White House chief of staff Denis McDonough moved to defuse a dispute over Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s upcoming trip to Washington on Sunday, calling relationships between the two countries “many faceted, deep and abiding”.
Administration officials told Israel’s Haaretz last week Netanyahu had “spat” in Obama’s face by arranging with Republican House speaker John Boehner to speak before Congress in March without first informing the White House.
The comment “does not reflect the views of this president or this White House”, McDonough told CBS. He said the importance of the relationship meant it was “above partisan politics”.
McDonough appeared on all the US’s major morning politics shows on Sunday – a move known as “the full Ginsburg” after William Ginsburg, an attorney for Monica Lewinsky who first completed the circuit in 1998.
On ABC’s This Week, NBC’s Meet the Press, CBS’s Face the Nation, CNN’s State of the Union and Fox News Sunday, McDonough defended White House positions on Yemen, Isis and other issues, and was at pains throughout to stress that relations with Israel remained strong.
The relationship is “focused on a shared series of threats, but also, on a shared series of values that one particular instance is not going to inform overwhelming”, he told NBC.
Briefing his cabinet on Sunday, Netanyahu said: “In coming weeks, the powers are liable to reach a framework agreement with Iran, an agreement liable to leave Iran as a nuclear threshold state.
“As prime minister of Israel, I am obligated to make every effort to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weaponry that will be aimed at the state of Israel.”
The Israeli prime minister’s US visit will come shortly before Israel goes to the polls. He is expected to call on Congress to for tougher sanctions against Iran at a time when the US is trying to coordinate talks to secure a final comprehensive deal over Iranian nuclear programmes.
The White House has said that the president on principle does not see heads of state or candidates in close proximity to their elections, in order to avoid the appearance of influencing elections in a foreign country.
“What we won’t allow us to do is for us to become an issue in their elections. That’s why the president was clear this week we should not meet with prime minister Netanyahu just two weeks before his elections,” McDonough told CBS.
Senator John McCain, the Republican chairman of the armed services committee, told the same show it was important that Netanyahu “speak to the American people”.
“Relations have never been worse between ourselves and the only genuine democracy in the entire Middle East,” he said.
He said Israel was convinced that US negotiations with Iran would ultimately lead to Iranian acquisition of a nuclear weapon, “which will then nuclearise the entire Middle East and that will then be a direct threat to the existence of the state of Israel”.
