L'Affaire Yaalon

Recently, the Israeli Defense Minister got himself into hot water for saying what everyone else has been thinking.  Referring to the Crimean crisis, he stated that:

“If you sit and wait at home, the terrorism will come again. Even if you hunker down, it will come. This is a war of civilizations. If your image is feebleness, it doesn’t pay in the world. Nobody will replace the United States as global policeman. I hope the United States comes to its senses. If it doesn’t, it will challenge the world order, and the United States is the one that will suffer.”

This made the State Department go ballistic, caused Kerry to call Bibi, and apparently involved a request from the American side that Yaalon resign from his post!

My thoughts on this whole affair include:

• Instead of trying to turn Israel into your whipping boy, maybe the "cronies" at the State Department should address the points that Yaalon raised. It seems to me that they are trying to kill the messenger precisely because his points were so close to home. 
• Israel is a democracy where free speech is protected. The US also used to value freedom of expression, but clearly those days are gone.
• Yaalon was freely elected by the voting public and is a war hero who is eminently suited to this position. Why would the US think that they could dictate who is in the Israeli cabinet? Can you imagine any country making such demands?
• Since the NSA is reading this, I expect that I am now on some Orwellian watch list.
• Actually one of the things that I love the most about Israel is that being "dugri" (i.e. direct/blunt) and free-wheeling, heated debates, are a valued form of discourse. It is so refreshing to be in a place where political correctness has not yet infiltrated people’s vocabulary and minds to the point that they can't produce a sentence without qualifying it ten times. I honestly can't tell you how much I missed this all the years that I was living in the US! 

Lastly, I find this whole affair slightly odd when you consider how much harm this administration has done to US-Israel relations. Let’s take a moment to recap some highlights:

The administration began its first term pledging the need to put some "daylight" in the relations between Israel and the US. (This is apparently the politically correct way of saying “Distance yourself while kissing up to the Arab States").

Though this administration has repeatedly said to Israelis that "among friends there are bound to be disagreements," it is clear that this is meant to only work one way.

This administration has, on more than one occasion deliberately ambushed Netanyahu on core issues surrounding the peace process - both in the press and at press conferences.

Perhaps most egregious of all, Obama had the temerity to compare Palestinians to African Americans in the antebellum South and the Secretary of State who recently said that Israel's core, simple demand, that it be recognized as the state of the Jewish people was not particularly important.

So these are the people who want an apology because Yaalon said what everyone around the world is thinking? I think it is long past due for the Obama administration to offer an apology to Israel.

Instead, as Shakespeare famously said in Hamlet, they "doth protest too much, methinks.”