At around 8 p.m. on June 15, the office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu finally deigned to release a message of congratulations in honor of author David Grossman for winning the prestigious Man Booker Prize a day earlier. Grossman is the first Israeli to win what is often considered the most prestigious literary award in the world after the Nobel Prize for Literature.

He received the prize for his novel "A Horse Walks into a Bar," the story of a 57-year-old standup comic from Jerusalem, the only child of Holocaust survivors and something of a loser. First published in 2014 and since translated into 22 languages, the book describes a local Israeli reality that is not political.

This Israeli literary achievement is even more impressive when considering that the six finalists included another canonical Israeli author, Amos Oz. He and Grossman have been the most eloquent and methodical spokespeople of Israel's political left for the past several decades — and especially the last few years vis-a-vis a right-wing government in power.

Nevertheless, it took Netanyahu almost a day to release a meager and measured congratulatory message in response to the esteemed author's rare achievement. This only underscored how little the prime minister is willing to compliment him: "I congratulate David Grossman for winning an important international prize, which reflects his ability as a writer as well as his literary works." Throughout that same day, the prime minister's Facebook and Twitter accounts were flooded with photos and flattering texts about his visit to Greece, pushing Grossman's achievement to the margins of the day's news. And it wasn't because of time constraints.