The three-day visit by Secretary of State John Kerry to Israel, which ended on Tuesday, April 4, was covered by the Israeli media with indifference bordering on disregard, especially after the great optimism left behind by President Barack Obama at the end of his visit, two and a half weeks earlier.

Kerry’s two meetings with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which lasted a total of seven hours, as well as his meeting with President Shimon Peres, merited minor coverage relative to such an event. Reports of the meetings were relegated to marginal sections of the news broadcasts.

The public agenda was focused at the time on internal economic and social issues. The public and the media, as well as the political arena, were far busier with the intention of the new minister of education Shay Piron to limit the scope of high school matriculation exams. Another central issue was the storm created by treasury officials, who threatened the country’s students with a tuition hike without informing the new Minister of Finance, Yair Lapid, of their intent. Lapid’s reprimand to those officials made it to the top of the primetime Channel 2 evening news show on the last day of Kerry’s visit, whereas the report of Kerry’s second meeting with Netanyahu was sixth on the lineup. Minister of Economy and Trade Naftali Bennett also managed to evoke much more interest than Kerry, making it to the front pages with his instruction to reduce the price of bread. Even the call by former foreign minister Avigdor Liberman for members of Knesset to take a 10% pay cut took up significantly more space than the content of the meetings in Israel with one of the most important people in the US administration.

We have yet to mention that politicians on the left and the right ignored the visit and preferred to comment on internal matters and mostly to attack Lapid. Where were the militant deputy ministers from the extreme right wing of the Likud — Danny Danon, Tzipi Hotoveli and Ze’ev Elkin — who used to pounce on every visit by a US secretary of state in order to declare their opposition to any diplomatic concessions? They, too, adhered to the economic-social agenda and opted for quiet on the home front.