Israeli ambassador: It's not my fault

Israeli Ambassador Ron Dermer has a message for Washington’s chattering class: It’s not my fault.

In an interview with The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg published Friday, Dermer sought to explain his role in the simmering feud between the Obama administration and the Israeli government — a famously bad relationship made worse in recent days after House Speaker John Boehner invited Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to speak before Congress.


Top administration officials are upset with Boehner’s surprise move, and with Netanyahu for accepting the invitation without checking with the White House first.

But Dermer says he did everything by the book.

“It was the speaker’s responsibility and normal protocol for the speaker’s office to notify the administration” about the invitation, the ambassador told Goldberg.

It would have been “inappropriate” for the news to have come from the Israelis, Dermer said.

Dermer told Goldberg that he negotiated the March 3 date for the speech directly with the speaker’s office, assuming that Republican congressional leaders would then inform the administration.

For this reason, Dermer said, he chose not to relay news of the speech to Secretary of State John Kerry during a two-hour meeting the day before Boehner’s announcement. Senior administration officials ultimately heard about the speech on the morning before it was announced publicly, and reacted with furious anonymous quotes to various news outlets to what they saw as a serious breach of diplomatic protocol.

Top Democrats in Congress, including House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, have rallied behind the administration.

On Jan. 22, the White House announced that President Obama would not meet with Netanyahu during his early March visit, citing a longstanding tradition of not meeting with other world leaders right before their elections. A National Security Council spokesperson released a statement saying that the decision was taken “to avoid the appearance of influencing a democratic election in a foreign country.”

The New York Times reported Wednesday that when Dermer became Israel’s ambassador to the United States in 2013, White House officials worried that his loyalty to Netanyahu would “politicize” relations between the two countries.

Dermer, a senior administration official told the Times, “had repeatedly placed Mr. Netanyahu’s political fortunes above the relationship between Israel and the United States,” in the paper’s words.