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Washington • The Israeli election buried one of President Barack Obama's major foreign policy goals and imperiled another.

The unexpectedly strong showing by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's party dimmed any prospect of a breakthrough in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. And Republicans in the U.S., who aligned themselves with the Israeli leader, now will be stiffened in their opposition to a nuclear deal with Iran that the U.S. and five other world powers are trying to negotiate.

After six years of strained and sometimes hostile relations, President Obama and Netanyahu have two more years to find a way to make a crucial strategic alliance work.

"I'm skeptical that there's any single act or even set of acts right now that will just wave away the tensions and the recrimination and the enmity," said Robert Danin, a senior fellow on the Middle East at the Council on Foreign Relations.

The weeks leading up to Israel's election brought the Obama-Netanyahu relationship to a low point. At the invitation of Republican House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, and in defiance of protests from the White House, Netanyahu traveled to the U.S. to deliver an address to Congress warning against an Iran nuclear deal.

In the waning days of the campaign, Netanyahu said he wouldn't allow the establishment of a Palestinian state if he was re-elected. The remarks reflected a reversal from an earlier position favoring a two-state solution, an outcome the U.S. has been pursuing for years.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest said the two-state solution remains the U.S. goal, though how it will be brought about is now in question.

Obama hasn't yet called Netanyahu, Earnest said. That will come after he's directed by Israeli President Reuven Rivlin to form a government. Earnest said Secretary of State John Kerry did place a call to the prime minister.

George Mitchell, former U.S. special envoy for Middle East peace and former Senate majority leader, said Netanyahu's public repudiation of a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict will have ramifications for U.S. priorities throughout the region.

"The situation in the Middle East is obviously very complicated with many intersecting, overlapping and in some cases contradicting conflicts," Mitchell said. "It adds to the complications."

Netanyahu's victory comes as the U.S. faces an end-of-month goal to achieve a framework for limits on Iran's nuclear program. The Israeli prime minister has criticized the talks and said it would allow Iran to become a nuclear power.

"That deal will not prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons," Netanyahu told the joint session of Congress on March 3. "It would all but guarantee that Iran gets those weapons, lots of them."

Though congressional opposition to an Iran deal is likely to harden among Republicans in the wake of the Israeli election, support for Netanyahu's position will probably weaken among Senate Democrats, said Steven Simon, former senior director for the Middle East on Obama's National Security Council staff.

The Israel vote also highlighted the increasingly partisan cast of U.S. foreign policy. Republican lawmakers began congratulating Netanyahu even as ballots were still being counted.

"Congrats 2 Israel & Netanyahu 4 the evident reelection of BiBi,"' Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa wrote in Twitter posting. "Would have been ironic if Obama had succeeded in ousting BiBi but not Assad."