From Ernest R. May’s “Lessons of the Past” (1973) to Yuen Foong Khong’s “Analogies at War” (1992) to Jeffrey Record’s “Making War, Thinking History” (2006), historians have argued about the use—and abuse—of historical analogies by decision makers. It is now conventional wisdom that Lyndon Johnson’s advisers were misled into going to war in Vietnam by “the Munich analogy.” Yet liberal historians who agonize other the misuse of Munich are often quite happy critiquing American intervention in Iraq as “another Vietnam.” Conservatives or neo-conservatives in the Dick Cheney mold retort that it is Obama liberals who were misled by their Vietnam obsession to make American defeat in Iraq a self-fulfilling prophecy. It is now clear from an lengthy, interesting account by Ben Birnbaum and Amir Tibon in the “New Republic” of the Obama-Kerry failed Mideast peace mission how the Vietnam analogy was central at least to Secretary of State Kerry’s belief that Israel, led by Prime Minister Netanyahu, was not doing enough to “empathize” with the Palestinians: “The prime minister opened the meeting by playing Kerry a video on one of his favorite topics: Palestinian incitement. It showed Palestinian children in Gaza being taught to glorify martyrdom and seek Israel’s destruction. ‘This is the true obstacle to peace’, Netanyahu told Kerry. “‘It’s a major issue’, Kerry replied. ‘And nothing justifies incitement. I hate it. I’ve read Abbas the riot act about it. You know I have. But it is worthwhile to try to understand what life looks like from the Palestinian point of view.’ “‘This has nothing to do with the occupation and the settlements’, Netanyahu said. “Kerry pressed on: ‘When I fought in Vietnam, I used to look at the faces of the local population and the looks they gave us. I’ll never forget it. It gave me clarity that we saw the situation in completely different ways.’” “‘This isn’t Vietnam!’ Netanyahu shouted. ‘No one understands Israel but Israel’. “Kerry tried explaining himself again: ‘No one is saying it’s Vietnam. But I’ve been coming here for thirty years, and I’m telling you, what’s building up in the Palestinians has only gotten worse. I’ve seen it. It doesn’t matter if it’s right or wrong; it just is. It can’t be solved if you can’t see it how they see it’.” President Bill Clinton—who invented the role of the president as “Empath in Chief”—is the great exemplar of both the strengths and the weaknesses of political empathy. In domestic politics, “I feel your pain” worked great for him at the ballot box. But in foreign policy—after the initial success with the 1993 Arafat-Rabin signing on the White House Lawn—the failure at Camp David in 2000 demonstrated how empathy could not bridge fundamental disagreements between adversaries. From Israel’s perspective, the trouble with Kerry’s urgings that it—once again—empathize at all costs with Palestinians is that empathizing with a psychopathic enemy like Hamas, blinded by hatred to everything but revenge for real and imagined grievances, is that you, too, will end up blind to your own self-interest including your interest in self-preservation. As is known to readers of sources more eloquent than any historian—The Bible, John Milton, Aldous Huxley—it was Samson who, by romantically empathizing over-much with the Phillistines, ended up “eyeless in Gaza.” It is Kerry who now may be blind to the folly of over-empathetic cease fires with Hamas, but it is innocent Palestinians as well as Israelis who could ultimately pay the price.