It's hard to understand why Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman stood on the sidelines for many long months watching the Foreign Ministry employees' justified struggle to improve their salaries and work conditions. Precisely at a time when Israel needs to gather all its strength for its public diplomacy fight against boycotts and de-legitimization around the world, the Foreign Ministry announced a general strike for the first time March 24.

The unprecedented decision to strike by the Foreign Ministry workers committee, including all its 103 embassies and delegations abroad, should serve as a wake-up call to the prime minister and foreign minister. Both of them must come to the aid of the diplomatic corps and bring about a speedy end to this crisis. Precisely Netanyahu and Liberman, who are on the front lines of the diplomatic process and aware of Israel's inferiority to Palestinian public diplomacy, should have known better. They should have shown more sensitivity to the distress of the Foreign Service workers who are their partners on this front.

The committee's claims are basically justified. According to data spread by the committee, the last decade has seen ongoing erosion of the salaries of the Foreign Ministry employees, leading to a situation in which about a third of the employees left the ministry in the same period for to economic reasons. Therefore, Liberman's aggressive response was not at all understandable when he stated that the strike is "a miserable decision showing that they have lost their senses entirely," instead of backing up his workers or at least expressing solidarity with them. Thus the minister's thick-headed response proves that his workers had no choice but to take such an extreme step. Perhaps now, when the foreign minister and his deputy won't be able to enter their offices in Jerusalem due to the strike, when the gates of Israeli delegations around the world will be locked, when the public diplomacy arena will be totally abandoned — perhaps then, someone will take Foreign Ministry worker demands seriously.

At the end of this week, the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva is poised to vote on five condemnatory resolutions against Israel, one of them calling for support of the boycott against products from the settlements. Because of the strike, the Israeli side will scarcely be heard, if at all. Events like this happen on a weekly basis. Calls for boycott never stop and Palestinian public diplomacy now operates unchallenged.