Susan Rice, President Barack Obama’s national security adviser, called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s scheduled speech to a joint session of Congress next week ‘destructive’ to U.S.-Israel relations.
Speaking on PBS’ ‘Charlie Rose’ Tuesday, Rice said Netanyahu’s acceptance of House Speaker John Boehner’s invitation to speak to members of the House of Representatives and the Senate and offer his views about a yet-to-be completed nuclear deal with Iran ‘injected a degree of partisanship.’
‘The relationship between Israel as a country and the United States as a country has always been bipartisan,’ Rice told Rose. ‘What has happened over the last several weeks, by virtue of the invitation issued by the speaker and the acceptance of it by Prime Minister Netanyahu two weeks in advance of his election, is that on both sides there has now been injected a degree of partisanship which is not only unfortunate, I think it’s destructive of the fabric of the relationship.’
Netanyahu is scheduled to address Congress March 3. Israel’s elections are March 17. Obama administration officials and congressional Democrats have accused Boehner, R-Ohio, of violating protocol by inviting Netanyahu to speak to Congress so close to his country’s election.
More than 25 House Democrats and three Democratic senators have said they won’t attend the speech. Vice President Joe Biden, the president of the Senate, won’t be there because he’ll be traveling abroad. And Obama won’t meet with Netanyahu when he’s in Washington.
Rice declined to say whether she though Netanyahu was coming to Washington to try to influence his election back home.
‘We want the relationship between the United State and Israel to be unquestionably strong, immutable, regardless of political seasons in either country,’ she said. ‘We’ve worked very hard to have that and we will work very hard to maintain that.’
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