My acquaintances in the Palestinian Authority’s public relations department in Ramallah shed no tears yesterday, Nov. 6, when they heard about the court’s decision to acquit former Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman. They have felt the absence of their neighbor’s No. 1 anti-diplomat and have longed for the days in which Liberman, with his special knack, would scratch the flesh-toned powder that covered the prime minister’s face whenever Benjamin Netanyahu mentioned the term “permanent arrangement.” As a senior official in the Mukataa once told me, “We can cut the cost of our own foreign minister. Liberman does the job for us much better than Riyad al-Maliki.”

With his acquittal, Israel once again has a salesman for whom the state’s customers around the world refuse to even open their doors. Liberman is officially a persona non grata in the neighboring Arab states of Egypt and Jordan. Though his deputy Zeev Elkin filled the position impressively as the far right’s messenger in the Foreign Service, within political circles there is no substitute for Liberman’s uninhibited tongue, which lashes out fearlessly at the gentiles.

If the transportation minister’s success is measured by the decline in traffic accidents, the foreign minister’s career depends on his ability to smooth corners and prevent diplomatic incidents. That is not the case with Liberman. Unlike his predecessors from the right — Moshe Arens, David Levy, Silvan Shalom and even Yitzhak Shamir — whose service as foreign minister tempered their public statements and sometimes even their positions, Liberman actually sharpens corners. The leader of the Yisrael Beiteinu movement, whose motto is “I keep my word,” hasn’t changed a single item in his lexicon, which happens to be that of a settler from Nokdim, where Liberman lives.

“I’m glad I managed to disappoint everyone,” he said at a press briefing in August 2009, two days before Netanyahu met with American envoy to the Middle East George Mitchell. “Everyone thought that I would say, ‘The view from here is different from the view from there,’ that I would break left and raise the banner of absolute peace. I can see better from here than I saw from there, and it reinforces all those opinions and attitudes with which I ran in the elections.”