In late October 2014, a remarkable transatlantic phone call took place.

Earlier that week, an anonymous official in the Obama White House had sparked a tempest in US-Israel relations by telling The Atlantic, “The thing about Bibi is, he’s a chickenshit.”

The resulting news cycle lasted days. The White House publicly denounced the comments about Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as “inappropriate and counterproductive.” US Secretary of State John Kerry called them “disgraceful, unacceptable, and damaging.” Finally, Kerry phoned Netanyahu to apologize on behalf of the staffer.

Now, here we are, almost 12 years later, with a US president who openly, unabashedly calls Netanyahu “fucking crazy,” gripes that he has “no fucking judgement,” and calls him “very difficult.” And the list goes on.

None of Donald Trump’s individual insults has had a lasting impact on the public, simply because there are so many of them.

The contrast between the two eras could be taken as evidence of many things: how Trump has pulverized norms of political discourse; how Netanyahu and his circle hold Republicans and Democrats to different standards; and how, simply, Netanyahu has been in power for a very long time.

For Netanyahu, however, the problem posed by Trump’s comments is more immediate and more personal. For years, he’s based his personal foreign policy chops largely on the claim that he alone is close to Trump. Now, Trump has provided ample fodder to undercut that claim, right as Netanyahu is facing a bruising election campaign and emerging from a war that, at best, has ended inconclusively.

It’s possible that Trump still likes Netanyahu despite the invective. After all, the president is a champion of flattery as well as humiliation. One could easily make the case that he loves, or hates, the prime minister. For Netanyahu, that’s exactly........

© The Times of Israel