Let me state (once again), lest anyone misinterpret what I am saying, that Israel's settlement project is a tragic mistake that has denied Palestinians justice, killed thousands of Israelis and Palestinians combined, and for all practical purposes has closed off the possibility of a two-state solution, jeopardizing not only Israeli security and democracy but the country's existence. I hold no particular brief for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or his Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman. I believe ideas matter. And, it's perfectly legitimate for professors to have views about the world and express them, even angrily.

Yet Shlaim and Remnick obscure more about Israel and its politics than they reveal. Yes, we know that Netanyahu and his government are right-wingers and we know that many settlers are racists and harbor little commitment to democracy. It would have been more interesting and I might have learned something new if either author had unearthed the crosscutting political pressures that Netanyahu confronts in maintaining his coalition. Netanyahu is a politician and as a result, like all politicians everywhere, he wants to stay in power. Knowing as the prime minister surely does that Israel's right has toppled successive governments since the 1990s including Netanyahu's own between 1996 and 1999, he is unlikely to pursue policies that will jeopardize his coalition. Netanyahu is no statesman, but statesmen are rare in history. A distillation of Israel's electoral laws, which has done more than anything to create the unhappy situation in the Holy Land, would have been far more helpful to understanding how it came to be that "the settlers, the Ultra-Orthodox Shas, and the National Religious Party" are the backbone of the current Israeli government, rather than the wild-eyed ideologues that Remnick and Shlaim portray. A nod to the fact that the settlement ethos is central to Zionism--of all varieties and shades--would have given some sense of the historical context in which Israeli democracy finds itself under threat. There are, of course, a variety of additional interesting avenues to explore.

I am sure Remnick and Shlaim would say that examining these issues was not their goal, which is their right, but it is also too bad. As powerfully as they have written, they haven't told even the casual or left-of-center observer of Israel anything they don't already know or fervently believe. As a (detached) observer, it's curious to me that even ostensibly sophisticated observers of Israel have come to essentialize--to reduce them to some alleged ascriptive or primordial characteristic--Israeli leaders. And as a result, observers like Remnick and Shlaim, who are only two recent and prominent examples among many others, have done precisely what they so revile about their subjects whom they accuse of having a one-dimensional view of the Palestinians as hopelessly retrograde and violent. I am not sure, but it strikes me that when it comes to Israel, Palestine, and peace, we need less polemics.

This article originally appeared at CFR.org, an Atlantic partner site.