Michael Oren

More than half the electorate wants Netanyahu gone.

Michael Oren, who was ambassador to the U.S., said the thing that makes this speech legible.

He's not really speaking to the U.N. He's speaking to the Israeli public.

Oren expects the address to look like a campaign speech, attacking New York's mayor, Zoran Mamdani, who called Netanyahu the architect of a horrific genocide, and attacking Iran to peel wavering voters away from Eisenhower.

After three years that have tested Israel's security, its politics, and its social cohesion, this election will speak to where the country goes from here.

My guest today is Dr. Michael Oren, historian, former Israeli ambassador to Washington, and a former member of Knesset.

We have a lot to cover, so let's get into it.

Dr. Michael Oren, Shana Tova, and welcome back to Boundless

Insights.

May this be a better year for all of us on every front.

Yeah, that's right.

Yeah, to quote the American foreign Israeli ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, that's right.

And look, yeah, until the next major bin Ladenite terrorist attack in the United States, in which case we pretend all this never happened and start over again, you know.

Oh, well.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says that documentary is full of lies, but causes major damage to Israel's image, and he proposes canceling the Israeli citizenship of the two filmmakers.

We asked Michael Oren, a former Israeli ambassador to the U.S., himself a best-selling author of history books, for his reaction.

He feels certain the film's allegations are false and unfair.

Oren is just now finishing up his own book on the October 7th atrocities by Hamas and the war in Gaza that then raged for two years, resulting in a kind of stalemate right now.

Still, there are occasional airstrikes by Israel to kill Hamas men and sometimes killing their families and other children.

It's still a controversy.

Here is Michael Oren telling the Mossad Files podcast his conclusions.

As a

[upbeat music] Welcome back, America.

I'm playing Hootie & the Blowfish because I'm gonna talk about the Houthis with Dr. Michael Oren, former ambassador of Israel to the United States.

Dr. Oren is the founder of the Isra- Israel Advocacy Group, which you can find online, israeladvocacygroup.com. Dr. Oren, I don't know if you have an opinion on Hootie & the Blowfish.

Do you have an opinion on the Houthis, though?

You know, the United States has got plenty of oil and gas.

Eventually, we'll sequester it for ourselves, but the rest of the world has gotta start paying attention to this.

Dr. Michael Oren already is, not surprisingly.

Go look up israeladvocacygroup.com. That's his.

I think that it's been in the atmosphere so long, especially on, um, the extreme left, that it is just part of the discourse, especially, you know, when the protesters are part of socialist or communist groups.

But to make things more personal, I actually was a student at Columbia after October 7th, and I started paying attention to this topic of information warfare because I was reading Six Days of War by, um, Michael Oren, and he included a few, uh, Soviet slogans, uh, anti-Zionist slogans, um, about, that were, that were popular during the Six-Day War.

And I was walking through campus, and I heard the exact same phrases being sung verbatim.

Like not even one word was changed.

These were peace offers that had the Palestinian side accepted them, we now could have a 20-odd year anniversary of peace between the two sides.

I remember as a college student in a class by the Israeli historian Michael Oren, later a diplomat, mentioning that in the 2000 negotiations when they broke down that Yasser Arafat said to Bill Clinton, you are a great statesman.

And Bill Clinton said, no, I am a failure and you made me one.

How much of an impression did that make on me? I suppose enough of an impression that about 20 years later, I still remember and I'm still telling this story.