In Defense of Israel by Moshe Arens

In Defense of Israel by Moshe Arens
Moshe Arens

In Defense of Israel | A Memoir of a Political Life by Moshe Arens is his memoir recounting his political battles in Israel.

The revealing memoir of one of Israeli’s most respected statesmen.

Moshe Arens was one of the last surviving members of the founding generation of Israelis. He was a political insider who worked with every Israeli prime minister from Menachem Begin to Benjamin Netanyahu, serving in a variety of important positions, including foreign minister and defense minister.

He also enjoyed an exceptionally close life-long relationship with the United States: he attended high school in New York and colleges in Massachusetts and California, married an American, and served as Israel’s ambassador to the United States.

In this memoir, Arens recounted his early role in the birth of Israel and developing Israel’s aerospace industry, followed by a long and distinguished political career that included service at the very top of Israel’s government for the better part of three decades. Arens advocated relentlessly throughout his political career for his vision of an Israel strong enough to withstand all challenges in its volatile neighborhood.

In Defense of Israel vividly recounts the many battles Arens fought in the political arena, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. The latter included his strong opposition to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s withdrawal from Gaza and parts of the West Bank―an action that led to the takeover of Gaza by Hamas.

Anyone interested in Israel’s place within the contemporary Middle East, including Israel’s relationship with the United States, will find this memoir informative, even eye-opening, and often provocative.

Moshe Arens and his family escaped the Holocaust and emigrated to the United States in 1939. He was a member of Israel’s independence movement and moved to Israel in 1948 during Israel’s War of Independence. An aeronautical engineer educated at MIT and the California Institute of Technology, he headed Israel’s aerospace program before he began his political life in 1974 when he was elected to Knesset. In 1982, he was named Israeli ambassador to the United States. He then became defense minister—a position he would later hold two more times—and also served as foreign minister. He was the author of Flags over the Warsaw Ghetto: The Untold Story of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and Broken Covenant: American Foreign Policy and the Crisis between the U.S. and Israel.

Arens died on 7 January 2019 at the age of 93.