Netanyahu: The Most Talented Fool in Town

Even Netanyahu’s sharpest critics tend to preface every indictment with a reassuring caveat: he is destructive, dangerous, but very smart. His admirers believe he ranks among the great living minds of our generation. And he himself has never bothered to deny the unfounded compliment that he belongs among the six geniuses of our time. The simple truth is far crueler: Netanyahu is responsible for Israel’s most terrible tragedies because he is consistently wrong. And all his errors flow from one source: he thinks in flat, one-dimensional, rigid terms, and in the deepest sense of the word, he is simply stupid.

Really? Yes, really. Stupidity can flourish in very talented people, those who are brilliant in one domain and complete idiots in others. The stupidity at issue here is the inability to understand complex reality, to learn from experience, to change course when facts contradict the theory. Someone who continues to operate according to a model that reality has already refuted is a perfect idiot, even if he does so with eloquence and self-confidence. Churchill, whom Netanyahu pretends to resemble, defined this type of fool, this zealot of his own mistakes, as “one who cannot change his mind and will not change the subject.” Netanyahu cannot be suspected of being a zealot for any ideology beyond his love of himself, and so he has only one answer to every question: fear and force, force and fear. Repeatedly, without end.

Barbara Tuchman, the historian who studied this phenomenon across the ages, called it “wooden-headedness.” By her definition: “Wooden-headedness is a source of self-deception, a factor that plays a surprisingly large role in governments. It consists of assessing a situation in terms of preconceived fixed notions while ignoring or rejecting any contrary signs. It acts according to wishful thinking while not allowing facts to alter its course. Its peak is described in what a historian wrote about Philip II of Spain: no experience of the failure of his policy could shake his belief in its essential excellence.” Tuchman did not know Netanyahu, but his wooden-headedness fits her theory precisely.

Her definition of folly is no less sharp: “the pursuit of policy contrary to the self-interest of the pursuer, even when viable alternatives are available.” Netanyahu’s folly was not born of ignorance. Like all the tragedies of history, it springs from information he deliberately ignores. His folly is not a simple error; it is the stubborn persistence, the zealous willingness, to keep making the same mistake despite clear and repeated warnings. And the foundational question remains open: why do Netanyahu and so many senior officeholders act against the path that reason and logic point toward?

Tuchman wrote about the folly of the Renaissance popes, who contributed their share to the birth of the Protestant Reformation. They were deaf to discontent, blind to the alternative ideas being born around them, impervious to every challenge, fixed in their refusal to change. They grew from rigidity and depended on it. Every one of those sentences fits Netanyahu like a glove.

Netanyahu excels in certain domains. He is skilled at deception, a master of illusion, capable of speaking, persuading, and maneuvering. He is an experienced reader of polls, an astute reader of audiences, and a high-level operator of political language. But all of these are merely tools, and the real question is what he does with them. The answer: essentially nothing. The tools serve a worldview that has compressed all of reality into a single-variable equation: the world is dangerous; therefore force must be applied, always and everywhere, all the time and against everyone. External and internal alike.

That is his conditioned reflex, and it fails time and again. He ignores the differences between types of threats, between different situations, between success and failure. Every outcome, even when it is the opposite of what he sought, is interpreted as proof that more of the same is needed. This is the clearest sign of political stupidity: turning every result into confirmation of the theory instead of examining the theory in light of its failures.

The most glaring example is Iran. For decades he presented it as the central axis of his life’s mission, the threat around which all of Israel’s operating systems must be organized. In practice, Iran entrenched itself, expanded, and grew more formidable, not least because of him. The policy whose purpose was to stop Iran contributed to its strengthening. This is conceptual failure in its purest form. Churchill, “his” Churchill, wrote that war is above all a catalogue of mistakes. The great world war that Netanyahu cultivated and unleashed will be a catalogue of one mistake repeating itself since the 1990s. The Netanyahu mistake.

Hamas grew stronger, the same as Hezbollah, while the Israeli society fractured and weakened. In each case force was applied, outcomes were promised, and the opposite reality was received. And yet Netanyahu and his cult never stop banging our heads against their walls. No examination, learning, reckoning, or any change whatsoever. The fundamental Israeli paradigm was perfected by him: What force did not accomplish, more force surely will.

History is full of similar examples. Napoleon Bonaparte, the military genius, led a million French soldiers straight into the Russian trap he set for himself. His advisors warned him, and the seasons did not rearrange themselves in his honor. But the tactical genius was incapable of reading a strategic reality that contradicted his flawed starting assumptions. Hitler repeated the same mistake, learned nothing, and was defeated accordingly. George W. Bush invaded Iraq, he and his learned advisors fantasizing about a reality that did not exist and could not have existed except inside their own wooden heads. Putin, the cold and calculating strategist, failed at the most basic thing in military planning: assessing the other side. All of them talented, all of them capable in one domain, all of them prisoners of a trap they could not find their way out of. Tuchman distilled what they had in common with precision: seeing the truth and acting with no reference to it.

Israel is the place where the syndrome of the talented fool is most amplified. The Israeli public spent long years grounding its national identity on the assumption that we and our leaders are smarter and sharper than any adversary arrayed against us. That assumption runs so deep that any evidence contradicting it is interpreted as a threat to survival itself. Unpatriotic, verging on treason. Within such a psychological framework, a leader like Netanyahu can survive every concrete failure, sustained by a mechanism of folly-preservation that feeds on itself. The more the policy fails, the easier it is to justify its continuation, and the greater the threat grows, the stronger the legitimacy to return to the same path exactly.

Netanyahu is the foremost fool of Israel. He is the principal architect of the politics of fear from which he profits, and that politics is what feeds the failures that justify its continuation. This circle is not accidental: it is the survival strategy of someone who has nothing else to offer. His political stupidity is the most tangible danger to Israel’s existence.

This is the truth and nothing but: Netanyahu lacks the most basic capacity of a leader, the capacity to learn. And when a leader cannot learn, all his other talents only enable him to perpetuate his failure for longer, at a higher price, not for him, but for everyone. The only proof that Netanyahu does not have a wooden head carved by Geppetto is that his nose does not grow every time he speaks or thinks. Which means when he is lying to us, or deceiving himself. That is to say, all the time.