Writing in El Mundo’s Middle East blog, Sal Emergui works himself into something of a lather about the 21 days in prison recently dished out by the Israeli Air Force to one of its members who had allowed himself the luxury of an unsmothered yawn during a speech being delivered by the commanding officer of the Ramat David air force base, on the occasion of a ceremony to mark the anniversary of the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin.

He describes the airman’s punishment as “peculiar”, the same adjective he applies to the “crime” - written like that in his text, inside inverted commas - he received it for. Emergui also seems perplexed by the fact that sentence is being served in a military and not a civilian prison and rounds off his piece by referring to an occasion on which Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was caught nodding off on TV. He seems to think that the fact Olmert received no punishment for his slip, other than becoming the butt of a few jokes, represents some kind of injustice when one considers the 21 days detention received by the yawning airman.

It shouldn’t be necessary to spell basic facts out for the benefit of a foreign correspondent for a leading Spanish newspaper, but I’ll go ahead and do it anyway. The airman wasn’t punished for a crime, with or without quotation marks. As a member of one of the branches of Israel’s armed forces he is subject to a disciplinary regime. A basic pillar of military discipline is behaving oneself in a respectful manner towards one’s superiors; failure to do so is likely to result in punishment. It’s like this in the armed forces of Israel, China, South Africa, India and every other sovereign state.

Olmert isn’t a member of the IDF and is, therefore, not subject to its code of discipline. What he did may have been rude, or a simple human failing, but it can’t be seriously compared with an enlisted man openly dissing a senior officer. I wonder if an enlisted man in the Spanish Air Force could ostentatiously yawn in the face of a Spanish Air Force general giving a major speech and expect to get away with.

Perhaps one shouldn’t take Emergui’s piece too seriously. Maybe he just had to file some copy and there wasn’t too much to write about. I can’t help thinking, though, that texts like this get written because a certain class of person can’t accustom themselves to Jews possessing certain kinds of institutions and exhibiting certain kinds of behavior - institutions like armed forces and behavior like the imposition of military discipline - that are regarded as unremarkable when possessed and exhibited by other peoples.