Michael Oren was interviewed by a writer for Yeshiva University’s newspaper.
I got only the briefest of glimpses, because this is a travel day, but here is a quote that fairly leaped out at me:
Q: Do you believe that Israel will ever see peace?
Oren: The period of 1960-67 is considered one of the most peaceful periods in Israeli history. Do you know that per-capita more Israelis were killed every year in terrorist attacks during that period than today? We’re in the Middle East, a very unstable and violent area, and, accordingly, we have to have realistic expectations of what peace means in our area. Peace for us really means the absence of active war.
There is a fairly annoying registration process in order to read the full interview. They lie when they say it’s a brief process.
I recently finished Oren’s “Six Days Of War” and his scholarship exposes the myth that Israel’s struggle has primarily (and historically) been against the Palestinian Arabs, who are now just the proxies for all the rest of the Arab nation-states. He’s great.