Ambassador Oren: “Obama is a True Friend” to Israel

David Streeter — July 11, 2013 – 10:31 am | Barack Obama | Israel Comments (0) Add a comment

Israel’s outgoing Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren reflected on the state of U.S.-Israel relations during an interview with Haaretz’s Ari Shavit. The full interview is available here, and excerpts are below.

Ambassador Oren said regarding President Barack Obama (emphasis added):

”What has happened in the security realm in the past four years and Obama’s visit to Jerusalem earlier this year prove it. Obama is a true friend and he is a most serious person and one shouldn’t underestimate him and his determination.”

Ambassador Oren said on the relationship between President Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (emphasis added):

“President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu are very intelligent, very strong and pragmatic people. Both wanted to achieve the same aims a solution of two states for two peoples, and preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. So their disagreements were not strategic but tactical. They met 11 times. Obama says that he met with Bibi more than he met with any other world leader. They’ve spent hours talking on the phone. I can attest that the conversations were open, candid and friendly. There were laughs, too. Obama is a very funny guy with a sharp, quick and witty sense of humor. I’m not trying to whitewash anything here. There were disagreements and there were some difficult moments. But we did not experience any genuine crises in the past four and a half years.

“In the past there were such crises: during the siege of Beirut, at the time of the Pollard affair, over the sale of the AWACS planes to Saudi Arabia and over the Israeli arms sale to China. The crisis that arose from the arms sale to China was a very deep and serious crisis that is still having an unsettling effect on our ties with Washington. But that crisis was hidden from view. In contrast, during the Obama-Netanyahu era there was a whole series of supposed crises, none of which was a genuine crisis. The public atmosphere was one of tension but behind the scenes we worked together as allies on the Iron Dome, on the Marmara affair, on the Palestinians’ unilateral moves in the United Nations and on Iran as well. The intelligence cooperation between our two countries is unlike the cooperation the U.S. has with any other country.”

Click here to read the full interview. 

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