This couldn't be more cloying, saccharine, and overwrought.

The author writes like an LLM, with "in his magnificent lecture, the French historian Ernest Renan wrote...", "Thomas Jefferson, 33 years old, wrote...", there's even an "ackshually here's what Ezra Pound meant when he said..."! (Would the author include Pound if he knew Pound's story, and his opinions on the subject at hand?)

It's a catalog of cherry-picked quotes to support a sophomoric and even somewhat insulting political "analysis." Thanks former Israeli PM, but I think that you should attend to the problems you have at home before lecturing at length on the affairs of others.