Rick Hertzberg's post about proportional representation precipitated unusually informative comments about how Israel's political system has helped to create the current stalemate, presumably by empowering smallish parties to hold bigger ones hostage to marginal views. There may be some lessons here for Americans.

Strict proportional representation was always good for national solidarity in that it gave (as Rick would have predicted) all views the guarantee of a voice; rates of voter participation were close to 80% in the 1960s and 70s. A downside was that it tended to empower party secretaries (and simple hacks) who waited their turn to rise to the top of party lists which they controlled, sort of the way junior professors work their way up to tenure and ultimately to control of their departments. (Peres had been an aid to Ben-Gurion, Olmert, to Justice Minister Shmuel Tamir, Sarid, to Finance Minister Pinchas Sapir, etc.; only top army officers were considered to have achieved something in their own right.)

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I agree with Bernie's latest piece re:Obama's foreign policy options and needs. In his words,

There will soon be three head-to-head debates. To win the election Obama must convincingly win the foreign policy piece; and to do that he must change the terms of debate. He must redefine the world's challenges in a way that demands what he is uniquely equipped to become: a president with, not just the power to deter, but the power to attract. He must, that is, show how terrorism is but a piece of a larger, complex challenge; that in the face of this challenge, we need the ability to 1) build out a system of collective security with other countries, 2) develop regional alliances in all parts of the world based on the common interest of regional players, Middle East, Asia, and Africa, 3) build global institutions for a patently global economy, and 4) win the hearts and minds of young people from Rio to Jakarta.

I've never heard the case for Obama as commander-in-chief, not just for military but for strategic options, put more succinctly. I hope that someone on the Obama team is reading TPM Cafe and its blog sheet!

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Some questions, taking off from something Alvaro de Soto said early in this colloquy: that "the political system in Israel allows small, one-issue sectors to effectively prevent the government from following the wishes of the majority."

Israel's electoral system--I think I've got this right--is the ultimate in proportional representation. The whole country is one district. Voters each cast one vote, for a party list. To get into the 120-member Knesset, a party needs two per cent of the vote. Once a party has reached that threshold, it gets one seat for every 1/120th of the total national vote it has received.

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Today, 9/11, seems the right day to ask how American foreign policy, and the Middle East conflict particularly, are playing out in the presidential campaign. What, if anything, can Barack Obama do to frame the conversation and, not coincidentally, get himself elected?

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which we have been discussing in this space over the past few days, may seem a side issue here. It is not. Obama himself made the case when he returned from the region in July that any US advance toward diplomatic normalization with Iran, or toward a regional alliance to help out in Iraq, would be tied-up in large measure with Israeli-Palestinian peace. It is a matter of hearts and minds in the greater Arab world.

Moreover, as many of us have argued, the US is the key to any future deal. Given the strength of the Israeli right (and the vendetta culture of Israelis and Palestinians more generally), we cannot expect an Israeli leader to rally an incipient Israeli majority to an actual deal, that is, risk undermining national solidarity for a long while--not unless an American administration and Europe together force the issue, offering a larger, plausible vision, boots on the ground, new investment, and so forth.

Rightist notions like "the global war on terror" have shown how Israel's conflicts are consonant with America's. The Israeli government's ambivalence about ending its occupation, its default to military force, its tensions with Iran, etc., have seemed a kind of US policy agenda in microcosm. And if America approaches its Middle East problems, as Obama insists it must, not with military preemption but with an emphasis on collective security, patient alliances, containment, the power of the global economy, and so forth, how can this not imply a verdict on Israeli occupation?

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Three big issues seem worthy of clarification outside the strings of comments.

1. Alvaro de Soto shrewdly suggests that Israel has need of (at the very least) a two-state solution, but lacks a leader with the brass or brains to take the country there. He is, of course, right. And I would take this observation one more step. Given the peculiar features of Israeli politics, it is structurally almost impossible for any such leader to emerge. I am not exactly speaking about the power of the religious parties, and so forth. I am thinking about something rather worse, which is that although polls show a decisive majority support the two-state solution (the elements of the Clinton parameters, etc.), this support drops precipitously when pollsters suggest a violent fight with the right to get there. 

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I feel a little shy about joining a discussion like this one. Thirty-plus years ago, when I was in the running to join The New Republic as its nominal editor, I sat down with my friend and ex-tutor Marty Peretz for a nice four-hour chat in a Cambridge coffee house. By the time we were done, (a) I had the job and (b) Marty and I had agreed to disagree about the need for a Palestinian state, which had been our topic for at least one of those hours.

For the next twelve years we continued to disagree--on that topic, at least, agreeably. (On other topics, not always so much.) One reason our disagreement stayed agreeable was that I wrote nary a word about Israel, though I edited thousands of Marty's. My view was, If he's going to pump millions into this magazine and let me say whatever I want about everything else, I'm going to let him run the Middle East Desk without any rude pipsqueaking from me. Michael Walzer and, sometimes, Leon Wieseltier usually said what needed to be said anyway.

Another complication was my upbringing. My father was a secular atheist Jew; my mother was a nice Protestant lady. I've never been completely sure what that makes me, though I guess the decibel level on my dad's side of the family, plus my telltale name, make me a hair more Jewish than not. On top of that, Dad, who wrote a monthly column for Commentary about Middle East developments, including Israel's founding, during that then-liberal magazine's first few years of publication, was an anti-Zionist, a proponent of a bi-national state. He thought that a state that self-identified as Jewish would end up becoming just another small-minded Levantine theocracy. Some version of these biases probably lingers in me.

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My friend Bernie's comments about my comment are spot on.

The Palestinians have earned a reputation for being chronic opportunity missers. For Palestinians the delay results in continued suffering and deprivation. The problem is that there is a heavy price to be paid by Israel as well if a two-state solution is not achieved soon: over time it will become an existential question. Writing recently in the New York Times about the urgency of a two-state solution, Tom Friedman said that "Israel is becoming permanently pregnant with a stillborn Palestinian state in its belly."

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So far, a number of quite reasonable objections to the path implied by The Hebrew Republic have cropped up, the most challenging (and authoritative) from my friend, Alvaro de Soto, who was the UN's chief diplomat to the Quartet's peace process a few years back. Alvaro writes:

There is plenty of room to doubt whether a two-state solution is still possible, whether the chance wasn't missed at some indeterminate point not too long ago. The Hebrew Republic may be a Hail Mary pass (an expression which I hope I don't have to explain to non-Catholics), but, I say, let us pray.

I agree that a two-state solution, such as the one we all imagined 20 years ago, is not easily imaginable now.  That is in part because (as I've written here before) Israel is itself something like two states now, secular Israel (anchored by Tel-Aviv) and orthodox-settler Judea (anchored by Jerusalem), and it is by no means clear that Israelis will be prepared to confront Judeans for the sake of Palestinians. Moreover, the Israeli and Palestinian economies are highly inter-penetrated. It is not clear that they can be disentangled. But if objections to a two-state solution, or even just a grim prognosis for it, imply endorsement for a one-state solution (some of the other commentators clearly endorse this), then we are into even more unimaginable territory.

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First, I would like to thank everyone at TPM Café for hosting this discussion.  And I would particularly like to thank friends and associates who have agreed to keep the discussion going over the next week.  Somewhere in the back of every writer's mind is the dream of enabling this kind of give-and take.  I do not take such gifts lightly.

Let me briefly set the stage.  My first book, The Tragedy of Zionism came out in 1985, three years after the ill-fated Lebanon War.  The book focused on how Israel's mounting military crises grew, not only out of Arab enmity, but out of certain failures in its own democracy: that the settlement movement, especially, was not simply the result of some post-1967 intoxication with the land, but that settlement was inspired and materially supported by residual Zionist institutions that should have been retired in 1948.  That Israel's state apparatus was only doing outside of the Green Line after the Six Day War what it had been doing inside the Green Line after the War of Independence. 

I argued, in effect, that the State of Israel had been founded as two states: a democratic state encasing a revolutionary Zionist settler state, the former developing a Hebrew civil society, the latter privileging Jews (defined by Rabbinic strictures) over non-Jews, which developed a world of its own in and around Jewish Jerusalem and the settlements of Judea and Samaria.  (In recent years, many of the settlers have actually begun to say they live in Judea, not Israel.) 

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Happy Monday Cafe-ers!

This week at Book Club, we'll be talking about Bernard Avishai's latest, The Hebrew Republic: How Secular Democracy and Global Enterprise Will Bring Israel Peace At Last.

Bernie's post will be up shortly, and I'll let him introduce the argument. But just to give you a hint of what's to come, and why this conversation seems important now, in the rush of election madness, to remember how much is at stake in the world at large, he concludes his piece like this:

You see, this whole way of looking at peacemaking must change. Israelis must begin to understand that there is a world to win: that peace means further integration to a larger system of collective security--that they are not alone in the world, and that the absence of peace means economic disaster. Israel, they must see (and perhaps only an Obama administration can help them see it), is not being asked to embrace anything more that all European countries have embraced. We have to get past the idea that the peace process means Israelis saying: well, let's give the Palestinians some land, and maybe they (and the world) will leave us alone.

Joining him in the discussion are Yoram Peri, Head of the Rothschild Caesarea School of Communication and Professor of political Sociology and communication at Tel Aviv University, Hendrik Hertzberg, Senior Editor and staff writer at The New Yorker. Sherman Teichman, Director of the Institute for Global Leadership at Tufts University will also be participating along with Dov Frohman, founding CEO of Intel-Israel, and Charles Glass, freelance journalist, broadcaster and author most recently of The Northern Front (2006). Last, but certainly not least, Ambassador Alvaro de Soto, Peruvian diplomat and former UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process will be adding his seasoned voice to the mix.

Join us!