But as Oslo slowly unravelled, and Israel's leaders -- not least Netanyahu himself -- were exposed as the true rejectionists, Israel was forced onto the back foot again.
Today, the consensus in Israel is not only that the UN is a bastion of anti-Israel prejudice but that it is an incubator of global anti-semitism, much of it supposedly spawned by Arab states. Israel is blameless, so this story goes, but the world has fallen under the haters' spell.
The parting shot of Danon's predecessor, Ron Prosor, last week was to accuse yet again a leading UN official, Jordan's Rima Khalaf, of anti-semitism for pointing out the untold misery caused by Israel's near-decade blockade of Gaza.
Earlier this year, after stepping down as Israel's ambassador to the US, Michael Oren went further, arguing that the plague of anti-semitism had infected even America's leading Jewish journalists. Their critical coverage of Israel was proof of self-hatred, he claimed.
The need for such desperate diplomacy has grown as Israel's moral image has tarnished, even for its allies. But the hectoring and intimidation by seasoned diplomats like Prosor and Oren has produced diminishing returns.
Danon's posting is part of a discernible pattern of recent appointments by Netanyahu that reflect a growing refusal to engage in any kind of recognisable diplomacy. Confrontation is preferred.
The trend started with Netanyahu's decision in 2009 to let the thuggish Avigdor Lieberman lead the foreign ministry and Israel's diplomatic corps.
Notably, Netanyahu picked Ron Dermer, a high-profile partisan of the US Republican party, to replace Oren in 2013. Dermer is widely credited with engineering Netanyahu's provocative address earlier this year to the US Congress, in an undisguised effort to undermine President Barack Obama's talks with Iran.
Danon's appointment, like Dermer's, indicates the extent to which the Israeli right has abandoned any hope of persuading the international community of the rightness of its cause -- or even of working within the rules of statecraft.
An Israel that has no place for negotiations or compromise wants only to tell the world that it is wrong and that Israelis don't care what others think. Danon is the right man for that task.
A version of this article first appeared in the National,
Abu Dhabi.
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