The Israeli/American relationship has always appeared very one sided to me with Israel receiving financial and diplomatic cover it requires at the United Nations as it continues it's massive persecution and oppression of the Palestinians and in return America gets the vitriol for supporting the hated regime in Tel Aviv.
As the votes are counted it appears that Benjamin Netanyahu has won the Israeli election but that has to come at a cost to relations with the only real ally Israel has on the World stage.
Obama and Netanyahu were already on shaky terms and the Obama administration were not slow to let it be known what they thought of Netanyahu's decision to turn up at Congress the other week and in unusually strong terms they have condemned the Israel Prime Ministers words in the last days of the election as 'deeply concerning and divisive' and 'rhetoric that seeks to marginalise one segment of their population'.
As the Palestinians are set to join the International Criminal Court on April 1 and intend to pursue war crimes charges against Israel over its occupation of the West Bank and last year's war in Gaza, there could not be a worst time for Israel to lose the support of the one country that has its back but it was telling that Netanyahu's telephone has not rang yet with the obligatory congratulatory message from the White House, a call which the White House said would be made in the coming days.
Most galling for Americans is the abandonment of the commitment to negotiate a Palestinian state which has been the basis of more than two decades of Middle East peacemaking and the promise to go on building settlements on occupied land.
US Secretary of State John Kerry, it seems, wasted nine months intense shuttle diplomacy based on Mr Netanyahu expressing support for the idea when all along he had no intention of fulfilling the promise and played the White House for suckers on the question of a two-state solution.
How this all plays out will be shown when the inevitable calls for boycotts, diplomatic pressure or action against Israel in the United Nations rears its head but Israel appears even further isolated and exposed today and that can only be a good thing that some of the scales have fallen from the eyes of the United States in dealing with Netanyahu and an Israel that has no intention of seeking peace with its neighbours until it has stolen enough of its land to make a separate Palestinian state untenable.
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