NJJN on-line New Jersey Feature

The ties that bind
NJ-born author examines the centuries of the American-Middle East relationship

by Judy Wilson
Special to NJ Jewish News

SideBar Excerpt: Brave introspection

There has been no shortage of information about the Middle East since 9/11, but historian and West Orange native Michael Oren had an original idea for a book. The concept had been germinating since his student days at Columbia and Princeton universities in the ’70s when he studied Arab history. He talked about Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present — due to be published in the United States on Jan. 15 — in a phone interview with NJ Jewish News from his home in Jerusalem.

“In college I read about Union officers after the Civil War who were sent to Egypt to help build schools and an army,” Oren said. “Like most people, I thought that America’s interest [in that region] dated only to the country’s comparatively recent interest in oil. When I went to the library to read more, I didn’t find much but I did see that America’s involvement in the Middle East went back much further.

“When I thought about the one book on the Middle East that hadn’t been written and should be written, I knew what I wanted to do.”

Coming four years after his New York Times best-seller, Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East, the new book has a different narrative style and focus. In the earlier book, he said, “the same characters figured in the action from beginning to end. Here, the characters change every few pages. It was a great challenge to keep readers interested in them.”

In a book that’s full of strange and wonderful stories, some of them involving famous people who turned up unexpectedly in the Middle East, Oren recounted his favorite: the tale of Moby-Dick author Herman Melville’s 1857 visit to an agricultural colony in Palestine where he lunched with missionary Johann Grossteinbeck, whose grandson — living in a different country — would one day write The Grapes of Wrath.

Although Oren has lived in Israel since 1970, he spends a great deal of time in the States teaching and speaking — as visiting professor at Yale and Harvard universities last year and testifying before Congress in 2003 on Iraq and the Middle East, for example. (In fact, he is due to arrive mid-January for a two-month, 15-city book tour and will return to Yale for the fall semester.) This familiarity with the people and governments of both countries gives him insight and empathy. He regards America’s decision to invade Iraq as “overwhelmingly good-intentioned. The American people genuinely wanted to import their style of democracy to the Middle East. I understood why Americans felt they had to go into Iraq.” People don’t see the Middle East for what it is, he said; “they behave as if they were looking into a mirror. What we now know is that Iraq is a profoundly different place.”

Recalling his congressional testimony, he said, “I told the legislators I’m not a prophet; I’m a historian, but I know that Arab states are typically held together by a savage central power, and I predicted that Americans did not have it in them to be as savage as they would have to be. Abu Ghraib is a good example — the country tore itself up on these instances of brutality.”

He spent his formative years in both America and the Middle East — he began going to Israel summers when he was 15 but returned to the United States for school and college. His parents, Marilyn and Lester Bornstein, still live in West Orange. His mother is herself an author (Hold Fast the Time, a romantic novel about a suburban Jewish widow who travels to Israel, was published in 2004). The family belonged to B’nai Shalom in West Orange, where Michael attended religious school and became a bar mitzva.

Israel offered different experiences, first on a kibbutz. “I wanted to be a farmer but I was a terrible farmer so I became a cowboy on the Golan Heights,” he said. “I rode horses and herded cattle — an interesting job because there were minefields all over.”

Today he lives in Jerusalem with his wife and three children.

The scope of Power, Faith, and Fantasy and its subject matter reinforce Oren’s status as an expert on the Middle East, one whose opinions are founded on a comprehensive understanding of more than 200 years of Western and Middle Eastern interaction. It gave added weight to his Dec. 26 response in The Wall Street Journal to President Jimmy Carter’s new book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. “Carter,” Oren said, referencing his own book, “is out of step with about 400 years of American-Christian thought on the notion of Jewish sovereignty in the Holy Land.”

His own book, Oren reiterated, “is important to read if you want to understand how we got to where we are today.”

Brave introspection

IT TAKES A smart scholar with a few novelist’s tricks up his sleeve to write history that will please both lay readers and academic audiences. Michael B. Oren’s new book Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present succeeds by fusing dramatic storytelling with meticulous attention to fact. So appealing are the adventurers, patriots, con men, and statesmen — some famous, some little known — who march across these pages, however, that it is easy to forget the originality and significance of Oren’s thesis: He argues that Americans and the Western world, familiar with the history of America’s involvement in the Middle East since the declaration of Israeli independence in 1948 (or, in the case of the British and the French, since World War I), are unaware of how persistent and influential our interaction with the Middle East has been for both parties over the last 240 years.

Unfortunately, he says, our ignorance of the past has had disastrous consequences for policymakers and populations here and abroad as we struggle to understand each other and develop a broader perspective on today’s crises.

Oren delights in throwing fresh light on historical events we thought we knew all about. We are surprised to read, for example, that the design for what became the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor originally depicted an Egyptian peasant woman whose torch would light up the entrance to the Suez Canal. Equally startling is the discovery that attacks on American merchant ships and travelers by the Barbary pirates — brigands sailing out of North African ports like Tunis, Morocco, and “the shores of Tripoli” — sped up the adoption of a “centralized national charter,” the Constitution, so the United States could effectively raise a navy to protect its citizens at sea. And who knew that the famous lines by Francis Scott Key — who did indeed watch “the bombs bursting in air” in the War of 1812 — were penned to replace words he had written earlier to celebrate an American victory over those Barbary pirates — “turbaned heads bowed,” the “brow of the brave,” and the “star-spangled flag of our nation.”

Western interaction with the East was characterized by myth-making on both sides, Oren writes, but the exotic East, the world of One Thousand and One Arabian Nights, of Sinbad and Aladdin, had an irresistible appeal to the American imagination — “the Middle East was the ultimate frontier.” Soon “pioneers by the thousands” headed eastward: adventurers, merchants, and especially missionaries, who “viewed Manifest Destiny not as a blueprint for conquering territory but rather as a warrant for capturing souls and minds.” Though often ill-considered or just wrong-headed, our evangelical efforts, like other Western initiatives, often led to positive achievements: promoting progressive education in Ottoman lands, “enlightening…countrymen back home” about realities on the ground, and creating the first professor of Arabic, at Yale University, and the first modern universities in the Arab world. “For all its demerits,” Oren says, “American interaction with the Middle East is rife with acts of decency and graced with good intentions.”

Oren’s goal is to place this complex history of mutual misunderstandings and mixed results into a context that will help us — and our leaders — “engage in brave introspection, reexamining [our] relationship to the Middle East and, through it, [our] relationship to the world.”

— JUDY WILSON

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