Leadership for What Purpose in Israel and Gaza?

As Israel embarks on yet another war "operation" against Hamas-led Gaza, many commentators, especially in the United States, decry a lack of leadership on both sides. I am not so sure. Leadership, by itself, is neither virtue nor vice; rather, leadership becomes one or the other as a result of the ends toward which it leads and the tactics it choses to get there. Leadership, both in Hamas and in increasingly conservative Israel, seems to be quite effective at leading toward exactly the sort of polarized situation Roger Cohen so trenchantly describes in the 15 July 2014 New York Times:

"Images of blown-up Palestinian children, and that skewed death toll, will hurt Israel. Its drift toward a culture of hatred toward Arabs will continue. The murder of Muhammad Abu Khdeir in revenge for the murders of three Israeli teenagers, and the brutal police beating of his cousin, were signs. Netanyahu called the Israeli teenagers’ killers “human animals.” The liberal daily Haaretz rightly observed: “Abu Khdeir’s murderers are not ‘Jewish extremists.’ They are the descendants and builders of a culture of hate and vengeance.”

"That culture is reciprocated by Palestinians toward Jews. Last month Mohammed Dajani, a professor at Al Quds University, quit after being hounded with death threats for taking a group of Palestinian students to Auschwitz. He thought young Palestinians should learn about the Holocaust, a heinous affront to the ruling order in the West Bank and Gaza. Enough said. Palestinians get weaker — a 66-year trend now — because they fail to look reality in the face."

Neither side really wants the other to remain--this is the crux of the issue and of the gap between the American center-left and the Israeli (and, for that matter, the American) right. The left assumes that good leadership would be effective at rapprochement and coexistence. I agree that achieving this would take exceptional leadership, but what we really should be debating at this point is the end goal toward which any sort of leadership in that region should lead.Current leadership seems to be very effective at getting the region to exactly the point where we are now--where Israel exercises a periodic "cutting the grass" exercise in Gaza. This abhorrent term, chillingly close to similar euphemisms employed by the Nazis suggests that the status quo is exactly the strategy to avoid having to deal with the other.