The paper was echoing the attitudes of many faculty and students on the campus. Veteran activist Prof. Gordon Fellman said, "His role obligates him to defend Israeli policies. That includes defending the Israeli incursion into Gaza, housing policies of the occupation, and so on. And I think for many people that's a third rail. And why mess up a commencement with a third rail?

All of this sent Oren's friend and colleague at Jerusalem's Shalem Center, Daniel Gordis, into full op-ed mode. "This is where we are today," Gordis laments; "For many young American Jews, the only association they have with Israel is the conflict with the Palestinians. Israel is the country that oppresses Palestinians, and nothing more." And what bothers Gordis especially, it seems, is the column of Jeremy Sherer, president of the Brandeis J Street U Chapter. This is how Gordis rehearses it:

In the same issue of the IHT (April 16, 2010), there appeared a full page ad ("For Jerusalem") signed by Elie Wiesel, and Roger Cohen's column, "The Clutches of the Dead." Nothing could have illustrated Cohen's point about the slim purchase that the "minority," the Living, have over the "majority," the Dead, better than Wiesel's sentimental claim over all of Jerusalem on behalf of some misty-eyed notion of three thousand years of Jewish belonging.

Neither man lives in Jerusalem, my city, but Cohen articulates that very value for which many of us hoped Wiesel--who won the Nobel Prize, not for literature, but for peace--would be our spokesperson. After representing so eloquently the victims of history's injustices in Nazi and then Soviet Europe, Wiesel would surely, we assumed, turn to the injustices perpetrated by his own people, and cry out against the occupation and dispossession of the Palestinian people. Instead he tells us, with no evidence on the ground, that "Jews, Christians and Muslims are allowed to build their homes anywhere in the city."

I defy Mr. Wiesel to find three Muslim families in all of West Jerusalem. The delicate balance between Jewish and Palestinian neighborhoods in this city has never been realized in city planning and infrastructure. Now it is being flagrantly undermined by acts that will almost certainly push the Palestinians into the hands of the extremists and kill any chance for peace between the two peoples.

Cohen reminds us that Jerusalem's poet, Yehuda Amichai, called his city the "only city in the world where the right to vote is granted even to the dead." As a growing group of Jerusalemites, Jews and Palestinians, stand in protest every Friday afternoon in the parking lot in Sheikh Jerrah across the street from where Jewish settlers have brutally displaced Palestinians based on some doubtful claim to Jewish ownership prior to 1948, we are taking a stand in the name of the Living and Life Itself.

Not only do the settlers here and all over the West Bank undermine the very legitimacy of Israel's existence (if Jews have a right to land owned across the Green Line before the War of Independence, then surely so do those thousands of Palestinians who were displaced from West Jerusalem--including, presumably, the very house from which I write these words), but they consign all of us, sooner rather than later, to join the phalanx of the dead who died because people like Wiesel prefer mythical references to History and Eschatology over the real people who want to live together in peace:

"You see that arch from the Roman period?" asks the putative tour guide in Amichai's poem "Tourists": "It's not important: but next to it, left and down a bit, there sits a man who's bought fruit and vegetables for his family."

Almost none in the group, I hasten to add, are leftists in the ordinary sense. Assaf and Amos are the products of the National Religious Party youth movement, Bnei Akiva, and came by their skepticism honestly. Another, Sara Benninga, is the daughter of a distinguished Tel Aviv University business professor. Most came to this issue because it could simply not be ignored. Little by little, they are becoming radicals of democratic globalism.

The leaders of this group are also gaining a good deal of experience in the management of protest. For yesterday's rally, they planned an operation that seemed to those of us who participated both poignant and instructive. It also wound up exposing the arbitrary ways the Jerusalem police has been dealing with the growing challenge to the city's disgraceful treatment of its Arab residents:

What, then, if the journalist, cooperating with the investigation, hands over documents in an agreement that stipulates that they could not be used to prosecute the source, if found? And what, nevertheless, if the government finds the whistle-blower and charges her under laws written, not to deal with the press, but to prevent espionage for a hostile foreign government? What if the government refuses to renounce the option of arresting the journalist for holding prohibited documents--so he remains in London, refusing to return to the country?

THIS, IN A nutshell, is the troubling case of a young woman, Anat Kam, who allegedly (well, apparently) leaked documents from the office of the Central Command to Haaretz journalist Uri Blau, showing that the IDF systematically issued operational guidelines to its soldiers quite different from regulations the courts have required. The latter decreed that the military may not simply engage in targeted assassination in the occupied territories; that, rather, soldiers must at least try to take Palestinian suspects alive, and not unreasonably endanger innocent bystanders during search operations. Blau's original piece exposed how the IDF ignored these bounds. He explored cases where Palestinians who might have been arrested were killed, as were bystanders.

I will, however, make one point the paper does not make, about the efficacy of targeted assassinations themselves. Presumably, these are justified, and the regulations issued to facilitate them justified, because occupation forces preempt attacks on Israeli civilians by getting the bad guys before they get us. I have no doubt that, in some cases, this preemption has saved lives. But what if, on the whole, the opposite is true, that shooting preemptively and recklessly raises the likelihood of violence against Israelis.

When we parted, Didi told me, among other things, he would be going to the West Bank towns of Bili'in and Nabi Saleh on Friday, where protests had been mounted for months: Bili'in over the route of the security fence, and Nabi Saleh over the appropriation by Jewish settlers of a local spring needed for farming. The army was trying to curtail the demonstrations by declaring the towns a closed military zone. "I'm going to go and dare them to arrest me," Didi said.

I hadn't heard from him since the weekend, and he owed me a draft, so I decided to call him this morning. "I'm sorry I've been late with the document," Didi said, a little sheepishly, "but I've been convalescing. Actually, I was shot last Friday. Plastic bullets in the groin and the back of my leg." He had had his arms raised, he explained, but was shot anyway. "There seems to be a new policy."

THE HUMILITY COMES with a pedigree, and the empathy with experience. Didi, or David, Remez is the great-grandson and namesake of the David Remez, one of David Ben-Gurion's closest friends, and the state's first minister of transportation, then education. His grandfather, Aharon Remez, was the (second) commander of the air force, and his father, Gideon, a veteran foreign affairs journalist. He is a scion of the country's labor aristocracy and knows its obsolescence but is also, in a way, the best of what's left of it.

Didi was himself a combat officer, and is still haunted by some of the actions he commanded in occupied territory a generation ago. He lived some years in the US (was actually a student at the Shady Hill School in Cambridge when his father was at Harvard) and flirted with emigrating, but came back, moth to flame, to "make a difference." Since then, he has been a managing partner of BenOr, Israel's hippest strategy consulting firm for NGOs operating in the region, whose clients include the World Bank. He is also a close advisor to Jeremy Ben-Ami at J Street, and to the young leaders of the Sheikh Jarrah demonstration committee. He doubts he is really making a difference, but I rarely see him without a smile.

JUST BEFORE I called Didi, I had gone on a mission of my own, to a local synagogue where a sweet young man stood in front of a boiling vat of water, and carefully dunked our pots to make them fit for Passover. I have written here last year about the child's play (as Yehuda Amichai called it) that typifies Passover preparations, the growing disconnect in this country between the rigors of Passover ritual and its meaning. Let's just say that talking to Didi made me feel fit for Passover.

In every generation, the Haggadah says, it is incumbent upon us to stand at Sinai ourselves. Didi knows something about standing, and generations, but also about the power of telling the story, especially in our generation. "The army withdrew from Bili'in when they saw the cameras and the crowds," he said. Didi won't make it tomorrow, but hundreds of us will be at Sheikh Jarrah, with the cameras and crowds and cautious cops, privileged to be led by young people.

Netanyahu's stance, or ploy, finally came unraveled last week, not only because of the dustup with Joe Biden about new construction in East Jerusalem, but because Gen. David Petraeus finally weighed in with a statement of the obvious, that America's long acquiescence in Israel's occupation "was jeopardizing U.S. standing in the region." Netanyahu is trying to pretend that the crisis with Washington was precipitated by bad timing. That's a little like saying the announcement of AIG's bonus pool was bad timing. Nobody's really buying it, and with Petreaus in the mix, the neocons can hardly sell it. We have come to a moment of truth that is long overdue. The Israeli media is, gratefully, growing preoccupied with its implications, not the least of which is just how divided the country is, and how its citizens must indeed choose.

Yes, land claims, especially the division of sovereignty in Jerusalem, compensation for Palestinian refugees, etc., have great symbolic importance to both peoples. Yes, Jewish settlements confound efforts to draw borders and should be frozen; yes, moderates on both sides confront "whole land" fanatics they would rather not fight for the sake of the other side. Still, if we ever get to a deal, the size of each territory will quickly seem trivial.

Israel and Palestine, together, are about the size of greater Los Angeles; the distance from Nablus to Tel Aviv is something like San Bernardino to Santa Monica. The West Bank and Gaza, Palestinians say, is only 22 percent of historic Palestine. But that is about the size of the territory most Israelis live on. In fact, the corridor from Ashdod to north of Tel Aviv--where 40 percent of Israelis live, and at least half of Israel's GDP is generated--is about the size of the Gaza Strip. Can we get real about what "two states" will look like?

The good news is that the Palestinian private sector, though small, is prepared for a take-off. There is a tight-knit, highly competent Palestinian business class already running enterprises from pharmaceuticals to supermarkets, telecommunications to software solutions. Palestine's billion dollar sovereign wealth fund, the PIF, has been investing strategically in construction and wireless telecommunications; it is transparently run by Mohammed Mustafa, a former World Bank official, close to Prime Minister Salaam Fayyad--in effect, the Ramallah bourgeoisie's chairman of the board. The Palestinian stock market lists companies worth only about $2.5 billion, but it has been growing at over 20 percent a year. Palestinian universities graduate 1,200 computer scientists annually.

The Palestinian Authority gets about $2 billion from donor countries a year, a large portion of it wasted on patronage jobs. Part of what has stifled entrepreneurship is old Fatah cadres running monopolies from cement to petroleum. But public sector salaries, along with remittances from family members working abroad, at least wind up in bank deposits. Bank of Palestine CEO Hashim Shawa estimates that about $6 billion in total deposits are available for investment in genuinely competitive ventures. At least twice that amount is in Palestinian-controlled banks in Jordan. Regional investors know Palestinians are relatively well educated and need one of everything.

Which brings us to the bad news. Revealingly, Palestinian banks have been unable to lend more than $1.5 billion to credit-worthy business plans. For when you look at all of the things an ordinary businessperson takes for granted--mobility, access to markets, talent, suppliers and financial services--you see the frustrating effects of an occupation designed to advance the settlers, not Palestinian development.

Problems of mobility are most widely reported: over 60 percent of land in the West Bank is so-called Area C--controlled by the Israeli army to secure Israeli settlements, but turning Palestinian cities into economic islands. Try growing a supermarket chain when your just-in-time logistics system has to deal with 600 roadblocks; try planning meetings to open a new store. The drive from Ramallah to Jerusalem should take about 12 minutes, but with the checkpoints, it's normally an hour, and that's if you have permission. A Palestinian businessman routinely waits a half day just to collect an Israeli permit to enter Jerusalem and begin the journey. The World Bank estimates that, in spite of a projected 6-7 percent growth, per capita GDP is falling and unemployment may be as high 20 percent.

But other problems are just as serious. Businesses need world-class managers, who have to be able to travel freely. Entrepreneurs from the Palestinian diaspora, if born abroad, have to fight for years to get residency permits. The handful who succeed cannot then use Ben Gurion Airport or come to Jerusalem, but suffer the same restrictions as locals. Components for Palestinian manufacturing are routinely held up in Israel ports, waiting for long security checks. (One Palestinian aluminum window manufacturer, denied a coating material that could be used to make explosives, offered to pay for IDF soldiers to supervise the entire process.) Palestinian banks cannot park their cash reserves in Israeli banks, losing tens of millions of dollars in interest. They also cannot set up branches or even ATMs in East Jerusalem, where unemployment is over 25 percent and 50 percent live under the poverty line.

I visited Ramallah's $350 million Palestinian cell phone company, Jawwal, now facing real competition from the PIF-funded Wataniya. The CEO, Ammar Aker (recently promoted to run the $900 million parent company, Paltel), took me to the roof of his modern building and showed me what he sees. On one hill to the north is a settlement in Area C brandishing the tower of an Israeli operator, Cellcom. To the south is another settlement with another tower. Cellcom gets about 10.5 megahertz of spectrum; Jawwal about 4.8 (spectrum, too, is a "security" asset). To get 3G and continuous coverage--what every Palestinian entrepreneur needs--you need to add a plan from an Israeli carrier.

Prime Minister Netanyahu has been bragging about Palestine's growth. But under current conditions, the resilience of its private sector seems little short of heroic. Surely, he must know there are things that must be done now. Israel should be inviting, not prohibiting, Palestinian entrepreneurs to come to the West Bank and invest. It should be greatly expanding the number of permits for businesspeople to come to Jerusalem. It should be allowing banks to operate here, thus stopping the city's brain drain to Amman and Dubai. It should be assigning security forces to work with PA forces to expedite Palestinian supply chains. It should be authorizing the development of a secure, north-south transportation corridor linking Palestinian cities, perhaps picking up on the Rand Corporation's brilliant idea of an "arc" of bus and rail lines. It should be releasing more bandwidth for Palestinian telecom, and restricting Israeli competition in Area C.

Netanyahu could do all of this today without endangering Israelis or even removing settlers yet. With so many Palestinians under 20, the economic disparities so great, and the territory so small, what can be more dangerous than continued stagnation?

]]> tag:tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com,2010://14.321818 2010-02-28T15:00:59Z 2010-02-28T15:08:56Z

Back in 2005, I called attention to a curious petition, filed the year before with Israel's High Court of Justice. The petitioners were thirty-eight citizens of Israel, most of them Jews but a number of them Arabs: businesspeople, professors, entertainers,...

Bernard Avishai http://www.bernardavishai.com Back in 2005, I called attention to a curious petition, filed the year before with Israel's High Court of Justice. The petitioners were thirty-eight citizens of Israel, most of them Jews but a number of them Arabs: businesspeople, professors, entertainers, writers, jurists; a past minister of education, a past head of the air force. Their petition enjoined the court to order the Ministry of Interior to inscribe them as "Israeli" in the Registry of Population. Given how much else was being contested in the country, one would think a petition to recognize Israelis as "Israeli" was frivolous. It was anything but that.

For as I wrote then, the petitioners were asking the state to recognize an inclusive, earned form of nationality, coterminous with and redundant to citizenship. They believed that fifty-five years after Israel's founding--when two-thirds of its citizens had been born in the country, and half of those are third generation--the experience of Israel itself must be determinative of national identity. More important, they wanted to close the door on discrimination against individuals on religious or racial grounds.

"I have staked my life on the moral and cultural power of the Jewish people," said Yoella Har-Shefi, a civil-rights attorney, who led the group, "but you can't say, 'Everybody is equal here, it's just that a Jew is valued differently'--and if there is international or internal protest, well, that's proof that 'the whole world is against us.' If Arab citizens can't become 'Israelis,' the country will come apart. We are sitting on the edge of a volcano, because Israel is the only country on earth that does not recognize itself."

]]> On Wednesday, the High Court will announce a new decision in this case. Veteran analyst and peace activist, Uri Avneri, sent around a commentary on the case. Here are some excerpts:

The Israeli Interior Ministry recognizes 126 nations, but not the Israeli nation. An Israeli citizen can be registered as belonging to the Assyrian, the Tatar or the Circassian nation. But the Israeli nation? Sorry, no such thing.

According to the official doctrine, the State of Israel cannot recognize an "Israeli" nation because it is the state of the "Jewish" nation. In other words, it belongs to the Jews of Brooklyn, Budapest and Buenos Aires, even though these consider themselves as belonging to the American, Hungarian or Argentine nations. Messy? Indeed.

THIS MESS started 113 years ago, when the Viennese Journalist Theodor Herzl wrote his book "The State of the Jews". (That's the true translation. The generally used name "The Jewish State" is false and means something else.) For this purpose he had to perform an acrobatic exercise. One can say that he used a white lie.

Modern Zionism was born as a direct response to modern anti-Semitism. Not by accident, the term "Zionismus" came into being some 20 years after the term "Antisemitismus" was invented in Germany. They are twins...

Herzl understood that the new reality was inherently dangerous for the Jews. In the beginning he cherished the idea of complete assimilation: all the Jews would be baptized and disappear in the new nations. As a professional writer for the theater, he even devised the scenario: all Viennese Jews would march together to St. Stephen's cathedral and be baptized en masse.

When he realized that this scenario was a bit far-fetched, Herzl passed from the idea of individual assimilation to what may be called collective assimilation: if there is no place for the Jews in the new nations, then they should define themselves as a nation like all the others, rooted in a homeland of their own and living in a state of their own. This idea was called Zionism.

BUT THERE was a problem: a Jewish nation did not exist. The Jews were not a nation but a religious-ethnic community...Herzl had to ignore this difference. He pretended that the Jewish ethnic-religious community was also a Jewish nation. In other words: contrary to all other peoples, the Jews were both a nation and a religious community; as far as Jews were concerned, the two were the same. The nation was a religion, the religion was a nation.

This was the white lie. There was no other way: without it, Zionism could not have come into being. The new movement took the Star of David from the synagogue, the candlestick from the Temple, the blue-and-white flag from the prayer shawl. The holy land became a homeland. Zionism filled the religious symbols with secular, national content... The first to detect the falsification were the Orthodox Rabbis. Almost all of them damned Herzl and his Zionism in no uncertain terms.

When Herzl originated the Zionist idea, he did not intend to found the "State of the Jews" in Palestine, but in Argentina. Even when writing his book, he devoted to the country only a few lines, under the headline "Palestine or Argentina?" However, the movement he created compelled him to divert his endeavors to the Land of Israel, and so the state came into being here.

When the State of Israel was founded and the Zionist dream realized, there was no further need for the white lie. After the building was finished, the scaffolding should have been removed. A real Israeli nation had come into being, there was no further need for an imaginary one.

THESE DAYS Israel's largest newspaper, Yediot Aharonot, is running a TV ad showing selected past issues. The day the State of Israel was founded, the giant headline announced: "Hebrew State!"

"Hebrew," not "Jewish." And not by accident: at that time, the term "Jewish state" sounded decidedly strange. In the preceding years, people in this country had got used to making a clear distinction between "Jewish" and "Hebrew", between matters that belonged to the Diaspora and those belonging to this country: Jewish Diaspora, Jewish language (Yiddish), Jewish Stetl, Jewish religion, Jewish tradition - but Hebrew language, Hebrew agriculture, Hebrew industries, Hebrew underground organizations, Hebrew policemen.

If so, why do the words "Jewish state" appear in our Declaration of Independence? There was a simple reason for that: the UN had adopted a resolution to partition the country between an "Arab state" and a "Jewish state." That was the legal basis of the new state. The declaration, which was drafted in haste, said therefore that we were establishing "the Jewish state (according to the UN resolution), namely the State of Israel."

The building was finished, but the scaffolding was not taken down. On the contrary: it became the most important part of the building and dominates its facade.

LIKE MOST of us at the time, David Ben-Gurion believed that Zionism had supplanted religion and that religion had become redundant. He was quite sure that it would shrivel and disappear by itself in the new secular state. He decided that we could afford to dispense with the military service of Yeshiva bochers (Talmud school students), believing that their number would dwindle from a few hundred to almost none. The same thought caused him to allow religious schools to continue in existence. Like Herzl, who promised to "keep our Rabbis in the synagogues and our army officers in the barracks," Ben-Gurion was certain that the state would be entirely secular...

BUT THE white lie of Herzl had results he did not dream of, as did the compromises of Ben-Gurion. Religion did not wither away in Israel, but on the contrary: it is gaining control of the state. The government of Israel does not speak of the nation-state of the Israelis who live here, but of the "nation-state of the Jews" - a state that belongs to the Jews all over the world, most of whom belong to other nations.

The religious schools are eating up the general education system and are going to overpower it, if we don't become aware of the danger and assert our Israeli essence. Voting rights are about to be accorded to Israelis residing abroad, and this is a step towards giving the vote to all Jews around the world. And, most important: the ugly weeds growing in the national-religious field - the fanatical settlers - are pushing the state in a direction that may lead to its destruction.

TO SAFEGUARD the future of Israel one has to start by removing the scaffolding from the building. In other words: burying the "white lie" of religion-equals-nation. The Israeli nation has to be recognized as the basis of the state.

If this principle is accepted, what will the future shape of Israel - within the Green Line - be like?

There are two possible models, and many variations between them.

Model A: the multi-national one. Almost all the citizens of Israel belong to one of two nations: the majority belongs to the Hebrew nation and a minority to the Palestinian-Arab nation. Each nation will enjoy autonomy in certain areas, such as culture, education and religion. Autonomy will not be territorial, but cultural (as Vladimir Ze'ev Jabotinsky proposed a hundred years ago for Czarist Russia). All will be united by Israeli citizenship and loyalty to the state. The inbuilt discrimination of the Arab minority will become a thing of the past, as well as the "demographic demon."

Model B: the American one. The American nation is composed of all US citizens, and all US citizens constitute the American nation. An immigrant from Jamaica who acquires US citizenship automatically becomes a member of the American nation, an heir to George Washington and Abe Lincoln. All learn at school the same core program and the same history.

Which of the two models is preferable? In my view, Model B is much better. But it would depend on a dialogue between the Hebrew majority and the Arab minority. In the end, the Arab citizens will have to decide whether they prefer the status of equal partners in a general Israeli nation, or the status of a recognized, autonomous national minority in a state that acknowledges and cherishes their separate culture, side by side with the culture of the majority.

In four days, the Supreme Court will decide whether it is prepared to take the first step in this historic march.

]]> tag:tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com,2010://14.320093 2010-02-19T15:06:02Z 2010-02-20T19:05:40Z

For a great many Israelis, particularly young Israelis, there is an depressing vacuum at the center of Israeli politics; and the most galling thing about it, as my friend Carlo Strenger suggests in his Haaretz column this past week, is...

Bernard Avishai http://www.bernardavishai.com For a great many Israelis, particularly young Israelis, there is an depressing vacuum at the center of Israeli politics; and the most galling thing about it, as my friend Carlo Strenger suggests in his Haaretz column this past week, is that it needs to be filled with liberal democratic ideas so obvious, so unoriginal, that it's astonishing how no political party exists to advance them. So I thought: If such a party existed, what would its platform look like? Can one put things in a way that will not be, as platforms generally are, tedious? Here is the best I can do for now. I warmly invite comments and suggestions from readers of this blog.

Israel's existing parties, each in its own way, fail to confront the main chance of the new global order and the mounting dangers of our regional stalemate.

We know from everyday experience that Israel has the commercial and cultural resources to succeed brilliantly at global competition. We see it changing daily into a large, impressive city-state with a great economic potential. We see a demonstrated power to acculturate new generations of immigrants and minorities into a vibrant, Hebrew-speaking civil society.

At the same time, we know that, like all small countries networked to global realities, Israel cannot solve its diplomatic, economic, and environmental problems alone, that is, without the cooperation of other regional and global powers. Our economy cannot survive political isolation any more than our democracy can. The occupation is ruining our lives.

Internally, too, we are undergoing enormous changes. A quarter of Israel's first graders are Arab citizens, and a quarter are ultra-Orthodox. Will either group grow up to imagine living in a state with room for the other, or for that matter, with a secular Israeli middle class that drives the economy and expects to be a part of the Western world?

]]> IN THE FACE of this crisis, Israel's government, and even its official opposition, have been nursing old grievances and worshiping old heroes. They argue, vaguely, that a Jewish state cannot be a state of its citizens. They insist on the region's acceptance of Israel as a Jewish state, and routinely host Diaspora Jewish leaders as if they exercised quasi-official power, implying that Israelis and Diaspora Jews are somehow parts of the same trans-geographical nation, united by birth and commandments, and that a Jewish state must naturally favor legally Jewish individuals over other citizens; as if the state were not a social contract, but an expression of some common Jewish personality; as if the Hebrew cultural distinction of Israel were not evident to all, Arabs and Diaspora Jews alike.

The State of Israel, in other words, exists. It is time for Israelis to recognize it. It is a Hebrew-speaking society of over seven million people, whose Jewish character is hardly in doubt. That Israel can take the Hebrew language for granted is Zionism's great triumph. Israelis need need no others. That Israelis celebrate national holidays, which draw on the traditional Jewish cycle, is a source of both joy and artistic restlessness. We do not need to legislate the identity or religion of Israeli citizens, or privilege any clergy or bloodline--on the contrary, these must grow organically, as in all modern democratic states, from the free choices of individuals and congregations.

We must, in short, stop treating the democratic principles and federal pluralism we see all over the Western world as if these amount to an implied criticism of Israel, but rather we must see them as an invitation to move to normalization. We must let Israel's robust culture compete. We must stop violating, not only international norms, but the genius of Zionism itself.

ISRAEL URGENTLY NEEDS a new, broadly democratic party that realizes the principles of Israel's Declaration of Independence: The state, that document says, "will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations."

This party will be an organization with a clear charter. It will welcome Jews and Arabs, secular and pious, young and old, who accept the basic principles of liberty--who see tolerance enshrined in law as the great achievement of civilization. It will organize from the grassroots: in homes, on campuses, and on the web. It will offer a new social contract whose main points are as follow.

1. Peace. Members of the party will work for a two-state solution. We see two-city states, Israel and Palestine--together, after all, no bigger than greater Los Angeles--maintaining cultural distinction but continuing to integrate economically. We believe Israel has an urgent interest in cooperating with the Western powers to facilitate the rise of Palestine's entrepreneurs and civil society; this means removing, even before a peace settlement, all the barriers of occupation to the movement of goods and talent within the Palestinian territories and between Palestine and the region. We look forward to economic cooperation, shared jurisdictions, from water to bandwidth, and a common market with Palestine and Jordan. We welcome the presence of appropriate numbers of international forces to maintain calm. We aim to create a Mediterranean Union, anchored by Israel and Turkey in partnership. We aim to achieve a bilateral defense pact with the United States.

2. Economy. We believe in the excellence engendered by market competition but, at the same time, rules imposed for the sake of the commonwealth--rules that keep competition in boundaries that promote equality, opportunity and economic security for all citizens. We see the expansion of Israel's global, technology enterprises as the engine of economic growth. We see Israel's intellectual capital as the seedbed for these enterprises. So we support monetary policies that keep Israel's currency attractive for global investment, but also separate accounting treatment for investments in education. We want to open Israel to the world. We see Israel's business community as a natural constituency to advocate for peace.

3. Education. We know that our school system, universities, healthcare and communications infrastructure must be second to none. These are not simply services to a democratic citizenry, but investments in our economy. Israel must compete on its brainpower and design innovations. Investments in our human capital will determine, for example, the vitality of our tourist industry, which can grow many times, and in many ways; Israel should be the place people from all over the world come to learn and be cured. Jerusalem hosts under two million tourists a year. Florence and Prague host four times as many.

4. Rights. We will work to enact a formal constitution and Bill of Rights consistent with the Charter of Human Rights in the European Union. We believe that the State of Israel should protect the equality and inner lives of individuals, much in the spirit of the Basic Law of Liberty and Dignity. As such, the state should not presume to legislate identity, national or religious, but should preserve the authority to designate only one national status: that of Israeli. All other "nationality" designations, including Jewish and Arab, should be purged from the Registry of Population.

5. Religion and State. We believe that all people should have the right to build religious educational institutions, but that as in any advanced democracy, these should be voluntary and financed by religious communities at their own discretion. At the same time, the state has the obligation to educate all children to the standards of civil society and inculcate the skills that will prepare children to be productive members of a global economy: a core curriculum of science, mathematics, and humanistic studies. Public schools should not privilege any religion, or any sect within any religion, and state funding for faith-based education should be gradually terminated, much as it was in Quebec a generation ago. Primary schools may be established by local communities in either Hebrew or Arabic, but regional high schools should be gradually integrated and taught primarily in Hebrew. All youth who are citizens of Israel should do two years of national service.

6. Land. We believe that the lands of Israel should be open to all citizens, without regard to origin. The Israel Lands Administration should, over a ten year period, privatize and auction off all holdings, except for those reserved for national parks. Sales should be without regard to the religion or ethnicity of the buyers.

7. Civil Society. We believe the state should regard marriage and divorce as the civil right of consenting adults. The state should create processes to constitute civil unions, no matter the religion or sexual orientation of the parties. This should be the state's only requirement to create legal commitments; rabbinic or other courts should have no jurisdiction whatever over these commitments. So far as the state is concerned, the dissolution of such unions, too, should be handled by civil courts. Burial is a civil right; the state should set aside land for secular citizens to be buried with dignity.

8. Immigration. We believe that citizenship should be earned by Jews and non-Jews alike after a reasonable process of naturalization. Israeli citizenship should in no cases be automatic: citizenship should acquired by landed immigrants in a process of naturalization over, say, five years. The Law of Return should therefore be superseded by an new immigration law--one that gives "landed immigrant" status to all appropriate immigrants, including especially refugees from anti-Semitism. Israel will remain the state of the Jewish people by historic affiliation, but Diaspora Jews will have no legal status in Israeli law. Unending debates over "who is a Jew?" should have no bearing on Israeli law.

9. Non-Governmental Agencies. We believe all institutions left over from the Zionist revolution--particularly the Jewish Agency and Jewish National Fund--should have no official status in the state apparatus whatever. Rather, these should work in Israeli civil society as self-funding NGOs; they should have no role in national planning other than the role competed for by all NGOs.

10. National Symbols. We believe that the festivals on the Jewish calendar should be accorded the status of national holidays, much as the Islamic calendar will be honored in the state of Palestine. Israel's flag, anthem and other symbols of state should be cherished and preserved; yet we believe they may be added to in order to reflect a more inclusive standard of citizenship.

The Jewish sages said, "It is not given to you to complete the work, but neither may you refrain from doing it." We are working for our children's future, and that of the wider world, of which we are a part.

]]> tag:tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com,2010://14.318087 2010-02-07T21:14:47Z 2010-02-07T21:48:46Z

The Public Editor at the New York Times, Clark Hoyt, is doing the public a great disservice, not only by calling for Ethan Bronner's reassignment, but for asserting a reason, apparently supported by Harvard's Alex Jones, that makes a nonsense...

Bernard Avishai http://www.bernardavishai.com The Public Editor at the New York Times, Clark Hoyt, is doing the public a great disservice, not only by calling for Ethan Bronner's reassignment, but for asserting a reason, apparently supported by Harvard's Alex Jones, that makes a nonsense of reason itself.

Let me be clear: Ethan Bronner is a friend, and I have followed his writing about Israel and the Middle for 20 years, that is, since before I knew him. If you think my friendship with him means that everything I am about to say is not to be trusted, then you have pretty much bought in to the standard Hoyt is proposing, and you might as well not read on.

]]> The (sublime) problem of truth is not just for journalists, of course. Every scholar, every judge, every scientist, struggles with it. The best answer we have is something like this: Ask a good question. Then hold yourself stringently to rules of evidence. To be sure, how you get to good questions is not a predictable matter: ask, say, Thomas Kuhn. And how you hold yourself to rules of evidence is not a simple matter: ask, say, Karl Popper. But if your question is stupid or you violate the rules of evidence, then you should not be trusted.

Which brings me back to Ethan Bronner. A good journalist knows questions most readers do not and then works diligently to answer them with data, witnesses, and obvious experts. A very good journalist knows questions most journalists do not, and then works tirelessly to answer them with unimpeachable data, by becoming an eye witnesses himself or herself, and finding experts who are not obvious. I have not agreed with the thrust of everything Bronner has written over the past couple of years, but he is very good journalist.

If Bronner had been found to be ignoring compelling questions, or cooking evidence in some sly way, you would have the right to explore his state of mind: whether some pay-off or family loyalty explains his lapses. But what if there are no obvious lapses? Why go ad hominem when there is no rationale for this? The sophomoric revelation that "we all have biases"--worse, that biases come from determined psychological states, explicable by families, or class, or tribe, etc.--is not enough to discredit arguments or the person who makes them. One son of a factory owner turns out Richard Arkwright; another turns out Fredrick Engels. I don't mean to be melodramatic, but transferring Bronner from Jerusalem for his son's decisions borrows from the same grotesque epistemology with which people were transferred to the Gulag for their son's decisions.

WHAT, IN THIS context, is Hoyt's specific claim? He writes:

E]ven the best and most honorable journalists can find themselves in awkward circumstances that can affect their credibility -- and the newspaper's -- with a public that has little trust in journalists. In this case, the guidelines stop far short of dictating what should be done. They say that if a family member's activities create even the appearance of a conflict of interest, it should be disclosed to editors, who must then decide whether the staffer should avoid certain stories or even be reassigned to a different beat.

In other words--or so we are to surmise--if Bronner's son is in the Israeli Army, most will assume his arguments are biased toward the Israeli Army, and the Times's integrity will suffer. After all, who trusts journalists to begin with? But if he took his job seriously, the Public Editor would not avoid the question of whether most should think this. He would educate, well, the public. I mean to the classical liberal assumptions about how we reasonably get at the truth, assumptions underlying the Constitution, and the freedom of newspapers, for that matter. Hell, the public might even trust journalists more if they actually stood for something this important, and held themselves to this standard. (Bill Keller's answer to Hoyt comes close.)

Instead, Hoyt is valorizing crude behaviorist ideas masquerading as liberal ones, that we are, really, nothing but bundles of "socialized preferences." What we think is the product of our "demographic." Our claims of fact (about history, society, etc.) are, by extension, an expression of our material "interests," or if we are deeply socialized, "values." The only truth, as Chuck Todd would say, is "the perception out there." The only game is "shaping the narrative." Perceptions, presumably, can be polled. How scientific of him.

I have written about this problem with the press before. It makes you weep with missing William Shirer and Edward R. Murrow and Alexander Kendrick and the generation of reporters who covered the war of liberal societies over European tyrannies and could smell totalitarian ideas a mile away. Bronner can. Anyway, just because this behaviorism is false doesn't mean it can't win. Moving Bronner would be a small victory. Sarah Palin's demographic--abetted not by a sympathetic press, but a hopelessly cynical one--is waiting in the wings.

]]> tag:tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com,2010://14.317177 2010-02-02T07:32:55Z 2010-02-02T08:09:28Z

Suppose you were coming up to bat in the bottom of the ninth: man on first, nobody out. Suppose the game were tied, you were a solid bunter, and the pitcher got behind 2-0. But then, suppose your manager knew...

Bernard Avishai http://www.bernardavishai.com

Suppose you were coming up to bat in the bottom of the ninth: man on first, nobody out. Suppose the game were tied, you were a solid bunter, and the pitcher got behind 2-0. But then, suppose your manager knew the pitcher was 37 years old and one loss away from being put on waivers; that the old southpaw has a disabled child, whose expenses are enormous. If your manager were a good citizen, would he take off the bunt sign?

This is a stupid question, of course (and, please, spare me the virtues of the hit-and-run), because citizens expect managers to play to win. A baseball team can appear to be a kind of person with (what Adam Smith called) "moral sentiments": the Red Sox might, all together, show up for the Jimmy Fund night. But a baseball team is not a social good. It is the competition among baseball teams that yields a social good. A baseball team is nothing but an artificial creation, a kind of Frankenstein community chartered to pursue more runs. It occupies the negative space created by the league's rules and regulations. I need not add, I suppose, that if your neighbor treated the neighborhood with the self-centeredness of a baseball team, you probably wouldn't have much to do with him.

You can see where this is going. 

]]> There have been a great many articles and blog posts excoriating the Supreme Court for pushing an old (and, from the start, rather shaky) legal metaphor--that a corporation is a person or citizen--to where it has become stupid and dangerous. (My favorite is this comment by my old friend David Boghossian, suggesting that if corporations are citizens, then Google should run for president.)

Still, the most imminent danger of supposing corporations are citizens seems lost in the conversation. I mean the danger to American corporate renewal and to the economy as a whole:

SURE, LET'S THINK about how Congress might put restrictions on corporate contributions to campaigns. But I wonder if the danger isn't exaggerated, at least as compared with established kinds of lobbying. Most corporations sell to customers half of whom vote "the other" party; they generally can't afford to alienate people by identifying closely with any candidate. With bloggers in every quarter of commerce and politics, it is hard to believe any corporate contributions might be kept discreet. Candidates don't need their bribes pushed in voters' faces.

Besides, companies need to recruit the best talent they can. Genius comes in many political wrappings, as any baseball team can tell you. Google has threatened to pull out of China, I suspect, more because it wants to continue to attract and inspire brilliant employees than because of any other long term calculation. If corporations were persons, then open networks and "slash and burn media" have forced on them what Harvard's Lynn Sharp Paine calls (too glibly, perhaps) "moral personality." This means, usually, moral cowardice.

NO, THE REAL problem is American CEOs with no relevant expertise using shareholder money to buy their way into public conversations: auto execs on global warming, bankers on macroeconomic imperatives, software companies on education. Meanwhile, who is watching their businesses? Again, a corporation is not a social good; it is a creature of rules, legal and strategic. We presuppose corporate megalomania because we assume that competition brings a social benefit: technological refinements, economic growth, management innovations of all kinds. And in case you haven't noticed, competition is really serious these days. (As I wrote here a few weeks ago, Fortune 500 companies are three times more likely to be selected out--fail of be acquired--than 20 years ago.)

There isn't a scarcer resource in any business today than CEO attention. There isn't a business in the world that hasn't been roiled by magical technologies and global assaults. Do we really want senior managers thinking about how to rewrite the legal rules in America while, in the rest of the world, managers are rewriting strategic ones?

Nor are managers of major companies less lazy or risk averse than ordinary citizens. Recently, Malcolm Gladwell had a great piece about flocking behavior on Wall Street. But 20 years ago, the Harvard Business School's Michael Jensen defended the leveraged buyout wave precisely because he thought this would be the only way to keep managers from being, well, business administrators: incurious, subject to inertia, self-important. Better to have Henry Kravis breathing down your neck, Jensen implied, than Korea Inc. stabbing at your back.

The point is, the more CEOs are distracted by electoral politics, the worse their businesses become. No taxation without representation, a CEO might say. I say, it would be better for us to forgo corporate taxes entirely--which are only about 12% of the US government's income, and generally passed on to customers as a cost of doing business--in return for a strict ban on companies lobbying or acting politically in any way. We could recapture lost tax revenue by levying a more heavily progressive income tax on big salaries and on the top 10% of the population that own 80-90% of stock. We could put a value-added tax on consumption, excluding such necessities as food, clothes, etc.

And just who is "us"? Ordinary citizens. Which is where my argument falls to the ground.

]]> tag:tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com,2010://14.316944 2010-01-31T12:46:18Z 2010-01-31T14:23:38Z

Imagine a state in Palestine to which the Jews of the world are gathered, but in which they have individual rights no greater than its Arab inhabitants. Imagine a country with no privileged religion: everyone goes to his or her...

Bernard Avishai http://www.bernardavishai.com Imagine a state in Palestine to which the Jews of the world are gathered, but in which they have individual rights no greater than its Arab inhabitants. Imagine a country with no privileged religion: everyone goes to his or her house of prayer in freedom and peace. Imagine a state in which individual human rights are paramount; a state that is full of different languages, reflecting the cultural richness of its many immigrants. Imagine that such a state would have no army, but would depend for its peace and order on the Western powers. Imagine that this state called itself merely the "new society." A hydroelectric canal would join the Dead Sea to the Mediterranean.

]]> Imagine that, in such a society, an Arab citizen could say something like this: "Would you call a man or a robber who takes nothing from you but brings you something instead? The Jews have enriched us, why should we be angry with them? They dwell among us like brothers, why should we not love them? Our houses of worship stand side by side...our prayers, when they rise, mingle somewhere up above, and then continue on their way together until they appeared before our Father."

Imagine a Jew adding: "Nothing on earth is perfect, not even our new society. But we are merely a society of citizens seeking to enjoy life through work and culture."

A leftist fantasy? Bound to undermine Israel? Actually, this is more or less exactly the vision of the Jewish state set out in Theodore Herzl's novel Old-New Land. (The dialogue is taken from the book verbatim; Herzl also wanted "athletic and rifle clubs" for once "pale, weak and timid" Jewish children.) Old-New Land's famous epigraph, "Im tirzu, ein zu agaddah," "If you will it, it is no dream," almost immediately entered Zionist lore, though few Zionists at the time were so liberal and cosmopolitan that they were prepared for a vision in which Hebrew had been effaced. Nevertheless, when people invoke the phrase "Im tirzu, etc.," this is the dream Herzl supposed Jewish will would attach to.

I AM THINKING about the origin of that phrase today because of a surreal ad recently taken out in the Jerusalem Post by an organization called Im Tirzu, which gives the will's triumph a rather different cast. The ad attacks the New Israel Fund, and its current president, former Member of Knesset (and dear friend) Naomi Chazan, for supporting various human rights organizations whose meticulous data and reporting contributed to the Goldstone Report.

Now that Alan Dershowitz has exposed that report as tantamount to reissuing the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, presumably all contributions to it, like the stringently liberal principles animating them, must be thought "anti-Zionist." (This morning, on Israeli radio, there was another attack on the New Israel Fund for supporting an organization, Breaking The Silence, which documented over 70 anonymous reports by soldiers of harassment of Palestinians at checkpoints.)

Anyone with a sense of history knows where this is going. Israel can't have an increasingly repressive and brazen occupation without eventually getting around to repressing Israeli voices who oppose it. Anyway, if he were alive, and were solicited by the New Israel Fund and Im Tirzu, who would the witness to the Dreyfus case write his check to?

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