After the cheery press conference of US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Feb. 15, it took more than two hours for Zionist Camp and Israeli opposition leader Isaac Herzog to respond to the event. In media terms, it was an eternity, as evidenced by comments from political pundits and in the WhatsApp group of the Zionist Camp's spokesperson. Everyone wondered why Herzog's response was so late in coming. When it finally arrived, it was relatively short: “It was sad and embarrassing to see Netanyahu fidget and squirm, just so he could avoid the idea of separation from the Palestinians in the form of two states. Every Israeli should be worried by the very possibility of a single state between the Jordan River and the sea, since this means that there would be no Jewish state. That would be very dangerous, it would be a disaster.”

It seemed as if the opposition chairman had had difficulty finding the right words for the moment. After all, it would be hard to attack the prime minister after seeing him received like royalty at the White House by the leader of the free world. Meanwhile, Yesh Atid Chairman Yair Lapid simply dismissed requests for comment from journalists in the party's WhatsApp group. He may consider himself the real leader of the opposition, given his success in the polls, but in this particular case, he seemed to prefer to ignore what was happening.

Netanyahu's first meeting with Trump was a success by any standard. The long silences and measured responses by the leaders of the center-left were a sign of confusion in their camps. The eight years of the Barack Obama administration coincided with three Netanyahu terms, and during that time, Israeli political discourse followed a well-established pattern. The tense relationship between the two leaders over such diplomatic issues as Iran and the Palestinians would inevitably lead to attacks on Netanyahu from the center-left, which would accuse him of harming the relationship between Israel and the United States.

“You caused serious, ongoing damage to the strategic alliance between Israel and the United States,” Lapid accused Netanyahu at a press conference he called after being sacked as finance minister by him in December 2014. “Senators call me, trying to understand your condescending and disparaging attitude toward Israel's closest friend in the world, a country whose relationship with us is our greatest security asset. Go explain to them that you are so detached from reality that you still think America is caught in the 1980s. Yes, you used to understand America, but America has changed, and you are detached from it.”