Is that how you treat a friend, Netanyahu?

The president and his inner circle are appalled at Israel’s self-absorption and its failure to notice that America is not only protecting Israel from Iran, fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also dealing with a miasma of horrible problems at home. And Israel insults the Obama administration over a domestic zoning issue that has nothing to do with its security?

“That’s not how you treat your best friend,” said one Obama official.

During the campaign, Obama told The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg that “being a friend to Israel is partly to hold up a mirror and tell the truth,” to save them from themselves when they mindlessly let settlement gluttony scuttle any chance of peace.

After it was reported two weeks ago that Israel planned 600 other homes in East Jerusalem, Prince Saud al-Faisal, the Saudi foreign minister, warned me that Israel’s ultra-conservative religious groups were “killing every option that comes out that has peace in its objective.”