Dear Mira and Jesse:

Here's what it felt like at the end of the world as we know it on one day in October.

This morning, I heard a wise man who knew everything that was possible to know about numbers, and how much energy it takes to run the whole world, describe exactly how much each American's life would need to change to bring it into balance with what it will take for all 6.6 billion people on Earth today to avoid a climate catastrophe. If we don't want more than a 5 degree increase in the average temperature of the world by 2030, we have to make big changes now in how much energy we use. I started looking at all the ways I and we use energy, using an amazing new tool this man helped build, and I wondered, could I cut my travel down to no more than three plane flights a year. Could we stop buying bottled drinks? Could we cut how much we drive in half? Could we convince our friends, relatives and coworkers to do the same?

Then another wise man showed me how much the ocean's life was being depleted by how we over-fish it, and how we pollute it. He showed us a picture of an albatross, one of the world's most beautiful birds, with a wingspan of up to 11 feet, soaring in the sky. And then he showed us another picture, of an albatross chick that died because its mother unknowingly filled its stomach with detritus from the ocean, like cigarette lighters. He told us that great fish like the bluefin tuna, were in danger of being over-fished out of existence, because humans loved them too much in sushi. I thought about whether we could give up eating sushi. I learned that there was much we could do to help the ocean heal.

Then I heard a third wise man (not sure why there weren't more wise women speakers by the way) explain how so much human potential is thrown away, and not just because for many people, poverty closes off opportunities at a terribly young age. Sometimes it is human stupidity. Sometimes it is because we ourselves don't work hard enough, and blame other causes for our own lack of achievement.

And then I heard a fourth wise man explain all the connections between working too hard, eating poorly, not getting enough exercise, being addicted to fast food and coffee, not getting enough sleep, and our out-of-balance economy. He showed how the "invisible hand" that Adam Smith predicted, in 1776, would balance individual self-interest with society's common good, had broken down. He showed, how our own reptilian part of our brains, which governs our most instinctive actions, didn't know how to deal with living in a world of abundant everything, and so we were getting fatter, more materialistic, and less healthy, and allowing the balance of our society to spin out of control. I decided I needed to read his book.

You might think by now that I was getting depressed, but I wasn't. The morning ended with one of my favorite (and your favorite) new musical artists, coming on stage to play three of her songs live. It was magic. Here's what it looked and sounded like:

I also heard another musician play, someone I had never heard of. He too made incredible music. It reminded me of how much beauty was possible in the world. I thought about maybe spending more time re-learning how to make music, and maybe less traveling.

Then I took a break, and looked at what was happening in the world. The stock market went down 400 points, and then up 500. The number of Americans newly applying for unemployment insurance rose to nearly 500,000. I wondered, yet again, about our house and retirement savings, and then decided not to think about it.

In Washington, one not so wise man, but a very powerful man, was admitting that he had been wrong, for a very long time, about the economy, but only realized it now, with the stock market's meltdown. In New York City, another very powerful man, was getting his wish to extend his time as Mayor, without a real vote from the city's voters saying they wanted to give him this chance.

I went back to paying attention to PopTech for the late afternoon sessions. I heard one wise woman (finally) describe how she had decided to change her life doing design work for corporate clients, saying "It's really depressing spending your life creating landfill. So now I work for love." Her artistry is amazing. She told us, "Please remember, always write your love letters by hand." I thought about the letters your Mom and I have shared, and thought about writing her a new one.

I heard a self-styled "perfume critic" walk us through a tour of different manufactured smells. They were beautiful, but I wondered at the luxury and excess of it, especially in these times. $50,000 for a kilo of one of these perfumes?! And yet, the other 500 people listening alongside me seemed to love everything he was showing us.

And then I heard one more wise man, a symphony conductor, who taught us what it means to live in a time of possibility. He showed us how we could sing as if we really meant it, and then he brought a 15-year-old cellist out to play for us, and showed him and us why it's great to make mistakes and learn from them.

As it always does after a day at a conference like PopTech, my head hurt. On the one hand, I was filled with ideas and hope. I saw, again, how much an individual or a small group of individuals can do, to make a difference. And at the same time, I saw how much we were still caught in forces much larger than us. We had just heard about how we needed to trim our consumption and curb our addictive impulses, but we were putty in the hands of the perfume critic. We had just been shown the power of community, but as soon as the last talk was over we went back to our separate spaces and lives.

I don't know. We are facing huge challenges, and you deserve to live in a world as good as the one I and your Mom have grown up in. But to face these challenges, we have to make bigger changes in our lives than we imagine--and not just personal lifestyle changes, but big changes in how we, as part of larger communities, behave together.

I think we are living in a time of great change. I think that in less than two weeks, we may be living in a new world. I am looking forward to that future. I hope you are too.

Love,

Dad

So long as their focus was on Eastern Europe, our press and politicians couldn't talk enough about 'the triumph of capitalism and democracy.' But now that they begin reluctantly to concentrate on piracy at home, they are--perhaps because so many of them are part of that piratical crew--understandably reluctant to admit the obvious: that our system is just as bogus and corrupt and irrelevant and defeated in its own way, offering neither the risks of true capitalism nor the safeguards of true democracy. Our system is a hoax.

If anyone still had faith in the system, the savings and loan adventure surely must have brought him to his senses and to his knees. The gambling debt of $500 billion ($150 billion plus interest and other incidentals)--or will it be, as some economists predict, a trillion four?--that the S&L industry left with the taxpayers has prompted even that deadpan Tory, George Will, to remark in wonderment, 'We seem to have a capitalism here in which profits are private and we socialize the losses. Why are we, in effect--if you're big enough, if you're a huge bank or a savings and loan--why, in effect, are we guaranteeing everything?...What I'm asking is isn't there a way to reform the system so that the taxpayers don't get stuck with what happens when you have deregulation and risk taking that goes wrong?"

The answer to his question is: No, there is no way to reform the present system, because the system is owned and controlled by those who are ruining it. Voters, ordinary taxpayers, have nothing to say about it."

That is from the opening paragraphs of Robert Sherill's majestic, troubling essay "The Looting Decade: S&Ls, Big Banks, and Other Triumphs of Capitalism," which was published as a special issue of The Nation back on November 19, 1990. I was assistant editor of The Nation then, and I had the privilege of working closely with Sherrill on that essay, along with a great group of intern/factcheckers (who amazingly enough included one Nicholas Clegg, who is now the leader of the British Liberal-Democratic Party!).

I've been asking my old friends at The Nation to get the full text of The Looting Decade up on their website, but they have their hands full at the moment. So, I'm posting the .pdf here for your downloading pleasure, and making an appeal: if you can help me get the text converted into .html and posted, please let me know asap.

Get your own - Open publication

In the meantime, as I have time I will post more choice excerpts. If you want to understand today's Wall Street meltdown, you have to start at the beginning, in the 1980s, when the deregulators first started running amok.

I also love my wife, Leslie, and her optimistic and compassionate view of daily life. She responded to that photo with this mashup:

Maybe she should start the SUCCESS blog?

For example, Rep. Barney Frank admits that it wasn't until sometime last year that he realized that all the deregulation pushes of the 1990s had loosed the creation of a "shadow banking system" that was undermining the whole financial system. ?Not only did Wall Street have so much freedom, but it gave commercial banks an incentive to try and evade their regulations,? Mr. Frank says. When it came to Wall Street, he says, ?we thought we didn?t need regulation.?

And then there was this episode, described in the article:

A milestone in the deregulation effort came in the fall of 2000, when a lame-duck session of Congress passed a little-noticed piece of legislation called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act. The bill effectively kept much of the market for derivatives and other exotic instruments off-limits to agencies that regulate more conventional assets like stocks, bonds and futures contracts.

Supported by Phil Gramm, then a Republican senator from Texas and chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, the legislation was a 262-page amendment to a far larger appropriations bill. It was signed into law by President Bill Clinton that December.

Mr. Gramm, now the vice chairman of UBS, the Swiss investment banking giant, was unavailable for comment. (UBS has recently seen its fortunes hammered by ill-considered derivative investments.)

?I don?t believe anybody understood the significance of this,? says Mr. Greenberger, describing the bill?s impact.

Oh come on! Back in the fall of 1999, here's what I wrote in a bulletin I was writing with my colleague Nancy Watzman, for Public Campaign, on the deleterious effects of money on politics. We didn't come up with this analysis on our own, either, but were relying on many outspoken critics of financial deregulation, who unfortunately were completely outgunned in the one currency that buys attention in Washington.

BRAVE NEW WORLD

Friday, October 22, 1999 should go down in history as the day that big money in politics won its biggest victory ever. That was the day that White House and Senate negotiators worked out a final, late-night deal engineering the repeal of a critical Depression-era law, the Glass- Steagal Act, that for six decades has kept the banking, securities and insurance businesses separate from each other.

The ramifications of this change are huge. First, insurance companies, brokerage houses, banks and credit card companies will be allowed to merge, a process that has been already taking place in dribs and drabs through regulatory waivers, but now will be vastly accelerated. Glass-Steagal had forced commercial banks out of the hyper-risky business of stock speculation and set up the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) to protect individuals from bank failures. Now, despite promises otherwise, the U.S. Treasury and the taxpayers will be in the position of bailing out speculators in the event that their risky plays in the securities business threaten the solvency of the soon-to-be-formed mega-banks. [emphasis added]

....
And, the least-remarked-upon result of the new law: political money will become concentrated to an unprecedented degree. From 1997 to present, contributions from the banking, insurance and securities industries in the form of PAC money, soft money and large individual donations ($200+) to federal candidates and party committees totaled more than $175 million, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. These three industries reported spending another $163 million on lobbying in 1997-98.

Key players in the final deal are also top recipients of campaign cash from the financial sector. Senator Gramm has raised $2.07 million from it from 1993-98; Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY), $1.71 million; Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT) $1.38 million.

And who are we relying on now? As Paul Krugman points out today, Phil Gramm is one of John McCain's top economic advisers. And, he notes,

In retrospect, it?s clear that the Clinton administration went along too easily with moves to deregulate the financial industry. And it?s hard to avoid the suspicion that big contributions from Wall Street helped grease the rails.

Last year, there was no question at all about the way Wall Street?s financial contributions to the new Democratic majority in Congress helped preserve, at least for now, the tax loophole that lets hedge fund managers pay a lower tax rate than their secretaries.

Now, the securities and investment industry is pouring money into both Mr. Obama?s and Mrs. Clinton?s coffers. And these donors surely believe that they?re buying something in return. Let?s hope they?re wrong.

It is high time for someone to start raising questions about the public interest here. The caterwauling from Bears' shareholders about price is overshadowing a critical point: Since the first deal was announced, J.P Morgan Chase's stock has rallied smartly. With its enormous market capitalization, that translates into a gigantic increase in market value. If the deal unravels, the stock price might -- indeed, almost certainly will -- fall again, but that is precisely our point: markets considered the deal that the Fed and Morgan tried to cut a very good one for Morgan. The question that needs to be asked is why none of that increase in value is ever to flow back to the public, whose money is critical to the deal. This would be easy to arrange and it does not risk reviving the Soviet Union's Gosplan: the Fed or the federal government could simply have taken some stock in J.P. Morgan Chase. Or, as in the Chrysler bailout, there could have been warrants issued, guaranteeing the government the right to buy stock at a low price. At some point in the future, when J.P. Morgan Chase's management and investors are again comfortable lecturing the rest of us about the magic of the marketplace and the urgent need to cut the size of government, the stock or the warrants could be sold off or redeemed, to pay for the rescue.

“When disgraced Gov. Spitzer arranged hookups with high-priced prostitutes at out-of-state hotels, he would always have another reason to make the trip. Sometimes it was a campaign fund-raiser.

One city where investigators say Spitzer enjoyed a rendezvous with a hooker was Dallas, law enforcement sources said Wednesday. The source would not say exactly when, but a review of Spitzer's campaign finance records reveal he held a fund-raiser at Dallas' elegant Hotel Crescent Court last October.

About 60 people attended, according to Jess Hay, the retired CEO of Lomas Financial Corp., who contributed $1,000 to Spitzer. Hay was surprised to learn about Spitzer's alleged trysts in Dallas.

Gee, and I always thought that the politician was already prostituting himself. As Mark Green pointed out some time ago in a Nation article called "The Evil of Access,"

Senator Zell Miller bluntly described the daily conversations from fundraising cubicles: "I'd remind the agribusinessman I was on the Agriculture Committee; I'd remind the banker I was on the Banking Committee.... Most large contributors understand only two things: what you can do for them and what you can do to them. I always left that room feeling like a cheap prostitute who'd had a busy day."

By the way, if you think the analogy is unfair to prostitutes, who are generally forced by dire circumstances to enter that profession, consider this. Politicians rely on private, self-interested, large donors to finance their campaigns because they don't have any other choice. Either you're rich or you prostrate yourself before a lot of rich people and interest groups. We have good people caught in a bad system.

Though I'm not suggesting that Spitzer started frequenting prostitutes because he thought he would be in good company. I do think that there may be a connection between his getting away with other questionable moves in his public career, and thinking that he could somehow get away with this...

In the pungently hypocritical game of American politics, this is just something outside the rules. Whether it's true, or not, matters little. Nor does it matter that the object of Power's derision has just finished spending millions on TV ads implying that Obama would be responsible for the countless deaths of millions of American children sleeping at 3 a.m. Tut, tut. Nothing monstrous about that.

Power was rightfully awarded the Pulitzer for her finely written and downright horrifying book "A Problem From Hell" which, in macabre detail, describes the calculated indifference of the Clinton administration when 800,000 Rwandans were being systematically butchered. The red phone rang and rang and rang again. I don't know where Hillary was then. But her husband and his entire experienced foreign policy team - from the brass in the Pentagon to the congenitally feckless Secretary of State Warren Christopher - just let it ring.

Read the whole thing.

"A reckless and irresponsible prime minister has a defense minister that has no credibility, shame or moral values, who instead of demonstrating leadership and demanding the removal of the failure Olmert, delivers a slap in the face to the soldiers, bereaved families, and citizens who have lost their faith in democracy. Olmert and Barak have driven the political system to a new low."

I turned 46 a couple of weeks ago. That's an x-ray of my chest, taken at a recent trip to the doctor. I had the flu around my birthday, and had a nagging cough that wouldn't go away. Hence the x-ray, which was just a precaution. All is well, other than a little wheezing.

I liked it when my doctor pointed to that big dark lump on the bottom right (my left) side of my rib-cage and said, "Your heart looks great."

My heart feels great. My heart is full. I feel very blessed by all the good people in my life and the good work I get to do:
-I am blessed by my wife, Leslie, who I have been with for more than 28 years since our first official date. (But who's counting?) What an incredible thing it is to share one's life with a partner who is your best friend.
-My daughter Mira, who just turned 18. OMG! She can vote this coming Tuesday! And she's going to a great college next year. And she'll be doing what she loves, playing softball, and exploring all the academic subjects she's interested in.
-My son Jesse, who is 14 and is a remarkable young man. Thoughtful, caring, hardworking, and somehow he's developed a better sense of humor than me. Damn!
-We have a good home. It's not a palace, but it's comfortable, and we should never take that for granted. The heat works, the water works, the electricity works, the phones (mostly) work, and we have fiber to the home. Can't beat that.
-All the family that surrounds us. All four grandparents are with us, and living full lives of their own. My sister has a beautiful first-born son. Two of Leslie's siblings are also relatively new parents. My brother has two delightful amazing young kids. Children renew my sense of purpose.
-I have amazing work that enriches and challenges and educates me everyday, and great colleagues and partners to share it with. Andrew, Josh, Anthony, Ellen, Mike, Greg--we are blessed to live in such interesting times, and to be able to, maybe just maybe, tip them in even more beneficial directions.
-I would never have guessed this maybe ten or fifteen years ago, but I also feel blessed to have found a vibrant Jewish community to be part of, Mishkan Ha'am, and to be able to share in all of the cycle of life with an intimate circle of real friends.

What can I say? My heart is full.

1. Online video is the opposite of paid TV ads. People choose to watch, and most attention comes because friends share video clips with each other. Contrast that to 30-second attack ads, which are literally forced on viewers, interrupting their favorites shows.

2. Online video is deeper than TV. The typical Barack Obama video is anywhere from five to ten minutes long. YouTube only counts a video as "viewed" if the viewer watches it all the way through. Thus, for Obama to have more than 8 million views, or 600,000 the day after he won the Iowa primary, tells you that many more people have probably watched part of one of his videos. This is yet more example of how the web is a world of abundance, not scarcity.

3. When we track viewership, or people "friending" a candidate or mentioning them in their blogs, what we're watching is a sign of intensity of support. Bloggers and their ilk are like super-charged citizens, and so the tracking numbers online aren't the same as polls, but more like measures of intensity of interest and support.

NPR's All Things Considered, July 24, 2007: "Did Web's Role Shape Debate, or Was It a Gimmick?"
KCRW's nationally syndicated show To the Point, with Warren Olney, July 24, 2007: "Will YouTube Change the Substance of Presidential Politics?"
NY Daily News, July 25, 2007, "Hey CNN & Google, Give Us a Presidential Debate 2.0"
The Politico, with Andrew Rasiej, July 26, 2007: "Democratic Debate: Still Not Democratic Enough"

Once in my life I was innocent enough to accept all those songs at face value, to believe that Israel wanted peace more than anything else. Now I know the story is much, much more complicated. My eyes started to open in my late teens and early twenties, at a time when I and my then-to-be wife Leslie seriously contemplated making aliyah to a kibbutz, along with a group of close friends from our summer camp days. Little things that I noticed bothered me: the fact that cars registered to Arabs in Israel have a different color license plate than to Jews, making them easier for police to spot and pull over; the fact that many kibbutzim, socialist in name and internal practice, sit on formerly Arab land and have no Arab members. I was already full of pacifist leanings, and the idea of having to serve in the Israeli Army, if I did make aliyah, bothered me immensely. And I was even more bothered by the idea that if I chose to conscientiously object, I'd never be accepted as a "full" participant in Israeli public life. (I know this has changed somewhat in recent years, but we're talking the early 1980s now.) Ultimately, we chose not to make aliyah, obviously, but given all the family we have living in Israel, we've never abandoned the connection.

I'm not going to blog about the intimate facts of my extended family in Israel. (On my mother's side, I have an aunt and an uncle and various cousins with their own children.) I'll just say that they're a mix of working class and middle class people, of both Ashkenazi (Western) and Mizrachi (Eastern) background. And they've had more than their share of life's hard knocks. Whenever we visit--and my mother makes this trip at least once a year--we try to offer as much support as we can. But some of their difficulties are deeply ingrained. This is a part of my Israel experience too, and one that colored the last few days of our time on this visit. But I'm not going to go there. Not now anyhow.

Back to politics. During this trip, I re-read David Grossman's book The Yellow Wind, and I also read a collection of dispatches written by Amira Hass in her role as Ha'aretz's correspondent from the occupied territories. It was a useful counterpoint to the tour we got on the helicopter ride, which climaxed with a close-up view of the border with Hamas-controlled Gaza and a visit to a synagogue that had been hit by one of the daily Kassem rocket attacks aimed at the Israeli border town of Sderot. Our guide, an American-Israeli named Calev Ben-David, concluded his explanation of the situation there by arguing for Israel's current policy of "targeted killings"--where the Air Force fires missiles at Palestinian militants that they have identified as bomb-makers, sometimes killing innocents at the same time. From his point of view, everything Israel is doing is justified self-defense.

Amira Hass makes you think twice, hard, about that argument. Her work covers the years between 1999-2002, when the brief hopes of the Oslo process and the Rabin-Arafat handshake all went sour and the second intifada began. If I can, I'll dig up some links to the most cogent articles in the collection. She documents, in careful and excruciating detail, how Israel has dominated the Palestinian population, and how the ongoing expansion of settlements during the Oslo period (when they were supposed to be frozen) and the ongoing humiliations of daily life and Israeli military action in the territories embittered and helped kill Palestinian hopes for a peaceful solution to their predicament. Again and again, you read of an arbitrary house demolition, or a permit refusal, and the sum total of these experiences begins to weigh heavily on the notion that justice is all on Israel's side.

I don't know what has happened to the prospects of Israeli-Palestinian compromise or even dialogue. (Unfortunately, there just wasn't time on this visit for me to see some of my old friends who are still involved in the Israeli peace movement.) Clearly, the outbreak of the second intifada (triggered by Ariel Sharon's provocative stroll on the grounds of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem in Sept. 2000) and the failure of the Camp David summit between Ehud Barak and Yasir Arafat later that year, and the usage of lethal force and then suicide bombing by Palestinian militants, has poisoned nearly all possibility for dialogue, though it's clearly not completely dead. But the rise of the "security fence" and the enormous consensus among Israeli Jews in its favor, suggests that we are into a new chapter in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. One glimpse of what that might be came in a conversation with one of my cousins...

Friday morning last week we drove to the artist?s colony of Ein Hod, nestled in the hills about a half hour south of Haifa. My cousin Nechama and her partner Nadav have made their home there, and this week they were hosting a menagerie of artists from all over Europe who were visiting and creating art while on their visit. Their home, which doubles as their studio and display space, was overflowing with half finished paintings. Two of the visiting artists held a playful ?instant art? competition in the road below their house, complete with a referee who timed each stroke of paint. It was a delight to see Nechama in her element, the ringmaster of a gentle exhibition of creativity.

On the way there, I recounted the details of our previous days with Katy, another cousin of mine, who was driving us, along with her mother and mine and Jesse, on the visit. On past visits, Katy has struck me as generally not one to talk about politics, out of a general disgust with men in public life (she grew up in Netanya, which has a reputation as one of Israel?s most chauvinistic cities). On this trip though, politics was very much on her mind. The day we arrived she told me there was a big demonstration against the light punishment given to disgraced Israeli President Moshe Katzav, who apparently harassed and molested and perhaps even raped many of the women who worked in his office. At her house later, she talked about how she couldn?t bear the thought of her grandchildren potentially having to go into the army and asked how we were going to end this cycle. And on the car ride to Ein Hod, she objected to my singling out the director of Israel 21c for living in Ma?aleh Adumim and not mentioning to our tour group that that was a settlement.

?Netanya is a settlement too, you know,? Katy said. ?So is Tel Aviv. The Arabs say that, and I think they are right. There is no difference between Netanya and Ma?aleh Adumim.? For a minute, she had me floored. At some level, it?s true. A hundred or so years ago, there was not much of a Jewish presence in this area, other than a community in Jerusalem. When the first Zionists came to settle places like Tel Aviv and Netanya, they were a minority of the population?the same way today?s settlers in the West Bank are a minority of the population.

But to accept Katy?s argument, you have to ignore one critical difference. When the first Zionists came to settle in Palestine, the ruling power was initially Turkish (the fading Ottoman Empire) and then, after WWI, British. There was no state of Israel in any boundaries at all, and the state that came into being was the product of the UN partition plan and then a climactic war between the nascent state of Israel and its Arab neighbors. Tel Aviv was the heart of a new country that was a majority Jewish, and that began its existence with the imprint of the United Nations (even if the 1949 armistice boundaries were beyond what was contemplated in the 1947 partition plan).

By comparison, when Israel began settling the West Bank and Gaza, it was doing so as a sovereign state acting in contravention of international law governing the responsibilities of an occupying power, and it did so in places where there was an overwhelming Arab majority.

But there may be something to what Kati said, nonetheless. There was a sense in her words that in the wake of the failure of the Oslo process Israel is no longer facing an adversary that is willing to compromise around the 1967 boundaries, that this is an existential conflict over whether or not to roll back the reality created in 1948. Certainly that is the sense one gets from the rhetoric of Hamas. But I still have to ask, who missed the opportunity of the 1990s? Was it just Arafat? That answer may make many Israelis feel better, but critics like Amira Hass certainly makes a strong case that the Israelis also misunderstood their adversaries, and traded the peace of the brave for a humiliating non-peace, one that is now bearing very bitter fruit.

Perhaps you can begin to see why I stopped writing intensively about this issue a decade or so ago...it's so frustrating.

We (my son Jesse and my mom, who is also here visiting) have also dined in Jerusalem with some American cousins of ours who have been living here 30 years and heard them declare that they have never been so depressed at the prospects of finding any solution to the conflict; I met with the director of the Hartman Institute, Donniel Hartman, and discovered the movement for Jewish renewal and relevance in modern times is alive and beating; and Jesse and I searched out and found the site of a tree that was planted at Yad Vashem 29 years ago to honor a Polish man named Walter Ukalo who was a friend of my in-laws and who saved eight Jews during the Holocaust, making him one of the good souls known here as a "Righteous Gentile."

I can't process all of this in any kind of narrative form. It's too much. I'm also sacrificing sleep to even get these thoughts down while they're semi-fresh. But here are a few jottings:

-- I have always said to myself that sooner or later, Israel's neighbors would have to reconcile themselves to its existence. "Like it or not, Israel is not going away," I'd say. And just from the explosion of construction that you see everywhere, this feeling of mine has only gotten stronger. Tel Aviv is unrecognizable to me. What was once a relatively modest city of five and six-story buildings with a handful of larger apartment towers is now a sprawl of genuine skyscrapers. In 1982, when I was here doing research for my Princeton senior thesis on the rise of Shalom Ackshav (Peace Now), I could walk from one interview at an Israeli newspaper to a meeting at the Kirya, Israel's defense ministry. Now I could perhaps still do that walk, but the borders of the city have spread at least four-fold. Same with Israel's highway system, which has gone from a handful of two-lane roads connecting its main cities to an array of super-highways and three-lane thoroughfares laced throughout the whole coastal metro area.

-- The helicopter tour, on the other hand, reminds me of how small Israel is. But while the Israel Project, the organization that took us on that flight, might want that to prove how vulnerable the country is, all it reinforced for me is how land alone is no guarantor of security. In an age of "home-made" Kassem missiles and spreading high-technology, no country can ensure its security perfectly. Unfortunately, so much of what is going on now seems to me to be the bitter fruit of so many years of Israeli hubris. The peace movement warned for years that holding onto the territories and building settlements on them would, among other things, embitter the Palestinians and poison the chances for peace. How horribly ironic that just 15 years ago, it was against the law for an Israeli to meet with a member of the PLO, and today Israel is trying to prop up Fatah, the core of the PLO for all these decades.

-- Tunnels. In Gaza, the Palestinians are digging tunnels. In Jerusalem, in the Old City, so are the Israelis. In Gaza, the tunnels are for smuggling weapons in from Egypt to supply Hamas, and for occasionally attempting raids on Israeli border outposts (one of which resulted in the killing of an Israeli soldier and the kidnapping of another). In Jerusalem, the tunnel is for uncovering the deep Jewish past there that dates back to the time of the Second Temple, more than two thousand years ago. These are not morally equivalent projects. No human beings are being harmed by that archeological dig. And yet there is a similarity, because these tunnel projects ARE both about national self-assertion. Israel's new Defense Minister, Ehud Barak, once created a stir when he declared on Israeli TV that if he were a young Palestinian living in Gaza today, he too would be a terrorist. This is not to justify what Hamas is doing or what it stands for but to realize that the Palestinians are in their own cycle of history, and maybe the moment for compromise has passed for this generation. I hope not for all.

-- The Temple Mount. Walking underground on our guided tour of the underground tunnel along the Western Wall, listening to our enthusiastic young guide gush about the beauty of the foundation stones, how we were passing just 300 feet from where the "Holy of Holies" once stood, closer than any Jew had stood in 2000 years; watching him kiss the rock wall, and then gazing on a sophisticated model of the Temple Mount that explained the archeological work we were walking through, I had a very bad feeling. It is one thing to see how archeology can uncover and confirm facts from the past. Yes, the ancient Jews built a great Temple here, and it is awe-inspiring to walk underground and know that you are standing in a bathing area built by King Herod, or what was probably a changing room for people coming to worship. But it is another thing to see how these discoveries fuel a Jewish neo-mysticism that thinks everything that Israel has accomplished is a miracle from God rather than the hard work of human beings, and how they fire a zeal for the return of that Temple, no matter how unrealistic or dangerous such a project might be. After all, if God brought the Jews of 150 countries back from Exile, won't God protect them if they fulfill His commandments regarding the building of that Temple?

-- Yad Vashem. Yad Vashem was stunning. The new museum, which was built in 2005, is nothing like the old one. Gone are the simple photographic exhibits that my colleague Joann, the Nation's copy editor, had so diligently copy edited as we walked its halls in 1985. Moshe Safdie, the world renowned Israel architect, has built a beautiful and stark gash in the earth made of steel and concrete, and most of the time you are underground walking the halls. Above us there is a thin beam of light coming thru the roof, meant to symbolize the occasional shafts of goodness that pierced the dark times of the Holocaust.

Our guide pierced my heart right away. A softspoken Orthodox Jewish woman with the slightest of Hebrew accents, she startled me at the beginning of our tour by asking the group, "Is there anyone here who knows someone who was in the Holocaust?" I cleared my throat and said, somewhat embarrassed, "Yes, my mother, who is with us here, was a hidden child during the war in Belgium. And my father-in-law, on his side of the family, lost at least 70 immediate family members. I have the list with me here." My mother then said a few words about her experience during the war, but she too seemed a bit startled. It was not going to be an easy walk through the exhibit, even though we were rushing and only had an hour or so for what is normally a three hour tour.
Several times I felt myself tearing up. Once, when I read the German Jewish poet Heinrich Heine, who was quoted from the 1820s saying, "When they burn books, the burning of people is not far behind." This as we watched a short movie showing Josef Goebbels presiding over a mass bookburning at a German university in the early 1930s. Once again as we looked at a giant wall-sized poster of the massacre site at Babi Yar, where more than 50,000 Jews were shot and killed in the open air. I hadn't realized that Babi Yar was a picnic site. You could see how the grounds were green, below the bodies stacked like cordwood. A third time as we looked later at pictures of the days after the liberation of the camps, and we listened to a chorus of emaciated Jewish children singing hatikva, "The Hope," which later became Israel's national anthem, and looked at a photo of the first Friday night Shabbat candle-lighting to take place in Bergen-Belsen. "That 8-year-old boy sitting in the corner there," our guide softly told us, "later made aliyah to Israel and grew up to be one of the country's chief rabbis." Gulp. Finally we stood in the Hall of Names, a circular virtual cemetery lined by simple black file boxes. There are 3.5 million names of victims of the Holocaust that are collected here, our guide told us. There were many empty rows, waiting to be filled.

At the same time I am thinking that's nonsense, don't be paranoid, you're not that important and it's entirely reasonable for them to say the helicopter they originally managed to reserve needed repair and the one they're using is too small to take Jesse along (and thus neither me). [UPDATE: It turned out that one of the folks in our little delegation wasn't feeling up to it, and so there was room for both me and Jesse to get on the helicopter! It's been a whirlwind of a day and while I am quickly posting this at 6pm, I don't have time to get into details about the trip, I will as soon as I can. I think the rest of this post still stands... and seeing both the "security fence" from the air, the geography of the conflict, and the battle around Gaza playing out now, I've got plenty more to chew on...]

I am also frustrated that despite my efforts last night at a delicious Ethiopian restaurant to draw out the Israel21c people and the Anglo bloggers they invited to join us for dinner, I couldn't really get them to engage on the issue of how they deal with what is euphemistically referred to as "the situation" or "the conflict" and in particular what it does to Israel to be continuing to be occupiers.

When I described for them David Grossman's effort in his book The Yellow Wind, which I am re-reading and savoring on this trip, to get Israelis and Palestinians alike to take one moment to empathize with the suffering of the other, and his failure to get anyone to do so, I got no meaningful response. Maybe they were tired. Maybe they were tired of being asked such questions. I know I've gotten tired of them at times.

Blogger Lisa Goldman, who had been involved in a fascinating dialogue with Lebanese and other Middle Eastern bloggers starting last year, and who had just come back from Lebanon, didn't really respond and if anything seemed frustrated at my effort to raise the issue. "Don't you understand that we are exhausted of the conflict and just trying to get by and raise our kids?" she asked. We have a government that is at 4% popularity in the polls (makes Bush look popular!), everyone is under indictment, and we've tried almost every option for peace, she added. Actually, there are some things we haven't tried, she said in passing, but didn't want to get into it when I asked. (But you just came back from Beirut and sat on the beach with a Syrian blogger, what else can you tell us, I thought to myself.) She just must have been tired. I can understand that!

David Brin, the head of Israe21c who hosted our dinner, casually mentioned that, in fact, he lives in Ma'aleh Adumim, which is a giant settlement of 40,000 people east of Jerusalem, but he insisted, with no rancor at all, that it really wasn't considered a settlement any more, just a part of Jerusalem, one of its neighborhoods. I had in front of me a perfect example of how the settlement movement had succeeded in making its zealotry part of Israel's "normal life", to borrow from the "This Normal Life" title of blogger Brian Blum's autobiographical blog, and I didn't have the heart or gumption or will to challenge him further. (My dear departed friend Robbie Friedman was right, I thought to myself, the settlement movement has succeeded in dragging Israel into an untenable situation, a cancer on Israel's soul.)

Brian, who was sitting across from me and who was the friendliest guy, and who has a really cool business in the works helping bloggers turn their best posts into cyber-books, had also told us that he started his blog five years ago, after a cousin of his was killed in a suicide bombing, and out of respect for his loss I didn't really want to probe too hard what is after all an unacceptable tragedy for him. I also kept sensing how badly these Israeli-Anglo bloggers want us to accept them and embrace them as part of the larger political blogosphere (Allison Kaplan Sommer, a blogger here who works for Pajamas Media, told us during dinner how she felt uncomfortable being totally rejected by the left side of the blogosphere and totally embraced by the right, even though that wasn't where she thought of herself, and I couldn't help but empathize with her)...the same way the Israeli techies we met over the last two days want to be (and in many ways are) seen as Silicon Valley (Middle) East and not necessarily as part of the "situation" that is still festering and threatening to explode once again. (No, we haven't spent a second talking about that!) But when you meet people face-to-face over a nice meal, the last thing you want to do is get into an argument.

I am also grumpy because so far I feel like we've been visiting a bubble, that we've had little to no contact with "real Israelis" but instead are being handled, with the greatest of finesse, by Professional Israelis, people who have made it their job, either by day or by avocation, to "represent" the country to outsiders and make sure we get a varnished view while claiming they are giving us a rounded picture. Out of politeness again, and a sense that, hey, after all, they invited me and paid my way, I bit my tongue when David Brin said that Israel21c had organized a post-Blogference touring itinerary that aimed to give us a balanced experience--seeing the border fence (with an IDF guide), visiting Sderot (a border town being regularly shelled from Gaza) and also meeting an Israel Arab economic development group. I should have said, and what about a meeting with a Palestinian, or one of the Israeli human rights groups? Are you so sure every option for peace has been tried? You say that the Palestinians rejected a two-state solution at Camp David, but what about the fact that after Oslo in 1993 Israel doubled the size of its settlement population and kept demolishing Palestinian houses (built without permits from the occupying authority) at a prodigious rate? But then again I am not staying for the full tour, as Jesse and I have various family and friends to visit around the country over the next few days, so while we are going to get spend the next two days with the group in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, which we are very much looking forward to, we will miss the trip to the border fence and the economic development group.

I don't feel good about biting my tongue...but at the same time I don't need to make a stink, this isn't my passion any more, thinking about all of this gets me depressed and angry, and why should I upset Jesse's experience of the country? (And hey, the Jerusalem Post just did a story yesterday about the Blogference where I am cited as having written "several books" on the Internet and politics--if only this were true!) I am wondering also what I should do with the time we have to make sure that Jesse does get a more rounded view of things--can we somehow squeeze in a meeting with the Seeds of Peace people, since after all we've been sending the kids Tzedakah donations to them for years. Or should we try to go parasailing, so he has a great story to share with his friends back home. But how can I take him on such a privileged activity when, after all, here were are in the Middle East and just a few miles away from us things are not gleaming and bright? So, that's what is keeping me up this morning when I should be sleeping...

And at the same time I am also still chewing on and savoring the conversations with all the interesting and creative people I met over the last two days, both from among the Israeli techies and bloggers who came to the Blogference and sought me out in the hallways for a conversation, and also the other members of our little delegation, like Andrew Baron and Joanne Colan of Rocketboom, and Doug Racine and Kent Nichols of Ask-A-Ninja, and Garrett Graff and Jessica Coen and Om Malik. Yesterday, I met one Israeli entrepreneur, Eran Reshef, who has started a company called Collactive that helps individuals and groups amplify their voices on social media sites...and another, Yaron Charka, who has started a company called Speakitz that enables anyone to add their voice or comment to any site on the web...and a woman named Taly Weiss with an absolutely brilliant if still not-fully-baked idea to create an international "United Nations 2.0" on the web and invite people from around the world to join and group them, by their IP addresses, to their own countries and enable them to vote on how their country should vote on issues actually coming before the UN. Imagine that, an Israeli who wants to think of a way to get the UN to actually work!

Dr. Noam Lemelshtrich-Latar, the organizer of the Blogference and Dean of the Sammy Ofer School of Communications at the IDC, also impressed me with his knowledge of how search technologies and personal tracking systems were being deployed, without our knowledge or consent, in all sorts of business settings, and his anger and concern for the mass invasion of privacy taking place was real and urgent. The School of Communications itself is an impressive new facility that should be a major draw for the IDC. The two thirteen-year-old pre-pubescent Israeli boys who sat in the back of the Ask a Ninja's workshop, furiously scribbling notes while the Ninjas spoke about how they build up their videoblog, wowed me completely. "Oh, we're really enjoying the event," they told me. "We're learning so much. We have our own blogs, you know." Same with the first year Israeli students at the IDC, Tammy Berger and Dorin Bornovski, who were interviewing all of us for a documentary they are making about the event. Same with the Israelis who came to my and Garrett's workshop on blogging and politics, and who genuinely seem to be searching for a way to foster the rise of an independent Hebrew political blogosphere that might be able to do for Israeli politics what the netroots movement in America has done for the left there (more on that topic maybe later). Their questions and enthusiasm and hard work were infectious.

Ach, I hate to feel so conflicted with myself. No wonder I can't sleep.