By sheer coincidence, on the day that The Wall Street Journal ran an article by Knesset member Michael Oren headlined “How Obama Abandoned Israel," the leading headline of Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth announced that US President Barack Obama had invited Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the White House for an official visit in July. If Netanyahu is right and the negotiations with Iran end in a “bad deal” — from Israel's point of view — this gesture of reconciliation will be by way of too little, too late.

Nonetheless, the invitation to Washington will lift the restraining order that has kept the prime minister away from the White House and provide an opportunity to improve the relationship between the two men.

One cannot overestimate the importance of an effort on the part of the leader of the greatest power in the world to set aside the bad feelings of the recent past — a past replete with insults from Netanyahu that peaked with his March 3 speech before the US Congress that was organized behind the administration’s back. Even if there will not be much good chemistry in the Oval Office, in international relations one cannot make light of appearances before the cameras and public remarks to the microphones, showing the world that the prime minister of Israel can still get his foot in the door. There is no need to belabor the importance of a reasonable working relationship between the Israeli prime minister and the man who for the next year and a half, until the presidential elections, will hold in his hand the US veto power at the United Nations and the pen that signs the forms for arms supplies to Israel.

It's exactly at this important juncture that Oren, who served as Israeli ambassador in Washington from 2009 until the end of 2013, saw fit to accuse Obama of nothing short of deliberately “putting daylight” between Israel and the United States. In the piece, designed to promote the sale of his new memoir, "Ally," Oren quoted from remarks Obama supposedly made to Jewish leaders in 2009, according to which “when there is no daylight, Israel just sits on the sidelines and that erodes our credibility with the Arabs.”