Washington, April 29 – After a recording slipped out of US Secretary of State John Kerry that Israel risked becoming an “apartheid state” if negotiations with the Palestinians failed, the secretary issued an apology for his choice of words, which he had believed would remain private, and could not understand why his remorse did not simply transform his fraught relationship with the Israelis into a love-fest.

At a meeting with the Trilateral Commission, Mr. Kerry sought to express that the two-state formula is the only one that would both guarantee Jews a majority in the areas Israel controls and secure full rights for Palestinians. However, he couched his statement in politically explosive terms, giving legitimacy to opponents of Israel who wish to undermine the Jewish state by any means. After the clip of his remarks gained attention, the secretary tried to distance himself from his careless terminology, pointing to what he called thirty years of staunch support of Israel in the senate, as if that somehow erases the fact that he has given Israel’s enemies rhetorical ammunition.

“For more than 30 years in the United States Senate, I didn’t just speak words in support of Israel,” Mr. Kerry said. “I walked the walk when it came time to vote and when it came time to fight,” somehow missing the point that using the A-word would be, as Aaron David Miller, a former American peace negotiator now with the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars put it, “ill timed, ill advised and unwise.”

An otherwise seemingly intelligent man, Kerry appeared genuinely flummoxed by the sudden uproar, as if no one could foresee the use of a politically loaded term as a bad move. Further, analysts expressed puzzlement over the secretary’s apparent ignorance of modern technology and media, as if things said behind closed doors could ever really be expected to remain so in the smartphone age.

“A cynical person might find it disingenuous that Secretary Kerry didn’t really expect this reaction, didn’t really mean to use the word,” said Huryu Kidding of the Center for Realism and Peace (CRAP), a think tank. “But even we cynical people don’t even know what to do with Kerry and Obama anymore,” he conceded. “We’re having trouble differentiating between genuine hypocrisy and plain old incompetence.”