| Summary/Abstract |
The ugly rhetoric that erupted between Israeli and American leaders in 2014 epitomized the rapid deterioration of the relations between the two leaderships, if not yet the two countries, since Barack Obama became the American president and Binyamin Netanyahu the Israeli prime minister in 2009. To be sure, there have been conflicts between Israeli and American leaders in the past, yet none of them reached the level of personal rancour seen in 2014 with Israeli Defence Minister Moshe Ya’alon disparaging Secretary of State John Kerry’s peace efforts as ‘obsessive and messianic’ and ‘senior administration officials’ deriding Netanyahu as a ‘chickenshit’ and a ‘coward’. Even the much vaunted security relationship between the two states began to suffer in 2014 as the US held up shipments of Hellfire missiles to Israel during its summer 2014 war against Hamas. While a renewal of the bilateral 10-year military aid agreement was signed in 2016, and the ascension of Donald Trump to the presidency may herald an improvement in bilateral relations, it remains to be seen if the damage to the US‒Israeli relationship done in the 2014–2015 period will be overcome.
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