Daniel (Danon) in the lion’s den
The former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations writes a book on what happened behind the scenes
It was the low point of Danny Danon’s five-year stint as Israel’s ambassador to the UN: December 23, 2016.
Danon had returned abruptly to New York from an aborted Hanukkah family vacation with his wife and children in Puerto Rico, and was sitting in a meeting of the UN Security Council, which was just about to pass a sharply worded anti-settlement resolution shepherded through by Israel’s greatest ally, the United States.
“At that moment, I felt for the first time the meaning of the words in the Bible that the people of Israel will be alone among the nations,” Danon writes in a book about his time at the UN, to be released next week, In the Lion’s Den. “Right after the vote, everyone stood up. I was the only one sitting in the room while people clapped and hugged each other.”
It was a moment that captured Israel’s isolation. The world applauded as, among other things, Israel’s claim to the Western Wall was deemed a “flagrant violation” of international law. It was a moment brought about by what Danon described as duplicitous behavior by the administration of president Barack Obama.
Ironically, Danon noted in the book, he first caught wind of the resolution the day before, when he had just landed in Puerto Rico and received a text message from a colleague from an unnamed Muslim country.
“The world of diplomacy and foreign policy makes for interesting friendships,” he wrote. “Other ambassadors with whom I was close didn’t call me to reveal Obama’s plan. Only one, a Muslim, shared the news with me. Other ambassadors were asked to keep it quiet, but once I called them, they couldn’t lie.”
The book reveals some of the on-the-ground backstories behind the resolution, a move that he wrote was “a hostile diplomatic attack against Israel pushed through in the final days of the Obama administration.”
Nothing better illustrates the depths to which the relationship between Washington and Jerusalem had sunk at that time than the fact that Obama refused to take a call from then-prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu before the vote, under the pretense that he was vacationing in Hawaii. Likewise, the US ambassador to the UN at the time, Samantha Power, would not take Danon’s calls.
“It was frustrating. Power and I had worked together very well up until this point,” he wrote. “We had enjoyed an open and honest dialogue, and now she was refusing to take my calls, which was a red flag. It was calculated and strategic on her part. Ignoring my phone call showed just how strained US-Israeli relations were at that moment.”
IN AN interview this week in advance of his book’s publication, Danon gave two reasons for Obama’s determination to push this resolution through – the US abstained, rather than cast a veto, but was very much behind its passage.
“First of all there was the personal issue,” Danon said. “Obama wanted to send a message that he had the last word.” Danon wrote in his book that Netanyahu believed “the resolution was the result of a personal grudge” Obama had against him. The two leaders had a famously rocky relationship, and a year earlier Netanyahu infuriated the president by speaking against the Iranian nuclear deal to a special joint session of Congress.
In addition to the personal issue, Danon said in the interview, there was also a desire by the administration to leave a clear message regarding how it viewed the ideal Mideast deal in the future.
The administration’s original hope, he wrote, was that this vision message would be enshrined in a second UN Security Council resolution, called the “Parameters for