Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve. -George Bernard Shaw

What if it's true? What if Israelis deserve no better than Ehud Olmert, Amir Peretz, Avigdor Lieberman, Moshe Katsav, Dan Halutz?

If we are stuck with them, and they have nothing to offer us in the way of governance or personal example, perhaps they can offer us something else. At the very least, maybe they have something to teach us. About ourselves. What's wrong with us.

	Advertisement

Take the question of leadership. We know what we want in a leader, the kind of person we'd be fools not to follow. We want someone wiser than we are on issues of life and death, someone better able to see around corners and beyond horizons. We want someone of sounder judgment, superior imagination, someone whose ability exceeds his ambition, someone who cares about the country more than he cares about his chair. Someone who cares about us.

Now look who we've got.

At this point, the top echelon of government, and much of the top leadership of the military, is a collection of one-man fan clubs. Leaders whose followers long ago knew better than to continue to follow them.

Here's where it gets even more depressing.

What if the reason that we tend to get the leaders we most deserve is that we tend to vote for the leaders we most resemble?

The cabinet, the Knesset, the president, the chief rabbinate - they are their constituents in caricature. Us, in a fun house mirror.

If this is the case, it should be a fairly simple matter to divine what's wrong with Israelis. The male ones, at any rate.

First, we apply the Universal Law of Israeli Male Dynamics, which states, referring to behavior in the Gan, or Israeli pre-school:

They never left the Gan.

They can do whatever they want. They can say whatever comes to mind. There are no painful consequences, no significant punishments. They can decide that the sandbox is theirs, and woe to the kid who was there first.

They believe, and they may be right, that they will not be thrown out of the Gan, no matter what they do.

Anything goes.

Witness what is sometimes called the Rabin Principle, that we can battle terrorism as if there were no peace process, and pursue the peace process as if there were no fight against terror.

It doesn't work. In fact, any kid in Gan could probably figure out that it cannot work. But we are so clever, we tell ourselves, that we can make it work.

We won't let the fact that it never works deter us.

Witness Thursday night. As Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is launching one of the most potentially useful and significant summits, on his way to meeting key mediator Hosni Mubarak, the Israel Defense Forces was raiding Ramallah in an operation - carried live on Al Jazeera - that cost four Palestinian deaths. As well as any chance that the summit could help free kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit.

"Things developed in a way that could not have been predicted in advance," Olmert said, in an expression of magic thinking fully worthy of a response to an angry pre-school teacher. "If innocent people were hurt, this was not our intention."

Even in the absence of dramatic events, variations of the Gan axiom abound. A random selection, from the pre-school that meets every Sunday in the Cabinet Room: