Oren GS '86 appointed Israeli ambassador to U.S.

Oren will replace current Ambassador Sallai Meridor in the coming weeks.

Born in New York, Oren grew up in New Jersey and attended Columbia for his undergraduate years. In 1979, he immigrated to Israel but returned to the United States to study for his Ph.D. in Near Eastern studies at Princeton.

In the past decade, he has served as a visiting professor at Harvard, Yale and Georgetown and is currently a senior fellow at the Shalem Center, an academic research institute in Jerusalem where he focuses on the diplomatic and military history of the Middle East.

Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman — who rejected two earlier candidates for the post of ambassador to the United States — has accepted Netanyahu’s appointment of Oren, Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Daniel Ayalon told Bloomberg on Sunday.

The choice is a surprising one, as Oren’s political views are not entirely in line with those of Netanyahu and Lieberman. Most notably, Oren has declared his support for Israel withdrawing from the West Bank, as it did from the Gaza Strip in 2005, while Netanyahu and Lieberman have stated their opposition to the Gaza withdrawal.

“It shows you that we select our officials not based on ideology necessarily, but also on objective qualifications,” Ayalon told Bloomberg of Oren’s selection. “We’re not looking into his soul and mind.”

Oren has written several books on the history of Arab-Israeli conflict, including “Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East” and his 2007 work, “Power, Faith and Fantasy: The United States in the Middle East, 1776 to 2006.” He also serves as the Middle East expert for CBS.

U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.), the ranking Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, praised the appointment, according to an article in The Jerusalem Post. Ros-Lehtinen said that Oren would be “an outstanding ambassador for Israel, our strongest democratic partner in this troubled region.”