THE CONVERSATION via Reuters — When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered a strike on the Lebanese capital of Beirut on June 14, US President Donald Trump was not amused. Fearing that the attack threatened an agreement with Iran on ending the war between the two countries, the US president lashed out. Netanyahu, he said, has “no fucking judgment.”

He was not the first US president to be moved to curse words by the Israeli leader.

When Bill Clinton first met Netanyahu in the summer of 1996, Netanyahu lectured him about the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Clinton emerged from the meeting exasperated. “Who the fuck does he think he is?” Clinton asked his aides. “Who’s the fucking superpower here?”

And then there were his relations with Barack Obama, which were bad from the beginning – and got worse when Obama began to negotiate a nuclear deal with Iran. During a hot mic incident in 2011, before the deal was even an issue, French leader Nicholas Sarkozy told Obama that Netanyahu was “a liar.” Obama replied: “You may be sick of him, but me, I have to deal with him every day.”

The journalist Jeffrey Goldberg kept a running list of the insults that he had heard Obama staffers direct at Netanyahu in private. One of them was “chickenshit.”

Why has Netanyahu exasperated so many US presidents and their aides? One reason is that he has been extremely single-minded in advancing what he sees as the interests of his country.

But the same goes for a lot of other global leaders, too. As a result, it can be tempting to explain the tension by looking at Netanyahu’s personality – and there may be some validity to these explanations.

But more broadly, it is the unique nature of US-Israeli relations – and the place that the country has in American domestic politics – which explains why Netanyahu has stressed so many presidents out.

One of the reasons the Israeli leader so frustrates American presidents is that they cannot just ignore him or cut his country off from US support. There are a number of large pro-Israel constituencies in........

© The Times of Israel