Former Israeli Ambassador to the US Ron Dermer blasted Jerusalem's silence on the nuclear deal with Iran on a podcast Wednesday.
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According to Dermer, who is considered to have been Israel's most influential envoy in Washington in the seven years in the role, if Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and Foreign Minister and Prime Minister-designate Yair Lapid had made more of an effort, they might have been able to avoid an accord.
Bennett and Lapid can and should enlist Arab leaders to this end, he said, arguing this would have made the US less inclined to sign a deal.
Dermer made the remarks on his Undiplomatically Correct Spotify podcast produced by the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, of which he is a member.
As Lapid is seen as on the center-left, Dermer argued he should have given interviews to left-wing outlets such as MSNBC, CNN, and NPR that Democrats tend to watch. This, he said, could have garnered bilateral support among Americans and US politicians.
Bennett and Lapid haven't really "been focused on turning this into a public issue or public campaign. They have made a joint statement about it but as somebody who served for 7.5 years in Washington, when we want to make something a public issue what happens is I would do a dozen interviews on that subject and you would have very vocal meetings with members of Congress and then you would, you would put on social media that you just met them to discuss this or that thing.
"So it is true that the Israeli government has been louder on the issue of the IRGC than they have on other issues, but the bar for the other issues is effectively a zero or a one, so maybe on this issue they've raised it to a one or a four. But they're not raising a public campaign against it, and I think it's a big mistake."
In a conversation with JINSA founder and podcast co-host Michael Makovsky, Dermer emphasized that because the Israeli coalition government is comprised of right- and left-wing components, its significant opposition to the nuclear deal would not have been seen by Washington as an Israeli political matter, as was the case when the original deal was underway with then-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 2015. He noted that then-US President Barack Obama's administration claimed that the deal was also good for Israel. This time around, though, the US administration has not even tried to make that claim, and Israel should have emphasized this significant point.
According to senior Israeli officials, the nuclear accord between the US and Iran is in fact a done deal. All that remains is for Tehran to decide whether or not will sign the accord, they say.
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