5:09PM BST 15 Aug 2013
The official gagging order has been imposed on Daniel Seaman, outgoing deputy director of the now-defunct ministry of public diplomacy and dispora affairs, after his comments drew the attention of the Japanese embassy in Tel Aviv.
It means he will be unable to speak or write on Israel's behalf as he prepares to move to the office of Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, as head of the interactive media unit, a job whose remit involves commenting on foreign affairs.
Mr Netanyahu's administration acted after Japanese diplomats contacted Israel's foreign minister to ask if Mr Seaman's August 8 Facebook comment on Japan reflected Israeli government policy.
The post argued that victims of the 1945 Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings were being remembered at the expense of those who died under Japanese military occupation.
"I am sick of the Japanese, of the Japanese, "Human Rights" and "Peace" groups the world over holding their annual self-righteous commemorations for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki victims," Mr Seaman wrote. "Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the consequence of Japanese aggression. You reap what you sow...
"Instead, they should be commemorating the estimated 50 million Chinese, Korean and other victims of Japanese imperial aggression and genocide - not to mention nearly 120,000 Allied military casualties who fought to defeat the genocidal Japanese. These are who deserve to be and should be remembered this week."
It was the latest in a series of robust comments left by Mr Seaman on Facebook, Haaretz newspaper reported.
He attacked the Church of Scotland in May over a report which suggested that Jews had no divine claim to the land of historic Palestine.
He wrote: "The Church of Scotland? The Calvinist, Presbytarian [sic] Church of Scotland? Why do you think we give a flyin **** what you have to say?"
On July 22, he lambasted the EU's decision to label the military wing of Hizbollah, the Lebanese Shia organisation, as a terrorist group a "half-a****"because it made a distinction with its political wing.
At the start of the Muslim holy festival of Ramadan on July 9, he wrote: "Does the commencement of the fast of the Ramadan mean that Muslims will stop eating each other during the daytime?"
Another post on May 26, referred to comments by Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, that Israel had a duty to return to its pre-1967 borders. "Is there a diplomatic way of saying 'Go **** yourself?'" Mr Seaman wrote.
In a statement, the prime minister's office said: "These comments are not acceptable and definitely do not express the positions of the state of Israel."
Israeli officials declined to say if Mr Seaman might be sacked but indicated that further disciplinary proceeding were afoot.
"For someone who up till now has worked in public affairs to be told that he cannot do this any more, and that's before any process that might or might not happen, well that's an important step," one government insider said.
Mr Seaman, a member of Mr Netanyahu's Right-wing Likud party, is a former head of Israel's government press office, when he was noted for his often confrontational relationships with foreign correspondents covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Separately, Israel's ambassador to Sweden has provoked controversy by comparing Palestinian prisoners released this week as part of a goodwill gesture paving the way to peace talks to Anders Behring Breivik, the Right-wing Norwegian extremist who killed 69 people in a shooting spree and eight others in a bomb attack in 2011.
"The horrors that [the Palestinian prisoners] did, to put it in a Scandinavian understanding, it's like what happened in Norway with Breivik," Isaac Bachman, Israel's envoy to Stockholm told Swedish state radio.
"Imagine if Breivik was released as a gesture of some sort."
The comments were condemned by families of Breivik's victims.