972mag.com/michael-oren-diplomatic-psychobabble/108136/

Michael Oren blames President Barack Obama for ruining relations with Israel, after the latter broke two sacrosanct rules that Oren himself came up with: that the United States and Israel should not have public disagreements, and that no steps should be taken to publicly embarrass the other side.

Oren is aware, of course, of the fact that successive Israeli governments (read: Netanyahu’s governments) have openly opposed U.S. policy (for instance vis-a-vis the Iranian nuclear deal), that every so often those governments declare new rounds of settlement building in the West Bank at the least opportune moments (say, for instance, when Vice President Biden visited Israel), and that they initiate rounds of violence against the Palestinians while openly and proudly declaring their oppositional stance. Oren even knows that Israel’s prime minister gave a speech to Congress without coordinating with the Obama administration, and did so in an attempt to drive a stake through the president’s Iran policy.

Oren has some very complex explanations for these all these annoying facts: the settlement announcements were never made by the prime minister himself, the attacks on Washington’s Iran policy are of the utmost importance to Israel — and the speech to Congress? Every Israeli leader would have done the same, and so on and so on. What is it so difficult for Oren to understand? The fact that Obama does not automatically support Israel, primarily that he does not automatically accept its settlement policies? Is it that President Obama dares to meekly protest the Israeli government’s unilateral steps.

That chutzpa — that the United States has policies which it doesn’t submit for Israeli approval — astounds Oren to a degree that he feels the need to explain it. Because neither the historical nor the political tools at Oren’s disposal can explain such madness (how is it possible that Washington doesn’t accept our annexationist policies?), he turns to psychology. Obama’s mother was married to two Muslim men. Oren reveals to us that Obama saw himself as a bridge between his mother and her husbands. Oren also dares to speculate “how that child’s abandonment by those men could lead him, many years later, to seek acceptance by their co-religionists.”