It is tragic when small people find themselves at the helm of countries at war. Compare Chamberlain, Netanyahu, and Abbas to Stalin, Arafat, and Ben Gurion. Abbas is not evil as many depict him. He is an office employee, not a fiery politician. He had been very considerate of Jews, honestly sought a peaceful solution, carefully approached Israel during the Oslo talks, and now just cannot handle the tide of public opinion. He is relatively honest: the Palestinians made their demands known at Oslo and have not changed them since.
The Palestinians are right: negotiations with Israel are futile. Like any people, Jews give in only to force. Thus even Fayyad wound up praising intifada.
The Palestinians cannot accept any territorial exchange which would leave Israel with settlement blocs, even though they comprise only about 7% of the land. The Jews who built those blocs were not stupid: their strategic location is more important than their meager size. The blocs would make Palestine’s borders long and winding, complicating travel and increasing their humiliation. By now, the only negotiable point is whether the West Bank will be connected to Gaza with a bridge or by a land route.
Leaders are not conspiratorial, but are plainly stupid. If they are to rise to power, they must be acceptable to all groups. They must be perfectly mediocre, unprincipled, and corrupt. The commando mentality of Israeli leaders, which leaves no room for strategic planning, goes well with naive leftist at the helm of America, a country which conducts silly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with no exit strategy and costs running at 100 times the amount of US aid to Israel.
Leaders are removed from public interest, and only care for one another’s approval. Thus Israeli government conducts defeatist policies to curry favor with its American colleagues.
Iranians are suspicious of the West. They are ready to export uranium if only the West does its part first. They want respect and cannot submit to threats.
Leaders have surprisingly silly ideas: Wilson on peace (though he lied, probably, to counter the communist peace propaganda), Obama on the Mideast, Bush on Iraq.
Germans and Russians view the same events, the same war, very differently. So did Russians and Americans in the Cold war. That didn’t happen because they are vile or have opposite values. Rather, they interpreted events differently. Blair has an exclusive education, views Arabs as traditional allies and is contemptuous of Jews. Obama’s radical left idealist background and automatic tendency to favor colonized people and Muslims guarantees troubled relations with Israel. Western leaders just don’t view events the way Jews view them. Terms like Juden, Jerusalem, pogroms, terrorism, and war of survival mean nothing to them.
Or take foreign Jews. When White House Jews such as Dennis Ross are entrusted with American relations with Iran and Syria, do their bosses harbor the slightest suspicion that these Jews might be pro-Israeli, which might jeopardize their mission? And these Jews, entrusted with an essentially anti-Semitic task, bend over backwards to prove themselves. In doing so, they are joined by Israeli defense establishment, which rallies behind America’s attempts to engage Syria―even at risk of massive American aid to Israel’s existential enemy.
Israeli leaders have wounded psyches. Barak was broken and moved to defeatism by the Argentinean bombing, which resulted in hundreds of Jewish casualties after he ordered a hit on Hezbollah’s leader Moussawi. A brilliant tactician, he lacks strategic vision and hops from one ad hoc solution to the next. Lieberman, whose Napoleonic ego is forever wounded by his humble origins in a small town in Moldova, an endless source of jokes among Russian Jews, will do anything for a bit of grandeur. Olmert and Livni are haunted by their right-wing past. Both tried to dissociate themselves from that stigma, while at the same time instinctively shrinking from leftist objectives. They haunted right-wingers in order to vindicate their own defections to the Left.
Netanyahu is torn between his Jewish soul and his American upbringing, between his allegiance to the country his brother died for and his obligations to the US establishment that propelled him to power, between his sympathy for right-wingers’ goals and his personal dislike for them. The path of concessions to world opinion made him a hated figure in the right camp, but he is still an alien to foreign leaders and diplomats. His complete lack of political achievements hurts his messianic nature.
All world leaders are worse for their countries than a random set of thugs appointed to the helm.