legislation giving Mr. Obama the power to impose sanctions on gasoline and refined petroleum imported to Iran. Anyone who thought that Mr. Lieberman’s campaigning for Senator McCain would make the independent Democrat irrelevant in the newly Democratic-dominated Washington will have to reassess that thinking if the legislation passes.

“I’m very proud of the breadth of the coalition that has come together,” Mr. Lieberman said, noting that the senators backing the bill include some of the most liberal and the most conservative members of the Senate. Mr. Lieberman speaks again about Iran this afternoon at the American Enterprise Institute.

Far from being a pariah in his party, Mr. Lieberman won a warm welcome last night from Rep. Anthony Weiner, a Democrat of New York, who blasted Obama for having bowed down to the king of Saudi Arabia, and who catered to the CAMERA crowd with the statement, “I’ve canceled my Times subscription so many times I don’t know what to do anymore.”


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