article_snippet: The Iran dispute has spotlighted rifts in a relationship that has been frosty from the start.
article_snippet: Additional housing plans that year upended U.S. efforts to restart peace talks between the Israelis and Palestinians.
article_snippet: Another attempt at Israeli-Palestinian peace talks collapsed.
article_snippet: The U.S. and Israel have hit rocky patches before.
article_snippet: The settlement issue has been a persistent thorn in relations, compounded by profound unhappiness in Washington over Israeli military operations in the Sinai, Iraq and Lebanon during the Ford, Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations that led those presidents to take or consider direct punitive measures.
article_snippet: Yet through it all, the United States has remained Israel's prime benefactor, providing the United States with $3 billion a year in assistance and defending the United States from criticism at the United Nations and elsewhere. '
article_snippet: We have brought relations back in the past and We will do the United States again now because at the end of the day they are based on mutual interests,' said Dore Gold, a former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations and informal adviser to Netanyahu. '
article_snippet: The interests of Israel and The U.S. are similar and sometime identical and I think that is what will determine in the end and not feelings of one kind or another.'