There's little good to say about outgoing Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon. He combined abrasiveness toward Israelis with softness toward terrorists. While Israel has bigger security problems than Yaalon, his misguided ideas about trying to maintain a status quo with Hamas instead of defeating it have contributed to those problems.
Like much of the elite of the security establishment, Yaalon prided himself on liberalism toward the enemy and hostility toward the right. The two inciting incidents that helped drive him from office were his ruthless pursuit of a soldier who shot a wounded terrorist he feared might be a suicide bomber and his defense of a general who compared Israel to Nazi Germany on Holocaust Memorial Day.
The former made him hated by the public. The latter pushed even Netanyahu over the top.
Yaalon departs in predictable fashion vowing to join any political party that will have him. Or perhaps start one of his own. The media will no doubt be prepping yet another fake third party for the next election after Yair Lapin and Moshe Kahlon, the last fake third party figureheads, flamed out. Yaalon is a gray and uninteresting figure. It's hard to see even the media being able to transform him into a national figure. And far too many people revile him now no matter how many editorials Haaretz or Yediot might run about the threat to democracy or freedom of speech as represented by the end of his time in office.
Lieberman is not the savior that many people imagine. He is likely to spend much of his time in office on self-promotion. But it's still better than how Yaalon used his time to push policies that were often little distinguishable from those of the left when it came to fighting Islamic terrorists.
In time honored fashion, Yaalon is warning about the "extremism" of the government he was in. That will appeal to the left, but not to Israelis who increasingly see the government as far too in thrall to left-wing elites.
