THANKSGIVING IS THE preferred American holiday not just because it is free of commercial pressures, denominational exclusiveness, and the insatiable longing of children. A month shy of the winter solstice, it is also less prone to inflict seasonal affective disorder, but that does not explain its appeal either. Nor does its distance from the frenzy of New Year's. Thanksgiving's place at the center of national good feeling might seem to derive from the sweet, if ahistorical, morality tale of amity between Pilgrims and native peoples. As the universal occasion of family reunion, what else is needed to account for its sanctity?

What do we talk about, to paraphrase Raymond Carver, when we talk about thanks? Awareness begins when a person grasps the single-most basic fact of existence, which is that existence is given.

The most important aspects of each human's condition, from physical makeup to intelligence to family connections to cultural legacy, are accidents of birth. The givens of life do not begin with us. How we make use of what we are given is something else, but givenness is the starting point. Self-consciousness is the recognition that we ourselves are not the source of our most precious selfhood. A religious view makes the instinctive leap from the given to the giver, calls it "God,'' and offers gratitude as the essential form of worship.

But there is a secular equivalent to this impulse, even if it assumes no particular "giver,'' no intelligent designer - nothing personal. The accidents of birth may have been shaped by a set of temporal precedents - driven, say, by cold dynamics like natural selection and random mutation. But what we are left with is the sacred experience of being, when there could have been nothingness. Awe, wonder, fear, and trembling - these define the spiritual response of the human person, who not only exists, but is existence conscious of itself.

Gratitude is built into that consciousness, needing no specified object, much less a named benefactor. Gratitude extends simply to all that went before, and all that sustains. Grateful to parents, and all ancestors; grateful to the fragile web of nature; grateful to the very air. As Americans, we can be grateful to particular traditions that protect our freedoms, and press us to expand them. As creatures, we can be so grateful to creation as to refuse the urge to make it stand for something else - even a Creator. We can say thanks without saying thank you. Gratefulness is open-ended.

An intense awareness of what is given assumes the like awareness that it will be taken. There was a time when the bounty of life that we celebrate by feasting did not exist, and a day is coming when it will be gone. Knowing that the feast will end is the precondition of true festivity.

No accident, therefore, that Thanksgiving comes as the climax of autumn, the season of mortality, when the vital abundance of nature harvests itself in one last flame-out of red and gold. The December holiday is all about nostalgia, a dream of the past. The New Year's holiday is all about anticipation, resolutions for the future. Thanksgiving is the holiday of the present tense. We celebrate what we have and who we are - right now.

When religious folks take proper note of the transcendent gratitude of those for whom "God'' is not necessary, believers, too, can be more open to the deeper meaning of Thanksgiving. One can leap too quickly to the other world, shortchanging this one. The overflowing banquet table is nothing if not worldly, gloriously so. Giving thanks to and for the ones with whom we gather is thus a profoundly secular act. But the great religions all say that such rare heartiness is enough - that loving gratefulness among humans is the only thanks that God ever wanted in the first place.

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The Jerusalem chapter of Search for Common Ground, along with the Washington Post's "On Faith" section, asked me to contribute 800 words on how Jewish values animated participants in J Street's October conference in Washington. So--not without hubris--I did:

During the first night of the J Street conference, when delegates were just getting settled, a half dozen speakers -- activists, rabbis and students -- unexpectedly poured their hearts out. The 1,500 people in the hall, the speakers insisted, were not only gathered to represent the majority of American Jews who think U.S. policy should put its weight behind bringing about a two state solution. We were gathered also to redeem "Jewish values." You heard a good deal of the phrase "Tikkun Olam," the repair of the world, that night. And I confess to cringing at times. Was social improvement a peculiarly Jewish desire? Could Tikkun Olam, a kabalistic concept turned into a leftist cliché, cancel out the fact that the Occupation is advanced by zealots of Jewish law, or that rightist, neoconservative ideas are particularly strong (so polls show) among the quarter of American Jews who attend synagogue at least once a month?

And yet something in the claim of these J Street speakers seems vaguely true. After all, 78 percent of American Jews voted for Barack Obama. Why, as the neoconservative Commentary Magazine complained in 1969, do Jews not just vote Republican and advance their class "interests?" Wasn't McCain a more avid "supporter of Israel?" Sure people who have been pushed around as much as Jews might be expected to be for the underdog, including Palestinians under occupation. But suffering, though ingrained in Jewish literature, is not uniquely Jewish either; nor does it necessarily make you peaceful or empathic. Are we to believe then that this desire for social improvement springs from Jewish tradition and if so, can it be redeemed by, of all things, J Street's American liberalism?

Actually, this begs the question, not of who is a Jew, but what is a tradition.

]]> phet, a man who -- much like neoconservatives -- says he would rather die than accept a world in which sinful people are not identified and punished.

So what is the tradition? The law commanded by Torah? Or is it the prophet's gloss on the law? Or another prophet's sublime lesson in humility? (or the Talmud's commentaries on the limits to humility?) The point is: the texts are not monolithic and mere humans have made choices about what commandments to perform, in what spirit; what interpretations to bring, and what texts or melodies to juxtapose. Before "modernity," rival rabbinic councils were the ones to choose; their implicit foil was the dogmatic uniformity of the Church. But at least since Napoleon marched the enlightenment into Poland, there was a new question: who gets to make the choices for Jewish "citizens" of a republic? This is where the liberal impulses circulating at J Street come in.

The phrase "Jewish values," you see, makes sense only to people who assume a world of (what we used to call) "free will." You have to believe that, generally, people have intellectual personality, individual sovereignty, and moral erudition -- that more sacred than the Book is the right to interpret books. Incidentally, this enlightenment insight not only marked Jews for successful acculturation into America, but arguably launched Zionism, too. If every Jew was going to be his own rabbi, then Jewish civilization had best be held together by a common language and territory.

So if Jews can be said to have stood for anything traditionally, was it not this allergy to dogma -- this breaking of idols? Did we not see democratic rights as, well, commanded? And, tragically, have not the land of Israel and Jewish military power themselves become idols for American Jews since 1967 -- or at least for leaders who spoke for the "community," while liberals remained aloof from its parochialism? Anyway, J Street says, "No more." Occupation and settlements justified by isolated passages of scripture debases the way Jews justify anything. Jews are not, or not only, an interest group. It is now Palestinians who have a "yoke" to "untie."

In his 1934 preface to the Hebrew translation of Totem and Taboo, Freud asked: when you eliminate Hebrew, the "religion of one's fathers," and "nationalist ideals," what "is left that is Jewish?" He answered: "A very great deal, and probably its very essence." Perhaps.

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What could they possibly want from us? That was the combined reaction of the president, the mayor, the cabinet ministers and the head of the opposition. After all, they said, Gilo is at the heart of the Israeli consensus. What does that consensus mean? Reminder: In June 1967 Israel annexed to Jerusalem some 70 square kilometers of West Bank territory, including 28 Palestinian municipalities and villages that were never considered part of the city. When Jordan controlled Jerusalem, it was six square kilometers, including the Old City, whose territory is no more than a single square kilometer.

Since 1967, some 30 percent of East Jerusalem land has been appropriated for the construction of new neighborhoods for some 200,000 Israelis. Indeed, there is consensus among Israelis that in a peace agreement that would include exchange of territory, Gilo would remain under Israeli sovereignty. But not in a unilateral step that would not be recognized by any other country. Around the world, there is wall-to-wall agreement that East Jerusalem is at best disputed territory; in the Arab world, the consensus is that it is occupied territory.

Read his whole column about the status of Jerusalem, from today's Haaretz.

So Intel's senior management go into a huddle. They authorize the local management team to meet with Robertson's representatives, along with representatives from the Virginia governor's office, now in the hands of rightist Republicans. At first Intel threatens to pull out of Virginia. But finally they approve a compromise agreement. The facility can stay open, the agreement states, but the shifts will be reduced. Also, on Sundays, only non-Christians can work there.

Imagine, in this fantasy, what the Intel board would face at the next shareholders' meeting. Or imagine the employee emails the corporation's global "Director of Diversity," Rosalind Hudnell, would be fielding the next morning.

Well, if haven't already heard, something quite like this just happened in Jerusalem.

What can Intel's leadership possibly be thinking? Have they lost all sense of who they are, let alone what Intel has meant to Israel? Intel's global sales are roughly equal to Israel's GDP. Intel's billions of dollars of investments in Israel have not only made it the country's largest high-tech employer, but have engendered dozens of entrepreneurial businesses, from software to clean-room building.

Even more important, perhaps, Intel has been something like Israel's most important business school, putting thousands through management and quality training over the years. Its impact on Israel's business culture has been something like MIT and the Sloan School on Cambridge, Mass. It is because they experienced companies like Intel that a new generation of cosmopolitan managers (people who, unlike their parents' generation, know how to listen) has grown up in the "Silicon Wadi" of Tel-Aviv, Herzliya, and Haifa. Indeed, Intel-Israel's former CEO and founder, the legendary Dov Frohman, has a briskly selling book on leadership. My God, if Intel will not stand for ordinary secular norms of human rights in Israel, who will?

PERHAPS THE MOST depressing thing about this affair is the way Intel's management seems to have concluded that this is the price you pay for operating in a Jewish state. Intel's employees chant, "Bum-bum-bum-bum"; presumably, employees in the Jewish state may now and then be forced to add, "Cheery-beery-bum!" Okay, this may not be the place to go into it, but Intel's decision implicitly capitulates to the notion, so casual among many clueless American Jews, that Israel is a something like a big shtetl, run to a great extent by Halachic rules, rationales, and rabbis. This capitulation is dangerous: to Israeli Arabs, to Palestinians, but above all to Israel's secular citizens who mostly consider themselves Jews in a wholly different way.

Look, last week, on a glorious Friday morning, my wife and I drove to Tel-Aviv and participated in a lively seminar to celebrate a new Hebrew translation of Freud's Moses and Monotheism; in the afternoon, we saw a brilliant, elegiac show about the settlements of the Valley of Jezreel by the Kfar Yehoshua artist, Eli Shamir--our budding Andrew Wyeth. This Hebrew version of the global thing, including a Hebrew version of Intel, is the real reason for this country. You can have Shabbes in Teaneck.

Which is not to say that Intel executives should take sides in a Kulturkampf to decide the historical reasons for Zionism. It is to say that Intel should just have the guts to be itself: to stop pandering, to stop thinking that it shows its tolerance for diversity by surrendering to diversely intolerant people. In fact, a majority of Israelis are counting on the conscience of the world to help them muddle through against Hamas on the one hand, and, on the other, the one-third (and growing) part of the of the Israeli population who want, say, the national orthodox assassin of Yitzhak Rabin to be released from prison. Intel, and all global companies operating in Israel, should be a pillar of (here, I'll say it) Western values. Allow fanatics to push out this pillar, and our souls will die with the Philistines.

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.

• The wall has made a pathetic ghetto of the nearly 300,000 Arabs of Jerusalem. A couple of nights ago, a gang of youths from East Jerusalem had some fun--so my young friend, the journalist Benjamin Joffe-Walt, told me--attacking night-clubbers in Nachalat Shiva, right in front of his apartment, with electric cattle prods. The last two terror attacks against Jews in Jerusalem came from neighborhoods within the wall. South Central LA anyone? Do we even need more disturbances on the Temple Mount to get things to blow?
  
• Nor, as I've argued again and again, can the Palestinian economy grow at nearly the rate it needs to--certainly not "like Cyprus"--if the occupation is not ended. IDF presence is largely meant to secure settlements in Area B and C--belts of land that surround Palestinian towns. So the occupation is a kind of antibiotic against Palestinian entrepreneurship. The Palestine Authority is much more likely to just collapse, or fold up, than engage in some "detente" with an ongoing occupation, with its closure regime. Read Shaul Arieli's urgent piece in today's Haaretz, which argues that the status quo, leading to the PA's "disintegration," would open the door to Hamas; or read Steven Cook's thoughtful piece in, of all places, The New Republic.
• IDF units sympathetic to Greater Israel are already showing an unwillingness to follow any orders to evacuate settlements. This tendency will only grow.
• If the West Bank blows, so will the Arab towns of Israel's little triangle, which Lieberman has already defined as alien to Israel (unless its residents, who have committed to Hebrew, also swear to uphold Israel as a "Zionist-Jewish" state). And when these towns blow, we will be in a Balkan-like civil war, with all the trappings: sniping, ethnic cleansing, terror on all sides.
• Oh, and remember Hezbollah's and Hamas's missiles? If the Mubarak regime in Egypt falls to Islamist rioters, will that be good for America, let alone Israel? No doubt, such riots will have a formal cause in Islamist attitudes toward the West; but will not the efficient cause likely be yet more pictures on Al-Jazeera of Israeli bombs dropping on civilian buildings where missiles are launched? Will Mubarak protect the Israeli embassy yet again?
  

And as for Shlomo Avineri's sense of things, a little history. When I first got to know him, as a grateful graduate student in 1972, he chastised the peace movement that advocated for a Palestinian state. No, he said, Dayan's "open bridges," preserving the status quo, was the only realistic way to go. When Avineri was Director General of the Foreign Ministry under Yigal Allon in 1976, President Sadat sent Israel his first direct message that he was interested pursuing a comprehensive deal. The foreign ministry (among others in Prime Minister Rabin's government) rejected the overtures, since the National Religious Party, which was part of the coalition, had threatened to bolt if the West Bank would become a focus for any negotiation. Avineri, among others, supposed Sadat's initiative was unrealistic.

There is, in other words, a kind of realism that you can never look stupid peddling. It basically assumes the present exercise of force is always better than the prospect of making peace with political enemies, because the other side can never be trusted; that, Hobbes or no Hobbes, it is vain to try to conceive of institutions in which trust is hedged about by policing, clear commitments and simple justice. I am not sure why we need "political scientists" who do not help us conceive these very institutions, especially in the face of violence and threats. In any case, the only psychological force more powerful than realism seems to be repetition compulsion.

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.

ABBAS, YOU SEE, is not the point. He has been a force for reconciliation, perhaps the best partner Israel could ever have (or so former Labor minister Ephraim Sneh writes in today's Haaretz), but his personal prestige was never very great. That he is threatening to withdraw from politics is a symptom of danger, not a danger in itself. For Abbas has always been a kind of national working hypothesis: that Ramallah's secular bourgeoisie was a natural leadership to bring forth a state, and that its power to create the rule of law, and its prospects in the regional economy, justified patience; that the continuing flow of money from the international community justified having a person in the (albeit diminished) Palestinian Authority that outsiders could trust.

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:

"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.

And here I thought the principle that a democratic state's legitimacy derives from the just consent of the governed was older than that. I also thought it was the counterpart to an argument about human nature and human limitations, you know, a moral argument reasonable people since Kant have had some trouble refuting. Wow, it is actually only a Weltanschauung our kids and other "poor, deluded dears" pick up along with a Eurail pass.

Had Lozowick actually read The Hebrew Republic, rather than merely forming an impression of its thesis, he would know that its point was to clarify just how a democratic state could retain a Jewish national character; how to protect its cultural distinction without violating ordinary standards of human rights. I am no Emile Zola, God knows. But imagine someone saying that Zola's case for equal treatment for Jews in the Republic was discredited by the fact that Jews had demanded it before him; that the case "originated" with enemies of the French nation. (Come to think of it, it is not so hard to imagine such people, is it?)

By the way, I interviewed Azmi Bishara at length in the book, and though I took issue with him on many points, Bishara shared with me his abiding respect for the work of Achad Haam, Zionism's most influential early writer, who was trying to explain how the "Hebrew national atmosphere" created by Zionism was the only way, really, to create a state of its citizens that was also a Jewish state. The replacement of the Law of Return with an immigration law that gives preference to refugees from anti-Semitism, but conditions citizenship on naturalization to Israeli identity, not J-positive blood, is just one reform that is overdue.

A FINAL WORD to Goldberg. Look, Jeffrey, people we know in common tell me you are "good company," and given your delight in identifying yourself as a teenage acolyte of Shomer Hatzair, I suspect that, had we met under different circumstances, and though you are closer to my son's age than mine, we would probably have become what writers call "friends." Hell, we might have traded nostalgic, knowing glosses on why Borochov's slavish borrowing from Plekhanov actually caused him to misunderstand how Jewish workers in the Pale would suffer from the rise in the "organic composition" of capital--or was it just that the Shomer Hatazir shaliach in your hometown served better pizza than USY?

In any case, I am humbly asking that you stop. The claims you continue to make about me--that is, "anti-Zionists" like me--are too silly to be worth anyone's time, but the reach of the Atlantic website is too important to ignore. If I do not respond, it may seem that your take-away is true, or plausible, or at least worth repeating.

Nor is this 1909, when calling someone anti-Zionist meant you were merely a part of a fascinating debate on how Jews survive "modernity." It is 2009, and calling someone anti-Zionist tends to type him as opposed to the very existence of Israel or a Jewish national home of any kind. Given the constellation that runs from Hamas to the Oxford Debating Union, the epithet can do a person harm.

And I write from the gate at JFK, returning (legally, but warily) to Jerusalem, embattled enough by the fear that Sidra's and my home will soon be swept up in a kind of Balkan tragedy, with bloody-minded fanatics on both sides demanding allegiance, and "experts" like Lozowick only too eager to choose sides. My deeds upon my head! I crave the law, if not that law. I have enough on my mind.

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."

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.

And, increasingly, it will matter for J Street as well. If the upcoming J Street conference succeeds--as it almost certainly will--it will launch J Street into an orbit that does not simply revolve around how various Jewish demographics fight out their differences over Jewish "interests." It will put J Street squarely in a debate about America in the world.

IT MAY BE hard to remember this now, but the post-war American State Department, from George Marshall to George Kennan, was institutionally opposed to Truman's decision to recognize Israel or support it thereafter. State remained wrapped-up in the need to secure America's oil interests in the Gulf, and through the Kennedy administration was mainly concerned about preventing Israel from developing nuclear weaopons. (I go into this at length in this recent Nation article.)

For its part, AIPAC was founded in 1953 to advance support for the infant Israel in the Congress; and AIPAC remained puny through most of the 50s and 60s. Yes, Israel's prestige rose immeasurably after it beat back threats from its neighbors in 1967, defeating Soviet clients. But then, Israel's assumed military superiority, buttressed by American jets, made lobbying in its behalf seem more or less superfluous. Lyndon Johnson was (like Truman) influenced by Jewish liberal friends like Abe Fortas. When Nixon came into office Israeli diplomats like Ambassador Yitzchak Rabin were all that was needed; Henry Kissinger was so sure that Israel would make short-shrift of any Arab attack that he asked the IAF to intervene in Jordan's behalf during Black September 1970, and even rebuffed Soviet efforts to start a peace process in the summer of 1973.

AIPAC became prominent only during the aftermath of the 1973 War; a bloody war that shocked American Jews of all kinds into action; a war in which Kissinger had to mount a huge airlift and a nuclear alert to save Israel from a stalemate, arguing (plausibly, after the Jordan intervention in 1970) that Israel was, after all, America's key strategic asset in a fight against Soviet Empire. AIPAC embraced this formulation and extended it, supported by budding neoconservative circles, and influential senators like "Scoop" Jackson. Eventually, AIPAC even used it against Kissinger when he tried to pursue detente or pressure Israel to surrender territory in the Sinai in 1975.

In other words, the key to AIPAC's emergence was a Manichean view from America; the fight against the Evil Empire, or since 9/11, the clash of civilizations. In this drama, Israel became cast as America's biggest regional aircraft carrier. AIPAC has succeeded by staying close to American hardliners, arguing against pressuring Israel (to give up territory, to stop settlements, etc.) for the same reason a basketball coach will not foolishly demoralize his slightly brazen power-forward. At the center of the argument was a way of thinking about American hegemony in a dangerous world.

YOU CAN SAY that AIPAC was misguided, that it's even become a pernicious force, but you can't deny that it got its strategic premises ordered properly. One cannot just assume that the Congress will care what Jews want. One has to start with America's foreign policy strategy and then apply its logic to the Middle East. Crucially, this means building coalitions with non-Jews as well, as any watcher of FOX News can see.

Indeed, what J Street really represents--what progressives argue for--is not just support for Israel as such, but for a globalist strategy in which Middle East peace is a key pillar; a strategy of collective security agreements, regional alliances, and international peace-keeping; of patient engagement over the unilateral use of force; of recognition that offering access to economic development and cultural freedom over time is hard power (I hate the term "soft power"); indeed, of the power to attract, not only the power to deter. It means diplomatic containment, not foreign invasion and counter-insurgency. It means what, say, Chuck Hagel calls "realism."

It is within this logic that America's urgent search for regional Middle East peace is "pro-Israel"--but also pro-Palestinian, pro-Jordanian. Which means that J Street will become a focus for a coalition supporting goals that would make President Obama's worthy of his Nobel: deescalation in Afganistan, containment of (not an attack on) Iran, building cooperation with the EU.

This larger coalition is only beginning to get mobilized. General Jones's agreement to come to the conference suggests the administration will be counting on it. Once a healthcare bill is enacted, and the fear of dissipating the solidarity of its Congressional supporters passes (does Obama really want to pick a fight with Joe Lieberman now?), expect the will of this administration--and this coalition--to be felt powerfully in Jerusalem and Ramallah.

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?

EVERY COMPUTER IN every car is governed by specialized software. Cars are becoming bundled computers on wheels. Back in 1995, the EPA mandated that the "port"--the interface connecter--to the engine's main computer be of a standard size, so that every mechanic's "scanner"--a critical piece of diagnostic equipment--could be manufactured and programmed to handle all cars. (Think of how every personal computer's USB port is a standard size.) For the EPA, the chief consideration was empowering local garages to check cars for a yearly road-worthiness sticker, including compliance with state emission standards. But there were more important collateral benefits, which not all parties fully understood at the time.

To put things simply, were the hardware fittings for each car as proprietary as the diagnostic software, Dave could never have afforded the wide spectrum of appliances that he would have needed to serve all makes. The cost of hardware would have become (what business schools call) a "barrier to entry." Imagine having to buy one computer for word processing, another for spread-sheets, another for browsing the web, etc.

But since, by law, the hardware fitting conformed to a mandated standard, Dave only had to purchase the BMW diagnostic software--not cheap, but cheap enough to allow him to compete with BMW dealers. (On the whole, software is always much cheaper than hardware, because--again, in business school jargon--the "marginal cost" of adding another customer is essentially nothing: make software for one customer and you've pretty much made it for a million.)

So Dave was able to buy a standard scanner and then supplement his purchase with a portfolio of custom software for most lines of cars. Mandated standardization unleashed a new competition to provide local excellence.

Government standards meant that the complex repair market, which would otherwise be stacked in favor of big dealers even after warrantees expired, could now include smart, independent technicians like Dave as well. The EPA did not presume to "regulate" competition in the diagnostic or repair industries. No bureaucracy presumed to control the provision of services. What the EPA did, rather, was precipitate a self-organizing system of repair-shop competitors, who themselves used the platform to overcome any barriers to entry and find their own ways to pursue distinct business offerings--services in which the EPA had an interest, and services like Dave's, which the EPA had no interest in at all.

Indeed, the small-shop repair industry organized itself so well that, almost from the start, a partnership developed between two non-profit trade associations, which might have been at each other's throats: one representing repair shops like Dave's, and the other, manufacturers and their dealers. By 2003, the Automotive Service Association (ASA) had reached an agreement with the Association of International Automobile Manufacturers (AIAM) on a series of standards to keep "after-warranty" repair open to smaller shops, where 70% of repairs are now done.

The quid pro quo for the manufacturers was an agreement that repair shops would not infringe on manufacturers' intellectual property--the source code for automotive software, which the repair shops did not need to compete. This may seem a humdrum development, but it is hardly that: by comparison, cell phone makers agreed only this past January, and under pressure from the European Union, to a standard for charging handsets through the USB cable.

IN A SINGLE stroke, in other words, the government catalyzed a "cross-sectoral" partnership, a new kind of cooperation between the public and private sectors. Enforced standardization led to more voluntary standardization, which led to market efficiencies and personal opportunities. The government had inadvertently created not only new terms of competition for entrepreneurs, but demonstrated a new means of delivering a public good.

The relevance of this model to the delivery of healthcare should be self-evident. To deliver a "public option" the first priority is to subsidize people who cannot buy into any plan, private or non-profit. But the next should be standards for claims processing, disease monitoring, and digitizing medical records. If this is done, we will not need huge insurers, or a Medicare-sized bureaucracy, to gain efficiencies and create buying consortia for drugs and medical devices. If this is done, the non-profit cooperative idea might well work better than any other, for it will encourage the development of non-profit HMOs, specialized hospitals and clinics, and reduce the perverse incentives built into fee-for-service.

THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF the mentor state are too complex to do justice to here. But some things can be said. First, the mentor state must enhance the "network effect" of linked businesses, nationally and internationally, much the way corporate leaders now manage businesses through the development of their knowledge management platforms. This means tending to the platform directly: building out the platform's hard infrastructure, making access universal, and mandating, where necessary, protocols for the platform's software spine infrastructure. It will encourage "open source" where possible; it will build continuing systems of classification for vanguard science, the new "roads and bridges" of the knowledge economy.

It will reform the overburdened patent system, and define new protections, distinct from patents and copyright, for inherently shared forms of intellectual property. It will use public sector institutions to advance novel methods of compensation for "snips" of information which cannot be protected as intellectual property, but are everyday assembled into intellectual property.

Biopharmaceutical companies, for example, have over $28 billion tied up in research, and National Institute of Health sponsored labs have over $30 billion. Consider how universities, developers of bioinformatics platforms, etc., would benefit from (what they call) "common ontologies" for structured scientific findings--and especially in vanguard fields such as genomics and proteomics, where different researchers, coming from different frames of reference, are always calling essentially the same physical events by different names. It would be natural for the publically funded NIH to take the lead here, especially in the most advanced areas, where language for findings is least standard. Such systems of classification give a new meaning to roads and bridges.

Indeed, what about protection for "negative findings" that are by-products of ordinary work--information about things that don't work. This kind of information is mostly trivial but not always. It is anything but trivial in life sciences, where eliminating candidate drug molecules from a biopharmaceutical company's pipeline early on may save this company tens of millions of dollars. You cannot patent the fact that a particular molecule does not work, or is toxic, in mice at a certain dosage. But another company at the other side of the world would pay real money to find out about failed experiments elsewhere. The government will have to regulate how participation is promised and compensated and what information is withheld, much as the Security and Exchange Commission regulates audits.

Second, the mentor state will focus on the triangular challenge of cultivating human capital: education, healthcare and environmental decency, which corporations will not do. The mentor state will, however, pursue these goals in innovative ways exploiting the virtues of the platform itself. It will, as Michael Porter and others have written, set strict performance specifications, and prompt start-ups and chartered non-profits to compete on enacting technical specifications. It will thus catalyze cross-sectoral partnerships (like charter schools, teaching hospitals, eco-partnerships, etc.) to pursue the social good more efficiently than through direct government agency. It is peculiar that school choice (vouchers, etc.) are considered a rightist proposal, and single-payer health insurance is considered a leftist proposal, when both rely on this same reasonable logic.

Third, for people incapable of making the transition to knowledge work, the mentor state will invest in--and employ many thousands in creating--an environmentally sound educational and communications infrastructure for future generations. Our children will need many smaller and better schools, competing with each other to advance curricula. They will need many more small liberal arts colleges. They will need national service programs that teach them teamwork, diversity, and poise. They will need wireless networks, ecologically friendly trains, and more--even where private investors would earn only marginal returns. Our inner-city children will also need thousands of preschool centers, thousands of wellness clinics. The cost will be great, but not as great as the costs of not making timely investments in our citizens' minds and bodies.

THIS MENTOR STATE will rise in fits and starts, but rise it must, and this is very good news for citizens and entrepreneurs both. It means that where life in the industrial factory once deformed people by requiring dumb, repetitive tasks, life in the solutions team elevates human skill, requiring deep literacy, curiosity, and a cosmopolitan heart. In the bounded logic of commercial markets, people are still means not ends: they have a price, not a dignity. But the fact that there is more to our lives than markets does not mean we should fail to consider how to make market society work as well as it can.

The good news is that--for the first time in the history of capitalism, really--life on the job will enhance the skills and means that engender democratic citizenship. Never before have human faculties been advanced by ordinary work. This is a relief, or would be, so long as we qualify people to work at all.

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.

Later on I learned that the website Dave logged onto was set up by the IATN--the International Automotive Technicians Network--which itself began as chartered non-profit back in 1972. The network has grown enormously since then, with nearly 50,000 users worldwide: archives, databases for all cars, a library of technical literature, and over a dozen engineering forums on leading edge automotive design problems. Dave was logging into a "groupware" site, which other mechanics haphazardly checked, to see if they could help a fellow member, or solve a product of their own.

Three hours later, I was driving by the garage again and stopped in. Dave was about to call me. He showed me pages of responses, which produced a consistent number of solutions (17 of 21 were more or less identical), describing methods of repair, parts descriptions, parts numbers, software settings, and part sourcing. He was also able to determine whether his diagnostic computer could actually reset the relevant module. By the end of the day, he said, he could give me a complete analysis and estimate, educating me to the module's engineering in the process. Even if I could not give the car to him, he told me, the printout would help me "ask intelligent questions" of the dealer.

DAVE IS not one for policy clichés. But if the "ownership society" had ever needed a poster-child, it could have done worse than capture the smile of reason on his face as he revealed his powers to me. Dave could not have survived as an independent entrepreneur of this sort a mere fifteen years ago and he knew it. His two bays had become five. His peer-to-peer information network, his "platform," had matured into a settled work environment, which meant the world to him: from diagnostic machines to parts ordering systems. These integrated technologies are now so pervasive that our children simply take them for granted. But to those of us who came into our own in the 1960s and 1970s, Dave included, they remain magical.