Click to listen to the audio version of this Daily Paradox.

President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are both highly intelligent and distinguished politicians. Both have considerable experience of the Israeli question; both know that the solution to the problem involves avoiding statements that raise expectations and tensions to a point where peace becomes impossible without a change of cast. Neither wants to lose his job.

In spite of this we had the ungainly sight a few days ago of the President insisting on boundaries for Israel that he knows are indefensible and therefore unacceptable and of the Israeli Prime Minister lecturing the President in front of the cameras and the world. The President’s constituency does not allow him to make statements of entrenchment without a subsequent politically weakening withdrawal; Israel does not have so many friends that it can afford to alienate its major supporter, the United States.

So what went wrong that led to a humiliating re-defining of what he said from the President and a considerable weakening of Netanyahu’s support elsewhere in the world? Were both men playing to the wrong gallery? Did the agendas get confused? Was the sheer pressure of the situation too much for them?

I suspect none of these things. The two know each other well. It seems that they don’t have a natural ability to communicate easily. My guess is that each misjudged the situation of the other and both failed to do the preparatory ground-clearing before their confrontation became public and apparently intransigent.

If my suspicion is right it is a classic case of them not understanding that their IQs and EQs, which must be considerable for both men, depend on successful application of the HQ (Handling Quotient). Any decisions about Israel are necessarily short – or, at best, medium – term while the so-called Arab Spring is flexing. Final solutions are still inevitably some way off, much as the President would like to add something permanent to his score board.

In this situation the only way to handle each other is to first privately agree the achievable immediate objectives and take their public stances around those, not around dogmatic and unsustainable positions. Successful negotiation is about the terms on which the negotiation is carried out as much as the eventual outcome of the barter.

Where Presidents and Prime Ministers are concerned the preliminaries to a public meeting are conducted by an army of aides, some of whom must have very red faces today. For the rest of us, not backed by such expertise, it should be a lesson in the importance of the groundwork of what is, and what is not possible before the battle starts. A clear understanding of the area of essential compromise is basic to any solution. Politics is the art of the possible.

In the end we are all politicians of one sort or another.