At AIPAC, I was struck by the fact that senior Netanyahu adviser Ron Dermer seemed so American. And he's from Miami, with a tough-guy swagger. I also saw Michael Oren, the next Israeli ambassador to the U.S., who I have to say is very appealing, and was born in New York and seems utterly American. Also saw Dore Gold, formerly of Connecticut, now of J'lem (though he has collected $96,000 a year as a scholar from the American Enterprise Institute)–a longtime part of the Netanyahu braintrust. And then there's Netanyahu himself, who went to high school outside Philly, and can sound very American too.
What's with all these Americanized Israelis? I asked Jeff Blankfort. He says:
There is an unwritten requirement that has grown stronger over the years that Israeli prime ministers, foreign ministers, ambassadors, spokespersons etc., have to be fluent in English in order to sell Israel at top dollar to the US, which is why David Levy never had a chance. The old guard, of course, Ben Gurion, Shamir, Begin, Rabin, Sharon, spoke with heavy accents, but we are not likely to see that anymore. What the Israelis want Americans to see and hear on the news programs and the radio is an image of themselves, the goal obviously being to reinforce the spin of "shared values," which is always referred to without getting into the details of life in Israel– that a half million Israelis who came to the US didn't want to put up with.
