Matt Steinglass comments on Netanyahu’s opposition to the Iran deal:

What is certain is that Mr Netanyahu is risking a split between Israel and America, and between Israel and American Jews, of a type that has never before occurred[bold mine-DL].

Netanyahu may be risking such a break, but one of the reasons that his complaints have been ignored by the administration is that there is little reason to think that the Israeli government would persist in a course that leads to a real rupture with Washington. It could happen, but it would be so contrary to short-term Israeli self-interest that it is hard to believe that a government that did this would survive politically for very long. It is very much in Israel’s interest to obscure how much of a liability it is for the U.S., and high-profile disagreements make that much harder to ignore.

Normal bilateral ties allow for states to have genuine and significant disagreements over policy, and the less space that is permitted for such disagreements the more rigid and unhealthy the relationship tends to be. The fact that the U.S. and Israel cannot be seen as disagreeing on major issues without throwing the relationship into crisis reveals the extent to which the “special” relationship between the two is both very dysfunctional and strangely fragile. “Pro-Israel” hard-liners in the U.S. look at this relationship and conclude that the best way to manage it is simply to affirm the Israeli position, but all that this does is mask the genuine divergence of interests in a way that poorly serves both countries. The more that hard-liners in both countries insist on doing this, the more likely a real and lasting rift becomes.