US officials’ jabs at Benjamin Netanyahu repeated in New Yorker piece on Kerry
The latest in a long line of pokes by anonymous US officials at Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appeared Monday in a mammoth, largely glowing piece, on US Secretary of State John Kerry that appeared in the New Yorker.
David Remnick, an often caustic critic of Netanyahu who penned the more than 10,000 word article, wrote that “American officials speak of Netanyahu as myopic, entitled, untrustworthy, routinely disrespectful toward the President, and focused solely on short-term political tactics to keep his right-wing constituency in line.”
The comments are similar to others that have been reported by senior US journalists over the span of the Obama-Netanyahu relationship.
Remnick, who had dinner with Kerry and his wife and also traveled with him for four days in October on one of his diplomatic missions, wrote that “State Department aides said that sources of Kerry’s exasperation with Netanyahu range from the injustice of settlement building in the West Bank to the way he employs Yitzhak Molcho, his lawyer and confidant, to stifle even the most inconsequential negotiation.”