JERUSALEM (AFP) – Relations between Israel and the United States have hit a 35-year low, Israel's ambassador in Washington said amid simmering tensions between the two key allies.

“Israel's relations with the U.S. are facing the most severe crisis since 1975,” the Yediot Aharonot newspaper Monday quoted ambassador Michael Oren, a prominent Middle East historian, as telling consuls in the United States during a telephone briefing over the weekend.
That year U.S. calls for a partial Israeli withdrawal from Egypt's Sinai peninsula, then under Israeli occupation, ignited a major crisis between the two allies.
The latest diplomatic upheaval started when Israel gave its green light for construction of 1,600 new homes for Jewish settlers in east Jerusalem during a visit by U.S. Vice President Joe Biden last week aimed at promoting indirect peace talks with the Palestinians.
U.S. administration officials including Biden, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and senior presidential advisor David Axelrod have slammed both the new construction and the timing of the announcement as insulting and destructive to peace efforts.
On Sunday, a major pro-Israel U.S. lobby group warned the stern U.S. remarks were “of serious concern.”
“AIPAC calls on the administration to take immediate steps to defuse the tension with Israel,” the American Israel Public Affairs Committee said.