Besides the Israeli, Jewish, and mainstream media interest in Ally, Oren said he has “interviewed extensively in the Christian press” about the memoir. He said the book contains “an important message for Christians, particularly in the section of the book that talks about my struggle with ‘60 Minutes,’ which had a segment that tried to portray Israel as anti-Christian.”
In the 2012 segment Oren refers to, the CBS News program attempted to depict an allegedly shrinking Israeli Christian population, what the late correspondent Bob Simon called “the invisible people, squeezed between a growing Muslim majority and burgeoning Israeli settlements.” But while Christians are widely persecuted in the rest of the Middle East, Israel is actually home to “a growing Christian population, a flourishing Christian population,” noted Oren.
Oren explained that he perceived the “60 Minutes” issue “not as a public relations problem, but as a strategic problem, because American Christian support for Israel is so crucial for us [in Israel].”
Having served as former Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin’s advisor on Christian affairs, Oren said, “I basically know every church in the Holy Land. I have a huge appreciation for Israel’s Christian community, and that Christian community has always felt that they have a good partner in me. I channeled that experience to defend Israel against the charges that somehow we were anti-Christian.”
Asked how he would respond to those in the American Jewish community who are skeptical of staunch evangelical Christian support for Israel, Oren recounted his journey from being raised in what he called the “American liberal Jewish tradition” of Conservative and Reform synagogue communities to ultimately gaining deep respect for evangelical Christian Zionism.
“In my professional capacity, I worked extensively with evangelical Christians and came to appreciate, out of my liberal position, their unconditional love for Israel,” he said. “I never felt that they were trying to proselytize me…. It was just unconditional love.”
Despite some attempts to delegitimize his new book, Oren said his e-mail inbox “is flooded with people saying thank you, and I draw a lot of strength from it.”
As for American Jewry, “with all the differences and rifts in our community, it remains overwhelmingly pro-Israel,” he said. “You can lose sight of the reality of the tremendous wellspring of support that Israel has here.”
(JNS)