For one thing, there was the nuance of audience: he was being interviewed by Fox TV and, perhaps already mindful of the mid-term congressional elections later this year, it would be understandable should he wish to play down any suggestion of a bias against Israel in favour of the Palestinians.
After all, Fox is the natural home to both viewers and commentators who may already believe that by virtue of his middle name "Hussein", the President is, de facto, compromised in such matters.
But even if this were not the case, in every likelihood Mr Obama would have chosen to tread carefully for, as many a United States leader has discovered before him, the Middle East can prove a graveyard of presidential ambitions, with numerous competing interests and powerful forces - both domestic and international - to be balanced and mollified.
Indeed, watching the various figures in the drama attempting to recover their equilibrium in the wake of the spat has resembled nothing so much as a convention of political high-wire acts.
The row erupted when, as US Vice-president Joe Biden arrived in Israel to preside over "proximity" peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians, the former announced plans to proceed with the building of 1600 dwellings in the predominantly Arab east Jerusalem.
This was construed, if not as a politically-driven attempt to cauterise peace efforts, then an irresponsibly careless bureaucratic bungle.
The Israelis insisted it was the latter, and were reported to have expressed "regret", but not before harsh words had been spoken.
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stated that the move was "an insult to the US" and Mr Biden chimed in with: "I condemn the decision by the Government of Israel ...
"The announcement ... is precisely the kind of step that undermines the trust we need right now."
Hence the "worst crisis" verdict put about by various commentators.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not appear to be in crisis mode, nor about to resile from the decision as he told a meeting of his Likud party late last week that construction would continue "as it has during the last 42 years" - in reference to the Jewish expansion that began in East Jerusalem after it was captured during the 1967 Six-Day War.
Mr Netanyahu's most immediate objectives will be to hold together a fragile right-wing coalition for some of whose members continued expansion is an article of faith.
He also knows that he has powerful support within the United States from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, one of the strongest advocacy groups in the country, coincidentally whom he was due to address this past weekend.
The spectre of Iran gaining nuclear weapons might also be said to sit on his shoulder as he feels his way across that who-will-blink-first tightrope.
And with not only Mr Obama making conciliatory noises, but also Mrs Clinton emphasising the two countries' special relationship, it might be said that it is the Israeli Prime Minister who has come out of the affair smelling of roses.
But he, too, needs to tread very carefully.
The recent stolen identity fiasco in which the passports of Australian, Irish and British citizens were appropriated in an assassination plot - to kill a Hamas leader in Dubai - infuriated those countries.
Canada has been on the end of such illegal and deplored tactics, as indeed has New Zealand.
In 2004, then prime minister Helen Clark angrily denounced Israel and imposed diplomatic sanctions on it after two suspected Mossad agents were jailed for six months for trying on false grounds to obtain a New Zealand passport.
Prime Minister of Australia Kevin Rudd was similarly forceful over the recent episode.
While all these countries find much in common with Israel, and much to admire about it, its intransigence in the field of international relations is evidently a source of frustration and anxiety.
As much as Mr Obama is soft-pedalling in public over the recent spat, in private there is little doubt the Administration is furious.
The US desperately needs alliances, and sympathy, in the Middle East beyond its traditional bonds with Israel if it is to maintain pressure against Iran's acquisition of the bomb.
One sure way it sees of achieving this is through making progress in peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, an objective that, from time to time, seems to slip down Mr Netanyahu's, and Israel's, agenda.
