Israeli reporter challenges McCain to polygraph after spat over interview
By David Bedein  
Senator John McCain and his Mideast policy inclinations are being challenged over an interview that he granted two years ago to Amir Oren, a journalist from the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, on May 1, 2006, in which McCain declared that his administration "would send "the smartest guy I know" to the Middle East: "Brent Scowcroft, or Jim Baker though I know that you in Israel don't like Baker."
McCain reportedly added: "I would expect concessions and sacrifices by both sides."
When Oren asked McCain if that meant a "movement toward the June 4, 1967 armistice lines, with minor modifications," the reporter wrote, "McCain nodded in the affirmative."
To deflect criticism that he has encountered on the 2008 campaign trail, the McCain campaign has been quoting an article by John B. Judis, senior editor at The New Republic, who wrote in an article in that publication on October 25, 2006 that McCain was "miffed at his portrayal in Haaretz," saying that "after reading the Haaretz article and subsequent report in The Jewish Press [in New York]," he felt the need to "clear up several serious misimpressions." McCain said that "in contrast to the impression left by the Haaretz article, I've never held the position that Israel should return to 1967 lines, and that is not my position today."
The senator repeated this week what he said to the New Republic which was that "in the course of that brief, off-the-cuff conversation, I never discussed settlement blocs, a total withdrawal, or anything of the sort."
Reached at his desk in Tel Aviv, Oren said that McCain is "not telling the truth", and that he would gladly invite him to a polygraph to see who is telling the truth. He said the Republican frontrunner indeed recommended Baker and Scowcroft as potential candidates to deal with the Middle East, and that he clearly answered in the affirmative when it came to McCain's expectations of Israel, and how it should relate to further withdrawals.
Oren said that McCain stated clearly that Israel's policy should be one of "defending itself and withdrawing, defending itself and withdrawing." Far from an off the cuff conversation, Mr. Oren told the Bulletin that this was a formal interview that McCain provided him at the the Brussels Forum for American-European Relations, following an interview that McCain provided to the Washington Post. Oren mentioned to the Bulletin that the interview was conducted in the presence of McCain's aide, Richard Fontaine.
Oren was clearly upset to hear McCain was challenging the veracity of the interview from two years ago. In Oren's words, McCain should "show the same courage on the campaign trail that he showed in Vietnam." 
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