The wife of a close associate of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday apologized for a tweet in which she had called President Barack Obama "black and weak," Haaretz reported.

Judy Nir Mozes Shalom, who is married to Interior Minister Silvan Shalom, had caused a stir over the weekend as many perceived her comment as racist.

"Do u know what Obama Coffee is?" Mozes Shalom had wondered on the social network. "Black and weak," she quipped, before deleting the tweet.

Mozes Shalom told CNN that she had merely been repeating a joke, but she deleted the message a short time after publishing it. Nevertheless, the tweet made headlines in Israel, and fellow Twitter users accusing her of being "racist" and doing "grievous damage" to foreign relations.

"I apologize," Mozes Shalom tweeted later. "That was a stupid joke somebody told me," she explained.

Mozes Shalom's husband is "partially responsible for maintaining Israel's good relationship with the (United States)," Haaretz noted. Ties between the Obama administration and Netanyahu's recently re-elected government have been strained because of disagreements over an emerging agreement between Washington and Tehran on Iran's nuclear ambitions.

A former Israeli ambassador to the United States, meanwhile, is also being critized over remarks he made about Obama, Politico recalled; Michael Oren wrote in Foreign Policy that he spent a lot of time trying to understand the president's approach to the Muslim world.

"Obama's attitudes toward Islam clearly stem from his personal interactions with Muslims. These were described in depth in his candid memoir, 'Dreams from My Father,'" Oren noted.

"Obama wrote passionately of the Kenyan villages where, after many years of dislocation, he felt most at home and of his childhood experiences in Indonesia," he wrote. "I could imagine how a child raised by a Christian mother might see himself as a natural bridge between her two Muslim husbands. I could also speculate how that child's abandonment by those men could lead him, many years later, to seek acceptance by their co-religionists."

Multiple Israeli officials, including former Finance Minister Yair Lapid and Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely, condemned Oren's analysis, according to Politico.