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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Oren and the Absurd “No Daylight” Standard

Oren distorts the historical record, but distorting the record is the point of the exercise.
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Steven Cook rejects Michael Oren’s idea that there is a “no daylight” rule for the U.S.-Israel relationship:

Contrary to Oren, there never was a “no daylight” principle and demanding that there was one distorts the historical record and sets up the U.S.-Israel relationship for future trouble….By setting this impossible-to-meet standard, Oren’s book thus seems destined to do precisely the opposite of what he wants for U.S.-Israel ties.

Cook is right that Oren is engaged in myth-making, but my guess is that Oren’s goal in writing the book is to make public disagreement between the U.S. and Israel seem inappropriate and a “violation” of the relationship itself. Perhaps the hope is to create the illusion that it is something that has only happened under Obama, which allows hawkish Israelis and their supporters in the U.S. to dismiss the tensions in the relationship as being mostly Obama’s doing. That way, they can pretend that things can get back to “normal” under the next administration and can treat the Obama years as an “aberration.”

In other words, Oren’s argument distorts the historical record, but distorting the record is the point of the exercise because the record is not so flattering to past and present Israeli governments. If that’s right, the purpose of all this is not to improve the U.S.-Israel relationship, but rather aims to make the relationship even more dysfunctional and one-sided than it already is. As Cook says, the notion that there will ever be a “no daylight” arrangement between the U.S. and Israel is erroneous, but by insisting on this impossible standard Oren probably hopes to make it easier to portray any future disagreement as a deviation from the “principles” of the relationship. The point of all this is to make it more difficult for the U.S. to differ with Israel on major issues.

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