I still remember the first week of August 2013, when Ron Dermer arrived at 3514 International Drive, the limestone fortress that houses Israel’s embassy in Washington. Within days, every Israeli reporter on the American beat learned the rule: Dermer does not speak to Hebrew-language media.
No background coffees. No late-night WhatsApp crumbs. Not even a polite “no comment.” The silence extended to off-record briefings with senior correspondents. We bristled (I certainly did), but after eight years I had to admit the discipline was consistent.
Unlike too many politically appointed envoys who treat DC as a springboard back to Tel Aviv, Dermer treated diplomacy as a job, not a brand-building exercise. That same discipline or detachment, depending on one’s vantage point, now shapes his performance as Israel’s strategic affairs minister, a post he has held since January 2023.
The appointment itself was unusual: Dermer is not a member of Knesset, and the “ministry” he heads is less a bureaucracy than a two-room hub tucked inside the Prime Minister’s Office.
There is no director-general, no budget line for media liaison, no Arabic-language outreach, and certainly no spokeswoman shepherding him through the daily news cycle. An aide once summed up the ethos to me in a single sentence: “He’ll talk to the American press when he absolutely has to; Israeli reporters are a distraction.”
Dermer says as much himself. In April 2025, during one of his rare public sit-downs – and notably not with a journalist but with Alex Traiman, the chief executive of the conservative Jewish News Syndicate – he explained:
“I must confess, I’m not a big consumer of the press. When I do read it, it’s not to find out what happened; it’s to find out what people think happened, because the gap is often enormous.”
He added that he employs neither a press adviser nor a political aide: “I made that decision a long time ago. Once you start chasing every false story, you waste huge amounts of time.”
Fair enough. Yet ministers, unlike ambassadors, answer directly to the Israeli public. Transparency is not optional; it is the rent we charge our elected – and appointed – officials. And that is precisely where Dermer’s hermetic style is colliding with Israel’s most painful crisis in decades.
A flame-throwing debut
The backlash started on Day 1. The morning Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu swore Dermer into the cabinet, veteran Likud MK Danny Danon warned on Army Radio that “appointing someone who never ran in the primaries is problematic… Importing a personal friend makes the very mistake we accused our rivals of making.”
A handful of coalition lawmakers quietly agreed. Questions about Dermer’s Israeli bona fides resurfaced in November 2024. Channel 12’s ultra-progressive analyst Amnon Abramovich sneered: “Ron Dermer doesn’t know where Rafah is, and if you dropped him in Nir Oz, he wouldn’t know how to get home.”
Abramovich, a pillar of the old secular elite, lamented that the Miami-born diplomat “never absorbed Israeli pop culture.” The Jerusalem Post fired back in an editorial the next morning:
“The sneer betrays more than snobbery. It is a throb of discomfort from an Ashkenazi establishment that senses its monopoly slipping to English-speaking, religious immigrants like Dermer.”
Still, the jibe stuck because Dermer himself rarely surfaces to rebut it. Matters turned from cultural to existential in February 2025, when Netanyahu made Dermer the point man on Gaza-hostage negotiations. The move astonished diplomats who assumed the file belonged to the Mossad and the Shin Bet.
Within a week a senior negotiator told Channel 12 that “the Dermer-Witkoff axis has failed… We need professionals who can sprint, not marathon runners obsessed with the Washington playbook. An understanding of Trump alone is not enough.”
Former war cabinet observer Gadi Eisenkot was even blunter: “[Dermer] isn’t functioning. We need someone who lives this 24/7, not a minister who drops in every two weeks for a situational update.”
Outside government, anguish turned to fury. In April 2025, a CNN report quoted an American official involved in the talks as saying Dermer’s arrival signaled “a clear shift in Israeli priorities. Negotiations appear increasingly politicized.” Hostage families seized on the line, rallying outside Dermer’s Jerusalem home with banners reading “59, or resign” – a reference to the Israelis still held in Gaza at the time.
When the war passed the 600-day mark in May, the Hostages and Missing Families Forum formally demanded his dismissal, accusing him of presiding over “a lack of results.”
A one-man foreign ministry
Dermer’s reach inside the cabinet is undeniable. Colleagues joke that Israel effectively operates two foreign ministries: the official one on Yitzhak Rabin Boulevard and a covert one wherever Dermer’s iPhone happens to be. In practice, ministries and agencies routinely discover that their talking points to Washington must first clear “Ron’s desk.”
Some welcome the coherence; others warn of tunnel vision. Deputy Attorney-General Gil Limon delivered a quiet but telling reprimand in March 2025, accusing the minister of failing to submit a conflict-of-interest opinion within the statutory 60-day period. For bureaucrats, that is the equivalent of a yellow card.
Even Likud cabinet members now complain – sotto voce – that crucial messages to the Biden administration are funneled through a single, unelected confidant. One senior official quipped that Israel’s diplomatic bandwidth with Washington has shrunk to “a narrow pipe with a heavy Dermer filter.”
And yet, to dismiss him as an ivory-tower ideologue is to ignore his record. Dermer was instrumental in securing the 2016 Memorandum of Understanding that locked in $38 billion in US defense aid over a decade.
He helped usher in the Abraham Accords in 2020, cajoling the Trump White House, Emirati royals, and a skeptical Israeli security establishment into the same tent. He speaks fluent evangelical, fluent Republican, and fluent Jewish – a rare combination.
Supporters also note that keeping negotiations quiet, especially hostage talks, can save lives. Media leaks can spook mediators and stiffen Hamas’s spine. The minister’s vow of silence, they argue, is not arrogance but strategy.
The counterargument is just as stark. Diplomacy without daylight breeds suspicion. When the man running the hostage file declines to meet even once with the families of the captives or with rank-and-file MKs hungry for an update, resentment festers.
At some point, a strategy that prizes secrecy over empathy begins to look like disdain. Worse, it risks blurring democratic lines of accountability.
And the results? Hamas still holds dozens of Israelis. Talks have lurched from “imminent” to “collapsed” and back again without visible progress. If silence is golden, Israelis wonder, why does it feel as though we’re paying a ransom in public trust?
Where the story ends – and must begin
Dermer may yet surprise us. He could, as he did in Washington, pull a diplomatic rabbit from his hat and bring the hostages home, vindicating every hour of quiet toil. Should that happen, the Israeli public will likely forgive the radio silence.
But politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum. The longer Dermer remains a face without a voice, the louder the street outside his home will grow.
Democratic servanthood is not a photo-op; it is a conversation. The strategic affairs minister owes the country more than encrypted phone calls and a single friendly podcast. He owes us a full accounting of what has – and has not – been achieved on the most painful file in Israel’s modern history.
If he truly believes that most press stories are “false premises,” he should say so in his own voice, on the record, and let the public judge.
Because even a minister who disdains the megaphone cannot escape one stubborn fact: in a democracy, silence is never a lasting strategy.