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.

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?

For peace to take root, in other words, a Palestinian business class will have to engender a civil society--people networked to the region and the world, developing a secular state as a counterpart to their combined enterprises. If Israel really wanted peace, wouldn't it do everything in its power to facilitate this?

THE QUESTION IS intriguing, not only because of what the Israeli prime minister is saying (or how he is bluffing) but because of what the Palestinian prime minister is doing. Salam Fayyad, the head of the PA's government since the summer of 2007, is a former World Bank official who's often called a "technocrat." He's really a kind of chief executive of this new class of managers and investors: people unafraid of commercial competition, even with Israeli firms, and who expect to eclipse and eventually displace the PA's Fatah leaders--the old cadres whose patronage, monopolies, and little corruptions during the 1990s all but guaranteed Hamas's success in the 2006 election.

Fatah held its first general convention in almost twenty years in Bethlehem on August 4, and a young guard more determined to cooperate with Hamas is now challenging President Abbas's sorry diplomatic record. Behind the scenes, however, it is Ramallah's business elites who are positioning themselves. Fayyad is not the only seasoned manager now taking a role in the PA: the new economics minister is Dr. Bassem Khoury, the former CEO of generic drugmaker Pharmacare; Dr. Mohammad Mustafa, another former World Bank official, now runs the Palestine Investment Fund (PIF), Palestine's $850 million sovereign wealth fund, put together with painstaking transparency from monies Yasir Arafat once controlled with virtually no oversight. Even outside the PA, the influence of senior telecom executives such as Paltel's Sabih Al-Masri and Abdul Malik al-Jaber, or private-equity magnates such as Sayed Khoury, is gossiped about, counted on. One sees the makings of a quiet revolution.

Sam Bahour, an Ohio-born management consultant who was instrumental in setting up Palestine's first telecommunications company and who, subsequently, pushed through construction of Ramallah's first shopping center and supermarket during the darkest days of the Al-Aqsa Intifada, does not approve of Fayyad's American-trained police force's peremptory jailing of Hamas cadres and their curtailment of civil liberties. But he does appreciate the law-and-order government Fayyad has established in West Bank cities, which the Israeli army tends to avoid. This is a kind of dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, Bahour admits, but the alternative is an Islamist command-state, like the one in Gaza, which offers no real hope and thrives on the uncertainties and brutalities of the occupation.

We are sitting in a café, nicely appointed in Art Deco style, which, Bahour tells me proudly, is the first of a chain, a kind of aspiring Palestinian Starbucks. But everywhere on the walls outside are pictures of young people, "martyrs." "Pictures of the Israeli army's innocent victims merge into pictures of suicide bombers and real armed fighters, looking sincere and ready for sacrifice," Bahour says. "This kind of thing works on our young people. When Israel attacked Gaza, my kids were on Facebook every night showing solidarity. We are surrounded by morbid memorials on every corner. We have got to create another reality fast."Bahour means a Palestinian state that Palestinian entrepreneurs themselves create in the womb of, and in spite of, the occupation, much as Zionism created a state within the British Mandate occupation. He is on the board of Birzeit University. He is also part of a business delegation that's been petitioning the Israeli Defense Forces to open the crossings to Gaza, so that West Bank enterprises can get in. ("Put a real Palestinian store next to a Hamas-controlled tunnel, and the store will win every time.") One green shoot of "another reality," Bahour notes, is the surprisingly robust Palestine Securities Exchange, whose companies' market capitalization exceeds $2.3 billion.

But the first order of business is housing. You see construction cranes everywhere in Ramallah. Mustafa says the PIF, in partnership with a Saudi real-estate company, is planning to invest $400 million on the Al-Ersal shopping and business office complex in the heart of the city, a project that will generate thousands of jobs and provide contracts for dozens of medium- and small-sized enterprises, from contracting and engineering to design and supplies. The PIF will also be spending $200 million on the 1,700-unit Al-Reehan project to the north--"our first settlement," Mustafa said, winking. Another hopeful new feature on the landscape--the one Netanyahu was himself grudgingly responding to--is the new president in Washington. Wherever you go in Ramallah you hear lively talk about Obama's leadership and confident declarations of how well positioned Palestinian business elites are to make the most of peace should he give them their chance. All of the business leaders I spoke with are eager for a peace treaty, and if Israeli leaders were seriously looking for partners they would look no further.

Yet what's missing is precisely the Israeli cooperation that Netanyahu's talk of economic peace would require. The problem is not Israeli companies, many of which are as hungry to chase business opportunities with Palestinian companies as the latter are to engage with Israelis. The problem is the occupation, whose military tactics and settlement institutions have long been directed to the realization of Likud's Greater Israel, not a Palestinian state; whose logic is to repress Palestinian autonomy rather than help prepare the ground for it or just get out of its way.

If you spend time in Ramallah and talk to its emerging leaders, it becomes depressingly clear that if the Israeli government were intentionally trying to crush Palestinian entrepreneurship, it could not pursue the endeavor more perfectly. Palestinian businesses have not only been cut off from Jerusalem, their natural commercial center; they cannot count on the things any company needs to survive: access to obvious markets in Jordan and Israel, the mobility of goods, the capacity to recruit talent, basic resources for specialized manufacturing and services, and a reliable financial infrastructure.

(Again, to read the whole article, go to the Harper's website here, free only to subscribers.)

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.

I suspect that readers of this post do not need much convincing. But, for the record, Canada allowed me to go all the way for a PhD without debt. My child, when I was studying in the 1970s, went to nearly free day-care. I never worried about health insurance. Our public television and radio hosts never had to become wood-peckers three times a year. Libel and hate-speech laws required you to actually have some evidence for your claims against someone. I have since put three children through the University of Toronto, also without debt.

Call it luck, if you want. But Gladwell, like Obama last night, might just as well have called it commonwealth. The healthcare debate is just the beginning.

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.

It is through cooperatives of this kind that public health is delivered in Israel and the system works just fine. You can also find this model in Switzerland and Holland, as Matthiew Miller writes. Princeton's veteran advocate for health reform, Ewe Reinhart, has been promoting the idea for years. You could even make the case that Canada's "single-payer" system is actually based on ten insurance cooperatives, since each province is responsible for setting up its own plan.

Nor do you need one big buyer to confront drug companies, any more than you need one big school to confront text book publishers. Remember that the public option will initially cover fewer than 20 percent of Americans. Private insurers want good prices (generics, etc.) the same way Walmart wants good prices, and public cooperatives will benefit as a by-product. Besides, you could establish a buying consortium among healthcare cooperatives on nothing more complicated than Facebook (the same way, incidentally, that the Daily Kos is threatening to establish a "netroots" campaign against Obama).

Anyway, the problem with the price of drugs has much less to do with buying power (a look at Porter's "Five Forces" might help here) than with the duration of patent rights and the simple fact that, as drugs become more tailored to individual diseases and genomes, their costs are amortized over fewer and fewer patients. (Between 30-40 percent of lifetime medical costs are incurred in one's last year of life; the number is bound to rise as treatments become more personalized.)

Finally, innovations in claims processing are more likely to be developed first in the private sector, for all the obvious reasons. (Would you rather deal with American Express or the IRS?) I am not freaked-out by the word bureaucracy. But you do not need to be as big and rich as Medicare circa 1965 to buy IBM mainframes. If you haven't noticed, we no longer need mainframes at all.

What we do need, urgently, are mandated standards for digitizing medical records and common protocols for reporting patient care. These are the real roads and bridges of a knowledge economy. They will be necessary to establish not only consolidated billing systems for doctors currently being driven crazy, but also ways for them to share information about standards of care. Reporting standards will also give NIH and biotech labs, who share annually $60 billion worth of research, common access to otherwise diffuse pools of data.

ALL OF WHICH brings us to Obama's speech tonight. I have not spent my life studying healthcare, but I know a thing or two. Obama, clearly the best president of my lifetime, could use a little more obvious support from people who should know better, from Bill Maher to Bill Moyers.

If we did not have, as Rick Hertzberg tirelessly reminds us, a political system that puts veto power in the hands of "a forty per cent minority of the Senate, representing as few as one-tenth of the nation's human beings," does anybody doubt Obama would have delivered a universal reform package by now? If we did not also have a politics in which presidents can be "put on the defensive" by people who'll say anything, and media "political directors" who chart the flocking behavior of independents who particularly disdain defensive presidents, would we really need progressives to cover the president's back?

The point is, we do have this system and this politics. Before we start threatening a revolt, perhaps we might bring our ideas up to code--and count our blessings.

But the bigger half is that the Zionist colonists, led by Ben-Gurion's Histadrut, had created a state within the British Mandate state back during the 1920s, 30s, and 40s: economically and culturally vibrant, and largely self-reliant. Were it not for the holocaust, the state may not have arisen in 1948, but it would have arisen all the more certainly. Indeed, Hitler wound up murdering its most avid cadres: among the millions of Polish Jews who died in the death camps, hundreds of thousands were sophisticated and devoted Zionists.

Palestine's natural leaders, too, have the means to achieve independence and earn international recognition, though (as my article will show) the occupation administration seems to be doing what it can to frustrate them. I've talked to everyone from the head of the Palestine Investment Fund to the CEO of Palestine's leading software house. It is hard to spend time with these people, some of whom have become friends over the years, and then hear reflexive Israeli government doubts about whether the peace process has a partner--something you hear much less from Israel business people, by the way. More soon.

Perhaps I am distracted by the need to finish painting my deck, but I don't really see why the article has raised so many anxieties. I'm not at all sure what it adds. The argument, at bottom, is that the Palestinians and Israelis each have "core" grievances, the former dispossession, the latter, existential terror, and that when seen as ideological expressions of their respective national movements, these explain why the two sides are talking past each other. "The first step will be to recognize that in the hearts and minds of Israelis and Palestinians, the fundamental question is not about the details of an apparently practical solution. It is an existential struggle between two worldviews."

Really. A struggle between worldviews. Therefore, peace is more or less impossible, or at least the two-state solution is, because one worldview says a "Jewish state" contradicts the pain of the Naqba, and the other worldview says a Palestinian state contradicts Zionism's essential fairness--and also means accepting people who refuse to have the pain of the Naqba contradicted, and so forth. Put Ismail Haniya and Menachem Begin in the room and this is what you get. Obama has better steer clear.

Palestinians hungry to develop their economy (about which, more in the October Harper's)know very well that making peace with Israelis on reciprocal terms, consistent with international law, is a promise they can make to their children. Most Israelis, still, feel similar things. Yes, the two-state solution solves nothing, or nothing finally. That's what makes it the solution for grown-ups.

The authors conclude: "As Israelis make plain by talking about the imperative of a Jewish state, and as Palestinians highlight when they evoke the refugees' rights, the heart of the matter is not necessarily how to define a state of Palestine. It is, as in a sense it always has been, how to define the state of Israel."

I agree, as any reader of my blog or book knows, that we need to refine our definition of a democratic Israel at peace. But then, why is the challenge any less for a democratic Palestine? I suspect this is a sly effort to suggest that, within the 1967 border, we need a bi-national state, not a state like Israel at all. If the authors believe this, they should have the guts to say it. For my part, a Hebrew republic called Israel will do nicely. Anyway, any effort at dismantling Israel will bring, not a one-state solution, but Bosnia.

The song says simply:

How is it that a single star, alone, can dare.
How can he dare, for God's sake.
One lone star, I would not have dared.
But then, in essence, I am not alone.

Listen to Mati Caspi. Listen to the young people responding. Can any prayer in the evening liturgy move educated young Israelis this perfectly? More and more I am growing aware that Israel's modern Hebrew musical culture is traditional Judaism's real spiritual rival. Can it dare, for God's sake, to outlast the orthodoxies?