Maariv daily paper reported last week that Ron Dermer, Netanyahu's American aid, is leaving the Prime Minister's Office. The story cited family reasons - a standard in such cases - and Netanyahu has refused to comment on the issue to follow-up pieces in the Jerusalem Post and Times of Israel. Personal changes between governments are not that unique, but Dermer's case is special. He was the neocon ambassador in Netanyahu's office (or vice versa). The Israeli media has put some of the blame for Netanyahu's support in Mitt Romney - now widely considered a diplomatic fiasco - on Dermer (in an interview to Yedioth…

As much as left-wing protesters have to fear Israeli cops, they have to fear even more the Israeli "street" the cops are shielding them from. In his 2004 book The Case for Democracy, Natan Sharansky (with co-author Ron Dermer, head of Bibi Netanyahu's brain trust) popularized his "town square test," which he called the threshold test of whether a society is free or not. It went like this: If a person cannot walk into the middle of the town square and express his or her views without fear of arrest, imprisonment, or physical harm, then that person is living in a…

The fierce backlash against attacks on Israeli human rights NGOs has pushed to the front an old argument against foreign funding for these groups. Various right wing columnists and politicians have been parroting it, but now you hear it from Netanyahu's office as well: As for questioning the legitimacy of foreign government funding of Israeli NGOs, mentioning America's Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA) may have presented a more balanced picture… It is hard to imagine any democratic country accepting foreign governments intervening in its domestic affairs by funding domestic groups engaged not merely in criticism of a particular government's policy but…