The administration seems to be upping the pressure, tightening the net around the political operative Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu put in place as his (and yes, I use that adjective advisedly) Ambassador to the US. The Times today reports that the White House has upped the ante, explicitly attacking Dermer’s behavior in a statement to the Times. Oddly, unless I’m misreading the article, the Times doesn’t actually quote what the unnamed but authorized “senior American official” said – which is odd and slightly undercuts the impact. But they provide the gist: “an unusually sharp criticism by a senior administration official who said that the Israeli ambassador, Ron Dermer, who helped orchestrate the invitation, had repeatedly placed Mr. Netanyahu’s political fortunes above the relationship between Israel and the United States.”
The straightforward subtext of this remark is that Dermer is damaging the bilateral relationship and should not be ambassador. So why up the ante now? I think TPM Reader MM reads the situation correctly: “it seems we’ve seen a step-up in response in the past day, presumably as the administration has been able to feel out opinion leaders and key stakeholders here and abroad.”
As I said a few days ago, I simply did not think the Obama White House had it in them to refuse any contact with Netanyahu during his visit. I was wrong. This may have something to do with President Obama having a highly limited number of fucks remaining to give this late in his presidency and resorting to a PAYGO approach rather than resorting to deficit spending on fucks he has to give.
While the Boehner-Bibi Bund has defenders on the merits on their push for blowing up the Iran negotiations, virtually no one outside the category of the most abject hackdom has been willing to defend Dermer. It is telling that Frank Luntz, the less than judicious or respected political operative who employed Dermer as a political operative when the two were engineering the Contract for America for Newt Gingrich in the early 90s, is the main guy the Times could find to speak up for him.
Israel HaYom is the mass circulation free daily paper that Sheldon Adelson (yes, same guy!) set up more or less openly to support Netanyahu back in 2007. Though its general line has remained supportive of Netanyahu through the latest controversy, even its lead columnist has called the Boehner-Bibi Bund and speech “grievous” and “cynical” …. “a trip … not being taken for the sake of the interests of the state of Israel, rather for the needs of Benjamin Netanyahu and the Likud, for the Likud election campaign.”
There’s some weird mix of incompetence and hubris in play on Dermer/Netanyahu’s side of this. They didn’t even loop AIPAC in on their stunt and caught them off guard too – something that has contributed to the widespread discomfiture among Jewish organizations across the country.
Absent any credible defenders lining up to defend the trespass, the White House is pressing the response. And while the US rightly has no claim or say on the identity of the Israeli Prime Minister, it’s quite a different matter with an Ambassador who, by definition, serves at the sufferance of the host country. Dermer’s case is ill-served by his repeated and transparent lies about it.
Particularly notable are the comments of former Ambassador to Israel, Daniel Kurtzer, who served as Ambassador during President George W. Bush’s first term …
“He’s a political operative, he’s not really an ambassador,” said Daniel C. Kurtzer, a former United States ambassador to Israel. “What he did was totally unacceptable from a standpoint of diplomacy. To think about going behind the back of a friendly country’s administration and working out this kind of arrangement with the parliament or the Congress — it’s unheard-of.”
Mr. Kurtzer said while it was unlikely the Obama administration would take the extraordinary step of declaring Mr. Dermer “persona non grata” — the official method for a foreign diplomat to be ousted from a country — it could request that Mr. Dermer by reprimanded or removed.
“He has soiled his pad; who’s he going to work with?” Mr. Kurtzer said.
The nonsense is aggravated by Dermer’s callow, demonstrably false pushback – claiming that he wasn’t try to offend anyone and thought it was up to Boehner to decide whether to inform the administration. Please, dude. For someone whose calling card in Israeli politics is a nuanced grasp of and ability to operate deftly within American politics, that’s pretty weak. Dermer has continued to make an argument which amounts to saying that the White House itself represents such a grave danger to Israel that Netanyahu has no choice but to trample all diplomatic precedent and norms to show up on an unsanctioned diplomatic mission to plead with the Congress to upend the President’s policy. This is not a public stance that is tenable for the Ambassador of a junior partner in an alliance with a great power.
