When someone points a gun at you and pulls the trigger, it changes your life. For Michael Oren, counter-intuitively, it’s made him better at his job.
The Israeli historian doesn’t have to resort to literary flights of fancy when describing a firefight or bailing out of an airplane or storming a hostile village — because he’s done it. The 51-year-old New Jersey-born Jerusalemite is a former paratrooper, special forces soldier and, in Israel’s most recent war, was called up to active duty in the army spokesman’s office — “It’s what you do in your dotage in Israel.”
The author of “Six Days of War” will be in town for a marathon of appearances next month, with events at U.C. Berkeley and Stanford on Dec. 1 and speeches at four local membership events for AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby, on Dec. 3 and 4.
Oren is in an unusual position for a historian — it’s not as if Shelby Foote ever had an opportunity to wear a blue or gray uniform or David McCullough sat alongside Harry S. Truman when he deliberated America’s nuclear options. But Oren did participate in the historical events he writes of; he is now a veteran of both Lebanon wars.
And his No. 1 critique of historians who never strapped on a helmet: A battlefield isn’t a chessboard. It’s a mess.
“There’s a tendency for writers to want to impart a sense of rational unfolding of sequences on a battlefield, to put a rationale on it. But, in fact, much of battle is confusion and fog,” he said in a telephone interview from his Jerusalem home.
“Much of this last battle was in fog.”
The intelligence failures and equipment breakdowns critics highlight as the root cause of Israel’s “failure” in the summer war is hardly a recent phenomenon. Most of Israel’s most storied victories were far sloppier than the Entebbe raid, he noted.
“In 1967, more of the Israeli paratroopers who fought in Jerusalem were killed by friendly fire than by Jordanian fire. And the ’67 war was as much of an intelligence failure as the ’73 war; Israeli intelligence completely failed to predict it,” explained Oren, whose next book, “Power, Faith and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present” will be released in January.
“There are always equipment failures and breakdowns. The engineers who went to clear Jordanian mines on the way to Jerusalem, someone forgot to bring the equipment and many of them lost their arms and legs. It happens in every war.”
Oren is of several minds when it comes to assessing Israel’s most recent war. By military standards, he considers it a success — Hezbollah lost an estimated 25 percent of its elite fighting force; by most standards a loss of 1 percent of one’s army constitutes a calamity (Israel’s 119 troops killed is its lowest total in any war, and represents about one-tenth of one percent of its fighting force).
On the other hand, life isn’t fair, and “winning” doesn’t mean the same thing to Israel and its Arab neighbors.
“The bar for Israeli victory is high and the bar for Arab victory is low. They just have to survive. We did not end the missile threat. By the end of the war they were still pumping 150 to 200 missiles a day into northern Israel. We did not use our army effectively to capture South Lebanon and eliminate the short-range missile threat.”
And, most tangibly, “we didn’t get our boys back.”
Much as sports fans argue about whether, say, the 1985 Chicago Bears could beat the 1994 San Francisco 49ers, Oren feels the 1973 Israeli army would have been far more successful against Hezbollah than the 2006 version.
When the second intifada — which he refers to as “The Terror War” — started in 2000, Oren describes the Israeli military as “still training for the first day of the 1973 war — they were training to take on 2,000 Syrian battle tanks, not some suicide bomber or his commander in Hebron at 2 a.m.”
Over the past six years, Israel transformed its army into “a large urban SWAT team,” finding little reason to call up reservists for military maneuvers. So when rusty reservists found themselves in conditions far more similar to Israel’s wars of the past than anti-terror operations of the present, problems were inevitable.
Oren, incidentally, believes that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert deserves all the criticism he’s received and more — “I was tearing out my hair at his decision-making” — but thinks Ariel Sharon may not have fared any better.
“Sharon was responsible for putting us in Beirut in ’82 for ultimately a disastrous 18-year occupation. So Arik Sharon ordering the army back to southern Lebanon would be so rife with historical weight and pain it might have inhibited his ability to make effective decisions.”
Michael Oren in the Bay Area
Historian Michael Oren will speak at both U.C. Berkeley and Stanford on Friday, Dec. 1.
He will appear at noon at Stanford’s Robert Moore House. Admission is free. For more information call Hillel at Stanford at (650) 723-1602 or email [email protected].
He will speak following Shabbat dinner at Berkeley Hillel, 2736 Bancroft Ave. Dinner is at 8 p.m. and his speech is scheduled for around 9 p.m.; both events are free but donations are appreciated. Information: (510) 845-7793.
Oren will speak at all four Northern California AIPAC membership events. At 11 a.m. Sunday, Dec. 3 he will appear in Sacramento. At 6 p.m. he will speak in Santa Clara. At 11:30 a.m. on Monday, Dec. 4 he will speak in San Francisco, and at 6 p.m. he will be in Oakland. For more information, visit www.aipac.org or contact Zack Bodner at (415) 989-4140.