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And now, from the University of Chicago Institute of Politics and CNN Audio, the Axe Files, with your host, David Axelrod.

I caught up with an old friend yesterday, Tom Nights, the US Ambassador to Israel.

Tom has a long and auspicious history in American politics and government and finance, and a story I'd like to explore at greater length at some future date, but the Ambassador was on a tight timetable, and I wanted to focus on the current crises in Israel, posed by Prime Minister Netanyahu's plan to curtail the country's independent judiciary, the Israeli government's decision to retroactively approve nine more settlements in the occupied West Bank, and the subject of how the US may respond to these things.

Here's that conversation.

Ambassador, it's great to see you. Full disclaimer here. We're good friends, so it's always good to see you.

Let me just jump right in because I know you are pressed for time. When you got this job, you said, which is a little more than a year ago, you said, well, my job is to try and promote calm.

So how are things going these days, my friend?

Yeah, little harder than I anticipated. Listen, the most important thing is that this relationship between the United States and Israel is an unbreakable bond, and which is the direction I got from the President when I took this job.

And we're going to continue, even though when we disagree, which we're going to disagree, that's what friends do.

Listen, you follow the US Israel relationship for a long time, David, you know, all the players. This is what friends do, and we're going to disagree on things that we don't like.

It does not suggest that we don't have Israel's back, that we don't support Israel's security.

Really important to understand that, but we are going to argue when we believe in things that are strongly against the interests we believe are in Israel's best interests.

But when it worked with them, when we can, I want to come back to this very point, but let me set this thing up because actually you did pretty well on the calm front for about a year.

And there was another election. I think there were five in the last few years.

And you have a new government in Israel, maybe Netanyahu is back as Prime Minister, but the cost of putting his government together by a very narrow margin was it is the most right wing government in the world.

And the government in the history of Israel, religious parties are empowered in a way they haven't been and that's created two issues that you're grappling with right now.

I could see the lines in your face that reflect that one has to do with the nature of democracy in Israel and the other has to do with the continued development of settlements by Israel in occupied areas.

So let me start with the first Prime Minister Netanyahu and his coalition are moving along a series of proposals that would in many ways got the power of the independent judiciary in Israel.

You've been more outspoken than any American ambassador generally would on this. The president of the United States has commented on it, which is highly unusual.

Well, tell me what you think the state of play is there and what you think the consequences of these proposals would be for Israeli democracy.

Well, it's a great question. We have to step back for a second and to say the following. First of all, you were right. This is a vibrant democracy as proven by the numbers of the tens of thousands of people who are protesting every Saturday.

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