House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are playing a dangerous game. What they are doing runs the risk of turning Israel into a deeply divisive partisan issue.

Boehner and Netanyahu are joining forces to undermine President Barack Obama. By inviting Netanyahu to address Congress without first consulting the White House, Boehner is retaliating for the president’s recent executive actions on immigration and other matters. By accepting the invitation, Netanyahu is putting himself in the anti-Obama camp. Republicans are thrilled, and Democrats are offended, by the show of disrespect for the president.

Nearly every issue in American politics has become partisan. Democrats and Republicans can’t agree on taxes, education, whether climate change is caused by human activity or even how the economy is doing.

Israel used to be a relatively nonpartisan issue. Americans have never shown much sympathy for the Palestinian cause, and they still don’t. During the Gaza war last summer, only 14 percent of Americans expressed more sympathy for the Palestinians than for Israel, according to a Pew Research Center poll. A bare majority — 51 percent — sympathized with Israel. More than one-third of Americans said they sympathized with both sides, neither side or had no opinion.

Public sympathy for Israel has been increasing since 2002, according to the Gallup poll, but that is largely because of growing pro-Israel sentiment among Republicans. A year ago, Republican support for Israel reached 81 percent. Support for Israel was significantly lower among Democrats (58 percent) and independents (56 percent).

Republicans have become uniformly pro-Israel, while Democrats are more divided. The division among Democrats is not pro-Israel versus pro-Palestinian. Very few Democrats are sympathetic to the Palestinians (17 percent in the Pew poll). It’s really a split over Israel’s occupation policies that critics believe violate human rights.

Democratic Party leaders have tried to hide that division. They did that at the 2012 Democratic National Convention. When the delegates voted on a platform amendment to restore language saying “Jerusalem is and will remain the capital of Israel,” support in the convention hall was clearly less than the required two-thirds. After some consultation, the chair called for a second vote. Same result. So the chair simply declared the amendment approved.

Only one place in U.S. politics has, so far, been immune from the growing partisan divide over Israel: Congress. Congressional Democrats have always been as staunchly supportive of Israel as their Republican colleagues. Criticism of Israel in Congress has been confined to the far-left and far-right fringes.

One could make the argument that without Congress, there would be no Israel. Since the 1967 Middle East war, every U.S. president, Republican and Democrat, has experienced run-ins with Israel. But Congress, whether controlled by Democrats or Republicans, has always been there to bail Israel out. Pro-Israel organizations such as Christians United for Israel and the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee know that. That’s why they have always concentrated their lobbying influence on Congress.

Netanyahu is playing his own political card here. Israel is having a national election two weeks after Netanyahu addresses Congress in March. Israeli political commentator Nahum Barnea wrote that Republicans “are helping Netanyahu defeat his rivals here, and he is helping them humiliate their rivals there.” Barnea warned, “That is dangerous. That is toxic.”

On Israeli radio, Shelly Yachimovich, an opposition member of the Israeli parliament, called it “a brutal and unacceptable bypass of the president of the United States,” adding, “Such a thing simply damages us.”

Congressional Democrats will certainly be in the audience applauding Netanyahu’s address. They do not want to retaliate by showing disrespect for Israel. But they deeply resent what Boehner and Netanyahu are doing. That resentment is likely to break into the open if, under pressure from Israel, nuclear negotiations with Iran break down and the U.S. gets pulled into a new military engagement in the Middle East.

Rank-and-file Democrats are also likely to be offended by the insult to their president. The risk is that support for Israel among Democrats will erode and the bipartisan pro-Israel consensus in the United States will collapse.

“Netanyahu is using the Republican Congress for a photo-op for his election campaign,” former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk told the New York Times, “and the Republicans are using [Netanyahu] for their campaign against Obama.”

Both Boehner and Netanyahu are meddling in another country’s politics. That is never a wise thing to do.