Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton failed to meet last week, despite attempts by Foreign Ministry officials to set up the session.
American officials have indicated that the meeting did not take place due to Clinton's tight schedule, while Lieberman's office denied that such a meeting was ever planned to take place.
The two met only a handful of times since Lieberman entered office, with the FM coming to Washington only one time, a month after entering office. Aside from that meeting, Lieberman and Clinton met another time during that U.S. visit, in addition to two other meetings they had during international conferences.
Clinton is considered to hold an especially hard-line in the U.S. administration in regards to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's policies, with the planned meeting due to take place one day after Netanyahu's address to Congress.
The meeting was supposed to take place on the sidelines of the OECD conference in Paris last week, attended by both Lieberman and Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz.
According to a Foreign Ministry source, Israeli officials were in contact with State Department counterparts to try finalize the meeting, only to discover that it would not take place.
Haaretz learned on Wednesday that the Foreign Ministry hoped to schedule a meeting without setting a set time. However, Lieberman eventually left the venue on the sidelines of which the meeting was planned to take place as a result of Clinton's later than expected arrival.
U.S. officials said that the meeting was cancelled due to scheduling issues, and had nothing to do with a political boycotting of Lieberman. The foreign minister's office, however, said that such a meeting was never supposed to take place: "A meeting was never set and thus such a meeting was never cancelled."