I understand the desire of New York Times columnists to appear realist. Writers who advocate for US intervention to induce Israeli-Palestinian peace, in column after column, month after month, can get to look, well, idealist. Writers are assumed to be wimps anyway.

Still, something strange is happening. On two occasions in as many weeks, columnists who have written passionately about the US pushing peace have argued, in effect, that the Obama administration should just disengage. Last week, Tom Friedman wrote that it's "time to call a halt to this dysfunctional 'peace process,' which is only damaging the Obama team's credibility." Today, Roger Cohen sees Tom Friedman's bid, and raises him, quoting Israel's most widely respected political scientist to boot:

Obama, who has his Nobel already, should ratchet expectations downward. Stop talking about peace. Banish the word. Start talking about détente. That's what Lieberman wants; that's what Hamas says it wants; that's the end point of Netanyahu's evasions.

It's not what Abbas wants but he's powerless. Shlomo Avineri, a political scientist, told me, "A nonviolent status quo is far from satisfactory but it's not bad. Cyprus is not bad."

I have abiding admiration for Shlomo Avineri (and Friedman and Cohen as well), but there is something in this realism that lacks common sense. For it assumes that the status quo can remain peaceful, especially if "we stop talking about peace." That Palestinians can pursue some under-the-radar economic evolution, or that Israelis and their "security wall" can force things to remain quiet when they have to; that Obama and America are better off letting the sides pursue detente, not peace--as if "some non-violent status quo" will hold; as if only idealists like Obama are making the great the enemy of the good.

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Harvey Cox, Mary Gordon, and Cornell West.

For those of you who think you've heard the last of God, listen to these three at the Boston Public Library, interviewed by the indispensable Chris Lydon, and broadcast on his Open Source webcast.

My old friend Danny Rubinstein, who has covered the West Bank pretty much since the occupation began, came over Friday afternoon. He had covered this week's expulsion of Palestinian residents from their disputed home in Sheikh Jarrah. He had just come from conversations with Palestinian journalists in East Jerusalem, and was not in a cheerful frame of mind.

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Job figures are lagging indicators but nobody feels reassured right now. It is hard to imagine Americans returning to something like the full employment of the 1980s and 1990s without new industries like telecom and computers engendering a vast new ecosystem of entrepreneurial businesses; companies in which American technological talent can distinguish itself; companies that either require local workers for infrastructure projects, or, design and manufacture products and components whose labor content is too small for managers to consider outsourcing to the Far East.

The good news is that the electric car is around the corner. The bad news--which is the best news of all for the economy, ironically--is that the electric grid cannot begin to cope with the electric car's demands and possibilities. Layering in all the network technology that will smarten the grid, and preparing electric cars to communicate with it (and each other), will transform our economic and physical landscape. These changes will require a new role for government--something the Obama administration seems to understand. I explore the new ecosystem and its implication in the current Inc. Magazine:

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I spent the day in Ramallah yesterday, attending a meeting of information technology and telecom entrepreneurs, and catching up with some of the folks I reported on in last month's Harper's: Palestinian business leaders who are, slowly but surely, laying the ground for Palestinian civil society; people fighting the limitations of occupation at every turn just to keep their businesses afloat, while the Netanyahu government boasts about "economic peace."

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Undaunted in his campaign to ferret out "anti-Zionists," yet apparently wondering if his own powers may be faltering, Jeffrey Goldberg has called in his Balthazar, "the erudite Yaacov Lozowick," to deal with a hard case:

"My impression of The Hebrew Republic thesis is that [Avishai is] talking about medinat kol exrachai'ah, the country of its citizens. This idea was formulated and mostly promoted by folks who were not only non-Zionist, they were anti-Zionist; it was a ploy to weaken the Jewish aspect of Israel until eventually the Jewish state would be submerged into its Arab environment. Yet Avishai isn't Azmi Bishara. I get the impression he's a caring Jew who is attracted to the medinat kol exrachai'ah idea because it fits so nicely into his broader Weltanschauung, the one that praises the European Union as the way of the future, the goal of human history and so on. On that level, he's non-Zionist because he's joining forces with a particular group of enemies of Zionism, even though he and they are using the same concepts for very different goals."

There is more to his letter. You cannot really understand the surreal quality of intellectual life in Israel today--the rhetoric you hear from talk shows to academic conferences--unless you take a moment to digest it whole. Yet beyond the glib "impressions" of books unread, the illogic ("non" = "anti"), the cozy appeal to dogma ("the Zionist way"), the guilt by association, the condescending tone, the last-minute finessing of obvious contradictions (viz., "the Zionist way" that takes Israeli Arabs as a "constituency and responsibility"), even the yanking-in of hackneyed German to sound, well, "erudite"--beyond all of this transparent demagogy--is a common claim that requires a moment's thought.

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A couple of days ago, Jeffrey Goldberg explained why he was disinclined to associate with J Street, in spite of his sympathy for a two-state solution:

So I'm comfortable in many ways with J Street's basic worldview. On the other hand, I don't think the group has put forward a well-articulated vision of what a progressive Jewish democratic Israel should look like. This might be because, in addition to having progressive Zionists as members, it also has anti-Zionists (these are the types who are happy with Stephen Walt's tragic endorsement of the group) and it's obviously very hard to put forward a positive vision of a Jewish Israel when some of your important supporters -- Bernard Avishai comes to mind -- don't even believe in the idea of a Jewish state.

Now Goldberg denies that "anti-Zionists" like myself are actually keeping him away from J Street's conference. We would know this, presumably, if we had read a different one-line blog post, in which he says, with obvious sarcasm, "I'm sorry I'm going to miss this conference" (which, in context, if you follow his link, reads like "I'm sorry I'm going to miss this circus"). Then, en passant, Goldberg explains his evidence for "anti-Zionism."

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I am just about to board a plane for the US, so I am unable to answer this remarkably ill-informed (and, under the circumstances, vicious) shot from Jefferey Goldberg: the idea that he cannot go to the J Street conference because "some of [its] most important supporters -- Bernard Avishai comes to mind -- don't even believe in the idea of a Jewish state." I would simply ask readers to consider this post, or this, or this interview. Or just watch this lecture on You Tube. Goldberg has, alas, started to speak about "the idea of a Jewish state" a little like the way FOX News celebs talk about "America." Complexity is for sissies. Very sad. When he was at the New Yorker, his work on the settlers was the best there was.

J Street calls itself "pro-Israel, pro-peace"; the "therefore" is implied. And the priority given to "pro-Israel" in the branding suggests, what most commentators reasonably assume, that J Street aims to give a home to American Jews who, comfortable with identity politics, suppose their anxiety about Israel constitutes a kind of secular Jewish identity; but Jews who also think that successive Israeli governments have hurt Israelis (and, by association, Jews everywhere) with settlements and a repressive occupation--you know, Jews who poll as "progressives" and have felt that Jewish leaders in Washington do not speak for them. (I have assumed something like this case myself.)

Though he downplays this gracefully in various public appearances, J Street's extraordinary Jeremy Ben-Ami obviously means "pro-Israel, pro-peace" to compare favorably with the stance of AIPAC supporters: increasingly rightist American Jews who will favor attacks on Iran if necessary, continued occupation if necessary, and who look to the Israeli government to say what's necessary. These AIPAC Jews, Ben-Ami reminds us, are only a quarter of American Jews; but they've captured the high ground on Capitol Hill for a generation.

Yet putting things this way--"pro-Israel, (therefore) pro-peace"--may be underestimating both AIPAC's achievement and J Street's opportunity.

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In my last post, I told the story of taking my old BMW to Dave Marshall's garage in New London, New Hampshire; of the novel opportunities for entrepreneurial growth the new technologies have bestowed on him. I suggested the ways he was keeping up his end of a new social compact, and I ended the post by suggesting also that there was another side to this compact, a novel role for government--which I've nicknamed "the mentor state"--whose responsibilities to the commercial ecosystem we are just beginning to understand.

Given the often heated reaction to this post, let me hasten to reassure readers, what I took to be self-evident, that the first responsibility of any democratic government (including the one we ought now to envision) is the cultivation of citizens; obvious things like the comparatively excellent public schools in New London, or the New London hospital, which enjoys a measure of municipal support, or land conservancies that make New London beautiful. Kant once said that all things, including people, can be seen as both ends and means; that as ends we have a dignity, as means we have a price. The first role of government is to attend to our dignity.

But unless we commit to socialism in the full sense, which has its own obvious pitfalls, we resign ourselves to the ways of market economies. Governments, Smith said (and who disputes this?), also have to "facilitate commerce in general." They enforce contracts, protect property, inhibit monopolies, and build roads and bridges. How has the new economy changed, extended, the scope of government action? What will the mentor state do differently?

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So the recession is over but unemployment is not falling, at least not yet. How on earth can a recovery be "jobless"? And how might this fit with the fact that, in the 1960s, about 60,000 new businesses a year got started in the US, while over a million a year were getting started in the years before the collapse? Here's a little story; bear with me:

In the summer of 2003, I drove my aging BMW over to Dave Marshall's garage, a converted two-bay service station on Pleasant Lake near my summer home in Wilmot, New Hampshire, hoping to find out from Dave--the solid son of the former Chief of Police--where in Concord or Manchester the nearest BMW dealership was. The "climate control" system was gone, a system governed (I correctly surmised) by a complex little computer module--not your change-your-oil-by-the-beach kind of problem. Dave got behind the wheel, confirmed the symptoms, shrugged, and told me he could handle it. I told him I doubted it. He smiled, not quite condescendingly. I followed him inside.

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President Obama will be hosting both Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Abbas this week. The subject, presumably, will be how to advance the prospects of a Palestinian state, and the agenda, almost certainly, will focus on such things as settlements and security arrangements. What has been getting less attention, but seems the biggest emerging fact on the ground, is the West Bank economy which is being driven by an exceptional, rising business class: the key to Palestine's civil society, around which a state must form. I have spent a good part of the summer talking to these leaders, and report on their achievements--and urgent requirements--in the current Harper's. The bottom line is this: Israel could not invent more appropriate partners to build a Palestinian state, economically federated with itself and Jordan; yet in spite of Netanyahu's exhortations, Israel seems to be doing everything to foil Palestine's economic development. Obama's chief objective must be to get Israel out of its way. (Alas, only Harper's subscribers will currently have access to the entire article. Below are excerpts from the article's opening.)

Benjamin Netanyahu ran for prime minister last winter rejecting a Palestinian state but promising to advance "economic peace." In his much anticipated speech at Bar Ilan University in June, he cautiously reversed himself on statehood but returned to his favorite theme: "Economic peace is not a substitute for peace, but it is a very important component in achieving it. . . . I call upon the talented entrepreneurs of the Arab world to come and invest here."

For Netanyahu's boosters, the phrase often means little more than increasing jobs for Palestinians on Israeli construction projects, including settlements that ring Ramallah, and in tax-exempt industrial zones; as well as more opportunity for West Bank farmers to sell to Israeli fruit wholesalers (who, in a grotesque twist, then pad their profits by controlling the distribution of their produce in Gaza). Economic peace slyly implies that Israelis can have no "partner" for a political settlement until Palestine looks more like Delaware. Meanwhile, presumably, fuller bellies and fatter wallets will make Palestinians more tranquil.

Nevertheless, economic peace prompts a reasonable question. If a Palestinian state rises, will it work? Does not the prospect of sovereignty presume a class of resilient entrepreneurs and professionals, people who will build competitive businesses that will, in turn, employ a burgeoning population?

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I did something embarrassing this past summer. I bought and read the (then) #1 non-fiction best seller: Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers. I expected the usual Gladwell, smart, off-beat, the distiller of academic psychological data for people responsible for judging (and perhaps marketing to) the rest of us. What I found was a profoundly humane grasp of ordinary fate. Consider reading Outliers in the silence induced by President Obama's closing words to Congress last night.

Gladwell purports to write about what makes unusual people successful. But it's the negative space that stays with you: the things we all need to catch a break. I mean the luck to be born at the right time and place. The luck to have local ways to develop ones' talents. The luck to be born to a family that assumes you will indeed have talents to develop and then demands the rigor to master difficult tasks. The luck to be born to a culture that allows you to fail and continue learning, or (what is often the same thing) to speak your mind without undue discouragement from hierarchy.

The luck, in short, to be born, if not a Kennedy, then (as Gladwell and I were ) a Canadian. For you add up the lucks and what you have is really something quite predictable: the benefits of a welfare state--or what I like to call (since this is a knowledge economy) a mentor state.

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Perhaps I am too immersed these days in the novelties of the electric car's "ecosystem," or just cranky contemplating returning to Israel and trading Obama for Bibi, but I am finding various threats to the president from Democratic progressives about the public option shrill and unpersuasive. A progressive seems to be somebody who brings to analysis of public policy none of the astounding progress we've made in commercial information and social networking technology during the past generation--except, of course, when talking about the virtues of blogosphere. (Just watch this short interview with the Daily Kos' Markos Moulitsas on MSNBC and you'll get the idea.)

For God's sake, you no longer need a single, Medicare-style insurer to get efficiencies in claims processing, or buying leverage with pharmaceutical companies, or the sharing of best practices. If you did, you'd still need General Motors to tell suppliers exactly how to make every part, or one big blog to keep the cost of bandwidth low. If, as seems likely, key Senate committees will insist that the public option be delivered through non-profit cooperatives, that may not only be "good enough," it may--with certain collateral regulations--be better than any Medicare-style insurer.

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Unlike Yasir Arafat's periodic declarations, Salam Fayyad's announcements that his government is preparing the institutions of statehood, irrespective of negotiations with Israel, should be taken seriously--and welcomed. As I argue in a forthcoming article in October's Harper's, Fayyad is no mere technocrat. He represents, and is organizing, precisely the business and professional class that can bring off his vision.Palestinians, too, can create facts. Ironically, Fayyad's political strategy mirrors historic Zionism's success.

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