Relations between the United States and Israel are often tempestuous, but the fireworks have rarely been as explosive as those that marked the end of 2016. The U.S. decision to abstain from a United Nations Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlements and a subsequent speech by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry that questioned the Tel Aviv government's commitment to a two-state solution rocked the foundations of that partnership. Both incidents focused on two questions: How far can Washington go when publicly disagreeing with Tel Aviv and how committed is the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the two-state solution?

The tempest flared late last month when the Security Council took up a resolution demanding that Israel stop the construction of settlements on occupied Palestinian territory. Today, 570,000 Israelis live in the West Bank and East Jerusalem among more than 2.6 million Palestinians and that number will grow steadily as settlements expand. In the past, the U.S. actively fought to keep such a resolution from reaching a vote, and if those efforts failed, it would have vetoed the resolution. (Often, that threat alone is enough to stop the Security Council from considering a measure.) This time, however, the U.S. abstained on the vote and it passed 14-0, sparking fury in Netanyahu, who accused the Obama administration of abandoning his country.

Five days later, Kerry defended the abstention in a speech that laid out the Obama administration's thinking. He explained that the U.S. "acted with one primary objective in mind: to preserve the possibility of the two-state solution." This is the notion that two states, one Israeli and one Palestinian, will eventually co-exist in the Middle East. This idea is almost universally accepted as the only possible formula for genuine peace in the region. Debates about implementation focus on details such as borders, the military capacity of the Palestinian state and the like.