Peres, of course, was a man of large flaws, and Netanyahu does possess certain gifts. The flaws of Peres included a weakness for political machination, and a love of abstraction, even at moments that required specificity and hardheadedness. Once, in late 2000, I was sitting with him in the Knesset cafeteria when a fellow member of parliament informed us of a Palestinian terrorist attack on the West Bank. Three Jews, including a mother of five, had been murdered. I asked Peres, who was then expounding on his vision of a “new Middle East,” what he made of the attack. “Setbacks are an important part of crises,” he said. “I’m not terribly impressed by crises. Life is difficult, but compared to what?” I wrote at the time that this answer explained why he had lost so many races for prime minister. Actual Jews were actually dead on a West Bank road, and Peres had already moved past anger and sorrow to abstraction and aphorism.

Netanyahu’s gifts, by contrast, include a justifiable alertness to the danger of Jewish non-existence—many on Israel’s left have ceased to understand that much of the Middle East would like Israel to die, which explains in part the irrelevance of the far-left camp—but Netanyahu also has an exceptional ability to weaponize the pains and fears of his traumatized constituents. The fetishization of fear has caused Netanyahu to make a crucial mistake: He refuses to see that it is possible for Israel’s leader to defend the nation from those who seek its destruction, and at the same time defend the nation from those who would turn it away from its traditional commitment to democracy and equality. Shimon Peres, at his best, protected Israel, from without and from within. There is a reason that he midwifed the Israeli nuclear program into existence—he never, in all his years, stopped making his paramount goal the prevention of a second Holocaust. He understood that Jewish optimism and Jewish innovation and Jewish achievement were all predicated on Jewish survival. But he also dreamt of a better world, and told Israelis that the age of the ghetto was over.

The tragedy of Netanyahu is a provisional tragedy. I spoke to Peres often about this: Like many progressive Zionists, including his great friend Barack Obama, Peres knew that Netanyahu, by virtue of his biography, his ideological predispositions, and his reputation for recalcitrance, could, if he so chose, deliver 70 percent of Israelis to a painful compromise. Peres was not unaware that the Israeli left would be hard-pressed to convince the Israeli public to make the sacrifices necessary to ensure their country’s survival as a Jewish refuge and, simultaneously, as a democratic state. Only Netanyahu could do this. But Netanyahu, again and again, has shown himself to be too small for the job. He has done some useful things—he has kept Israel out of wars his compatriots have sometimes sought, and he has built new relationships for his country across Asia and Africa. But he has mismanaged the relationship with Israel’s Arab minority, and has, on occasion, made Arab citizens a scapegoat; he misplayed, badly, the Iranian nuclear controversy; he has alienated a growing number of young American Jews from Israel; and he turned the cause of Israel into a partisan issue in U.S. politics. Mainly, though, he has led many Israelis to believe that the status quo with the Palestinians is sustainable. It is not. The coarsening of Israeli society, its weakening commitment to the core values of democracy, continues apace, and Netanyahu alternately ignores this coarsening, and abets it.