“For all my hundreds of speeches and innumerable hours of talk, American Jewish criticism seemed only to surge.” We disappointed him. Oren deals with his disappointment—rather like Obama, he needs to comprehend why his magic did not work—by refusing to imagine that a deeply critical view of Netanyahu could arise from anything but an aberration. The aberration in question, I was startled to learn, is some sort of internalization of the anti-Semitic view of the Jews: the opposition to Netanyahu, like the opposition to the Jews, is a prior prejudice, dogmatic, vile, immune to evidence, not an argument but a hatred. Needless to say, I do not take kindly to this. Analytically speaking, Oren is, for all his smoothness, very coarse. Even in a time of resurgent anti-Semitism, anti-Semitism cannot explain everything. Netanyahu’s reputation is not entirely out of his hands, just as Israel’s fate is not entirely out of its hands. Oren’s suggestion that the prime minister’s unpopularity has nothing to do with his qualities and his words and his deeds reminds me of the old joke about the Jew with a stutter who is turned down for a job as a radio announcer and explains to his wife that the station will not hire Jews.

“No less than their Israeli counterparts,” Oren observes with disillusion and outrage, “American commentators—almost all of them Jewish—were fiercely indisposed toward Netanyahu.” Note that subclause: in Oren’s view, one’s interpretation of reality should be shaped by one’s ethnicity. It wounds Oren that people who share his identity do not share his ideology, and it confounds him. About The New York Times he complains that “these and other unflattering dispatches were written by Jews working for a paper long under Jewish ownership.” Shouldn’t Jews write flattering dispatches? And more generally: “The presence of so many Jews in print and on the screen rarely translates into support for Israel. … The pinch I felt reading articles censorious of Israel sharpened into a stab whenever the names on the bylines were Jewish. Almost all of the world’s countries are nation-states, so what, I wondered, drove these writers to nitpick at theirs?” Clearly Oren does not read the free presses of other nation-states, in which criticism of power is regarded as one of the very purposes of the profession. “Nit-picking” is not a disgrace in a democratic society, it is a glory. This is certainly the case when the nits that are being picked are historically and morally significant. Oren ludicrously conflates the defense of Netanyahu with the defense of the Jewish people.

Again Oren responds to disagreement with psychopathology: Jews who differ with him are infirm Jews. They suffer from an identity disorder. “Pondering these questions, I could not help questioning whether American Jews really felt as secure as they claimed. Perhaps persistent fears of anti-Semitism impelled them to distance themselves from Israel and its often controversial policies. Maybe that is why so many of them supported Obama …” This is patronizing Israeli crap. It also demonstrates a deep ignorance of the condition, internal and external, of American Jewry, and a fundamental failure to grasp the way in which American pluralism represents a revolution in Jewish history. Like many American Jews who move to Israel—and I bless them all (except those who choose to “ascend” not to the Jewish lands of the state but to the Palestinian lands that it occupies)—Oren has a problem with the majority that stays behind. They seem to call into question the legitimacy of his choice, and so he must call into question the legitimacy of their choice. (I know, I just committed psychology.) He translates the old Zionist principle of “the negation of the diaspora” into a genial condescension toward the diaspora. American Jews are truants and Michael Oren is their truant officer. I should note that in his recent campaign for a seat in parliament, Oren permitted himself to describe Netanyahu as “cynical.” This was required by his political self-interest, since he was running on a right-wing list that needed to distinguish itself from the prime minister’s Likud party. But still, how dare he? Was this the vestigial quaking of a former American Jew?