The undiplomatic envoy

WHEN PRIME Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks to the US Congress on March 3, the whole world will be watching – not just what he says, but who is in the chamber and who isn't; who stands up to give him a standing ovation, and who doesn't. And after he sits down, more questions will be asked – especially about the future of Netanyahu's favored protégé, ambassador to Washington, Ron Dermer. Whether the initiative for Netanyahu's controversial invitation came from Dermer personally, or at the initiative of Speaker of the House John Boehner, is already being disputed with each side blaming the other. “Israeli Ambassador Ron Dermer has in recent weeks emerged as a deeply controversial figure in Washington. Engineering an invitation – behind the back of the White House – for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to address Congress has earned him a confrontational reputation,” analyst Elias Groll wrote in the blog of the influential journal Foreign Policy. Dermer is clearly undeterred by his new notoriety and celebrity. Instead, he is sticking to his guns, as he made clear when addressing an Israel Bonds meeting in Boca Raton, Florida, on January 25. “There may be some people who believe that the prime minister of Israel should have cleared an invitation to speak before the most powerful parliament in the world on an issue that concerns the survival of Israel,” he said in a speech he posted on his Facebook page. “That is why the prime minister feels the deepest moral obligation to appear before the Congress to speak about an existential issue facing the one and only Jewish state. That is not just the right of the prime minister of Israel. It is his most sacred duty to do whatever he can to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons that can be aimed at Israel.” Sarah Stern, head of the Washington-based pro-Israel Endowment for Middle East Truth (EMET) is a strong defender of Dermer. She contends he has been a forceful, energetic ambassador and an outstanding success at presenting Israel's concerns on a nuclear-armed Iran and other issues. “I think he's been made to be the scapegoat. He's really very good and very effective at his job,” she tells The Jerusalem Report. On the other hand, Charles W. Freeman, a veteran US diplomat and former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, contends that by meddling directly in domestic US politics, Dermer has crossed a critical line. “Dermer has accomplished the seemingly impossible. He has made a partisan issue of the US relationship with Israel and while simultaneously forcing American politicians to choose between their loyalty to constitutional norms and their affection for the Jewish state and its wealthy supporters in the US,” Freeman asserts to The Report. Dermer not only remains proudly partisan and unapologetic: He is proud of engaging in behavior that does not accord with the traditional gravitas and dignity of ambassadorial behavior. “Breaking Protocol, Choosing Sides: Go Patriots” he tweeted before the Super Bowl on February 1. (His American football acumen, at least, proved prescient. The Patriots defeated the defending champion Seattle Seahawks.) And, on February 11, Dermer posted on his Facebook page a taunting video insult at Iran. Ironically, this kind of behavior is routine for Iran and other Israel-hating states. But Israeli diplomatic representatives have always refrained from it. Writing on the Foreign Policy blog, Groll commented, “Israeli officials argue that the West is at risk of being duped by Iran, and have publicly pressured the White House to abandon the negotiations or hold out for much tougher terms. That, in turn, has helped to drive Netanyahu's relationship with President Barack Obama to a new low. Videos like Dermer's – coming in the midst of a major diplomatic push to strike a deal before a June deadline – probably won't help matters,” Groll concluded. Currently, Dermer's future appears clearcut. If his patron, Netanyahu, loses the March 17 election, Dermer will be toast. He will be instantly replaced by a very different kind of ambassador chosen by Zionist Union leader Isaac Herzog. On the other hand, if the prime minister is victorious again, he will almost certainly ask Dermer to stay. Dermer is very much a cherished close friend and adviser to a notoriously private leader, who has almost no personal intimates in his innermost circle. And his behavior as ambassador, as political pundit Peter Beinart, a hostile critic of the prime minister, wrote in Haaretz on February 6, reflects Netanyahu's own behavior toward US presidents and senior officials over the past 25 years. Also, Dermer had already been involved in more than one row and faux pas with the White House and senior Obama administration officials even before his appointment in 2013. The most notable of these was his central role in engineering Mitt Romney's visit to Israel in 2012 and Netanyahu's open endorsement of Romney for president that year. No previous prime minister had ever taken such a partisan public position on any US presidential race. And, in anticipating a Romney victory, Dermer was spectacularly wrong. So far, Israel and Netanyahu have had to pay no price at all for Dermer's indiscretions and partisan and controversial decisions that were either based on or enthusiastically supported by his advice. However, Obama is proving to be far from the helpless, politically castrated nonentity in his last two years in office that his many enemies had anticipated following his 2014 midterm defeat. He is pushing for congressional authorization to wage war as needed against the new Mideast extremist threat, Islamic State, and this is not the action of a powerless, weak or dispirited man. Fundamental to Dermer's (and Netanyahu's) dilemma is that neither appears to recognize the line he has crossed and the longterm damage to Israel's bipartisan standing in Congress from which it has benefited for so long. Dermer went out of his way to acknowledge and praise Obama's strong support for Israel in his Israel Bonds speech in Boca Raton. “I deeply appreciate the strong support we have received from President Obama in many areas, in enhanced security, logistics, heightened intelligence sharing – military assistance and Iron Dome funding, and opposition to anti-Israel initiatives in the UN,” he said. However, Dermer's undoubted success in speaking to strongly pro-Israel Jewish, Republican and Christian audiences is unraveling in other key areas of support Israel has long taken for granted. This is certainly true among Democrats in general, and in the powerful Congressional Black Caucus (CBC), in particular. “The audience for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's speech to Congress on March 3 is shaping up to be largely Republican – and almost completely white,” the respected and influential Washington political newspaper Politico reported on February 10. “Many members of the Congressional Black Caucus say they're planning to skip the speech, calling it a slight to President Barack Obama that they can't and won't support,” the newspaper said. It further noted, “Israeli officials have been taken by surprise by the CBC backlash, kicked off by Rep. John Lewis, a civil rights leader who said… he won't attend, quickly followed by Rep. Jim Clyburn and others.” The 46-member-strong CBC has always been one of AIPAC's greatest allies on Capitol Hill. But its members are now furious at what they see as Netanyahu's personal insult to the first black president. Many of them, perhaps most of them, are going to boycott his appearance in Congress. Blame for this is openly being directed at Dermer, too. In fact, Rep. Hank Johnson has publicly blasted Dermer in the strongest terms imaginable using words no CBC member has ever before applied to any Israeli ambassador. “Noting that Dermer once worked for Republican pollster Frank Luntz, Johnson called the ambassador a 'longtime, right-wing political hack,' and said he is uninterested in meeting with either him or Netanyahu,” Politico reported. Judged against this level of outspoken outrage, Dermer's contention that he has strong relations with Democrats appears flimsy indeed. “Democrats across Capitol Hill have been increasingly vocal about their opposition to the speech, criticizing the prime minister and House Speaker John Boehner for making them choose between their support for their president and support for Israel. Announcements that Democrats plan to sit out the speech have trickled in for days,” the Politico report said. Also, Netanyahu's address threatens to backfire in its most basic purpose. Many Senate Democrats, including Jewish ones, have expressed fury at the way the president was bypassed to engineer Netanyahu's joint address. The support of at least 13 Democrats are vital to override any proposal by Obama to lift sanctions against Iran even if every one of the 54 Republicans in the chamber unites against it, because the Senate requires a two-thirds majority, 67 votes out of 100, for approval. If Netanyahu's speech ensures congressional approval for a deal with Iran rather than derailing it, then Dermer will have failed in his most important function – advising his prime minister on how best to seek to increase or maintain support of Israel from the US government and its legislature on an issue vital to the Jewish state's existence. “…Until Boehner's surprise announcement – which, incidentally, was extended (apparently falsely) 'on behalf of the bipartisan leadership of the US House of Representatives and the US Senate,' Sens. Mark Kirk (R) and Robert Menendez (D) had a shot at peeling off enough Democrats to get a sanctions bill through the Senate even before March,” veteran Washington correspondent Jim Lobe wrote on his Lobelog blog on February 6. Dermer's critics point out that he has never been a diplomat at all and has no background in the foreign service whatsoever. His defenders counter by pointing out that historically the most effective Israeli ambassadors have seldom been foreign-service professionals but usually exercised clout because they were close to the prime minister of the day. However, such successful ambassadors were usually either figures of distinction in Israel, such as Yitzhak Rabin (1969-73) and Zalman Shoval (1990-93, 1998-2000). When Golda Meir appointed her own favorite, Simha Dinitz (1973-79), as Rabin's successor, he proved catastrophically out of his depth during the Yom Kippur War and the peace negotiations that followed. (Dinitz owed his longevity in Washington to the fact that Rabin and Menachem Begin routinely ignored him in their dealings with successive presidents and secretaries of state.) The appointment of Dermer reflected Netanyahu's well-established determination to make bold and unconventional selections for key posts. His previous “outsider” choice as ambassador, Dermer's predecessor Michael Oren (2009-13) had no conventional diplomatic experience either. He was a respected historian, but he proved to be a highly effective and universally respected envoy. However, Dermer is certainly not in the dignified and bipartisan Oren tradition. He rose as a personal favorite of the prime minister by being a Republican, hard-right partisan in the US before coming to Israel. He has been consistently and unself-consciously abusive toward all liberal political opponents – whether Democrats in the US or supporters of the peace process in Israel – throughout his entire political career. On the other hand, the enormous danger of the potential Iranian nuclear threat to Israel – one repeatedly and openly proclaimed by a long succession of Iran's leaders – leads Dermer's defenders to argue that his fearless and forthright approach in describing the problem is vital to mobilizing the support necessary to defeat it. “There is an existential threat to Israel,” EMET's Stern tells The Report. “The prime minister has a very clear sense of that and the ambassador is serving as a loyal member of the government in trying to make sure its case is heard most effectively at the highest levels in Washington.” The move to outflank Obama by going directly to Boehner was necessary, Stern says, because “Israel has been sidelined. They weren't asked to participate in the [Iranian nuclear] talks.” However, Freeman, a respected and influential veteran member of the Washington foreign-policy establishment, contends that the Netanyahu-Dermer solution to this problem only made it worse. “Mr. Dermer's tenure as ambassador rivals that of Citizen Genêt in terms of the disservice it is doing to his country's cause. He has become a symbol of all that is questionable in US-Israel relations,” he contends. (Edmond-Charles Genêt, while French ambassador to the US, endangered American neutrality during the war between Revolutionary France and Britain in 1793-94 by arming American ships as privateers to prey on British trade.) Obama still has nearly two years to go before stepping down. During that time, Israel, increasingly isolated elsewhere in the world, will become ever more dependent on the president's willingness to continue wielding the US veto in the UN Security Council and expediting the huge flow of military aid as willingly and unhesitatingly as he has done until now. Continuing to humiliate, sideline or undermine the most powerful man in the world in such circumstances hardly seems like a good idea.

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