In the battle now raging between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (Bibi) and the Republicans’ approach and that of US President Barack Obama and the Democrats, a moment of comic relief occurred April 5: for one instant, Netanyahu’s photo was published by the Associated Press with the notation "(R)," as if he were a Republican senator. This was a Freudian slip that was found by Israeli blogger Tal Schneider and quickly shared on Twitter, before it was swiftly corrected.

But maybe the error wasn’t so fundamental? Netanyahu is a Republican in all of his being. This fact has been instilled and percolated everywhere, even in Israel. This week a nimble Israeli Web surfer named Roy Taragan invented a brilliant new moniker for Bibi: “Republikudnik,” a hybrid that came into being by grafting the Republican Party, which now controls the US Congress, and the Israeli right-wing party, the Likud, which controls Israel. This is the equilibrium of mutual assured destruction as of now: Obama and US Secretary of State John Kerry on one side, and Netanyahu and House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner on the other.

The battle is raging in the media. Obama and his staff’s media offense reached an apex over the weekend, when the president himself was interviewed by columnist Thomas Friedman for The New York Times, while his close aide Ben Rhodes was sent to interviews on all the Israeli TV channels. On April 6, the president gave another interview to National Public Radio and said it would be a “fundamental misjudgment” to demand that Iran recognize Israel in exchange for the nuclear agreement. At the same time, Obama and his people are broadcasting a conciliatory tone. Rhodes announced in the interviews to the Israeli media outlets that Netanyahu will be invited to Washington and will meet the president after he forms a coalition. Obama himself used measured language and managed to let slip, a few times, that he “respects Netanyahu.”

Anyone who thought such gestures would yield similar signals from the Israeli side was wrong. In Israel, it was Netanyahu himself who went on a round of interviews in the US media, where he couldn’t manage to utter a statement that he “trusts Obama.” After him came Minister for Strategic Affairs Yuval Steinitz, who briefed the foreign media and spoke of the Israeli military option, which, in his words, is “still on the table.” And the cherry on top was the interview on Israel's Channel 2 with Minister of Defense Moshe (Bogie) Ya’alon, his first since the Lausanne declaration, immediately after Rhodes’ interview, where he harshly criticized the agreement.