Israel’s 66th Independence Day, 2014.

On the eve of Israel’s 66th Independence Day, Minister of Finance Yair Lapid announced on his Facebook page that he had decided to resign.

It was Lapid’s 120th post to his half million Facebook friends, but the title that he gave it this time seemed even more sensational than usual. “Let’s Talk About (Prime Minister Benjamin) Bibi Netanyahu,” he wrote, and he spent 2,000 words doing just that. With remarkable proficiency, Lapid described how Netanyahu had deceived him when he promised to get the diplomatic process moving — writing that what actually happened was that Netanyahu succumbed to Knesset Members Zeev Elkin and Danny Danon. Not only did he shut the door on Abu Mazen. He also made a mockery of President Barack Obama, he explained. Once again, the journalists were fuming. Lapid bypassed them with his dramatic announcement by sending it directly to Facebook.

The moribund diplomatic process may have been the official reason for the crisis initiated by Lapid two weeks earlier, but his real motive was that he wanted to get as far away as possible from the Finance Ministry, and he wanted to do it as quickly as possible.