Is there a rift between the United States and Israel?
Not a chance. The real conflict is with the liberal-statist juggernaut of President Obama and crew.
Well did Mayor Ed Koch denounce the President:
"We campaigned for him, and all he has done is throw Israel under the bus."
The President and his cadre of leftists support the perennial underdog Palestinians, just because they are weak. Unfortunately, none of these pols is willing to acknowledge that the Palestinians weakened status in the Middle East is due to the interminable prodding and cajoling of hostile Arab states who wish to jam this never-ending thorn of Palestinian statehood into the side of the Jewish State.
Every attempt to disrupt peace is one more attempt to delegitimize the Jewish State. President Obama has inadvertently hasted this harassment from denouncing the Jews' right to build Jewish settlements in Jewish territory, to urging Prime Minister Netanyahu to offer retracting Israel's border back to pre-1967 lines.
The American President wants peace at any cost, even if eventually endangers the Jewish State. Israel deserves peace, but not at the cost of its own existence.
The rift with Israel, therefore, is not with the United States as a whole, but with the current President, whose term of office is likely to be cut conveniently short by the next Presidential election.