Bernard Avishai Dot Com

What Can Obama Do About Palestine, Meanwhile?

2009-11-08T06:26:00.007-05:00

My old friend Danny Rubinstein, who has covered the West Bank pretty much since the occupation began, came over Friday afternoon. He had covered this week's expulsion of Palestinian residents from their disputed home in Sheikh Jarrah. He had just come from conversations with Palestinian journalists in East Jerusalem, and was not in a cheerful frame of mind.

One gets the feeling that things are coming to a head, he says, what with Mahmoud Abbas' announcement that he would not seek reelection, and Netanyahu headed to a Washington whose Congress had just denounced the Goldstone Report. The Israeli government is doing what it can to defend the status quo. But the status quo engenders a disaster, and the Obama administration is understandably distracted.

The question is not whether time is running out on a two-state solution, as if one state, like South Africa, could ever happen here. The real question is whether we are going to prevent the kind of general violence that will turn Israel and Palestine into a Balkans-style conflict, with Jerusalem a kind of Sarajevo, and the Israeli Arab villages of the Little Triangle a kind of Bosnia. Without palpable outside action to move Israel off the status quo, especially from the Obama administration, the streets of the West Bank will blow. But Obama has no desire to pick a fight with any senators just now, not until 60 of them vote to end the inevitable Republican filibuster.

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

But when ordinary people in the streets of the West Bank start to believe that this leadership cannot be trusted to deliver--that donor money is meant to palliate them during a silent ethnic cleansing of Jerusalem and the annexation of their land by settlers--Hamas will appear the only game in town. We seem to be in a race between the vote on healthcare in the Senate and the outbreak of riots around Al-Aqsa.

THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION cannot just sit on its hands, and seems to know what it needs to do in the long run. But what exactly can it do in the short-run to reassure Palestinians without inciting a public backlash among senators eager to prove their "friendship" to Israel. The dispute over a "settlements freeze" has proven a dead end, since everybody (including leaders of the PA) have been working on the assumption that at least some of the citified settlements will be annexed to Israel, while that Palestine would be compensated with a land swap. Neither could the Obama administration endorse the Goldstone report, which Palestinians justifiably regard as a touchstone of others' empathy for them, without laying itself open to charges that it is cavalier about missiles falling on Israel.

Somehow, then, the administration has to signal that it is not only serious about pursuing a Palestinian state but that it has a pretty clear understanding of what that state would look like, where it's borders will be, and so forth--and that it is not simply a cheerleader for negotiations that will, under present circumstances, prove fruitless. But how do you buy time without appearing to endorse the status quo. How do you signal the outlines of the state without presenting the whole plan for a state?

ALL OF WHICH brings me back to Rubinstein. Perhaps the most depressing thing he told me confirms apprehensions I wrote about in Harper's last month, that while the Palestinian prime minister Salam Fayyad is trying to build out the foundations of a Palestinian state--say, through massive construction projects in and around Ramallah--he is being thwarted in all kinds of ways by the occupation authorities and the IDF. Almost no developments in Area A (the cores of Palestinian cities), for example, can fail to encroach on Areas B and C where the IDF controls the roads and airspace--more than 60% of the West Bank. "He is trying to break ground on the Al-Ersal project and he is suddenly up against a road the settlers use only for themselves in Area C. This is so called 'state land,' the Israeli government has taken from Jordan and calls its own."

But here, precisely, is an opportunity for the American government, is it not? Suppose the Obama administration were to commit, say, $50 million to this project and use its public influence to seek its construction. If the Israeli government gets in the way, then it is obstructing a joint Palestinian-American project. If the question comes up whether parts of Area B or C around the project are ultimately going to be part of the Palestinian state, then the American administration can signal--that is, in advance of any negotiation--that it is siding with the Palestine authority over the interests of the settlers.

The point is, we have to move away from statements of principle to manifest demonstrations of intention. America has to become Palestine's partner not only in training police, but in expanding the foundations of commerce and statehood. Just as important, the Obama administration needs to prove that, unlike its predecessor, it will not become an inadvertent tool of the settlers.

And if while it's focussed on its domestic priorities the administration can't avoid a fight with AIPAC's favorite politicians, let it be over something the vast majority of Israelis, let alone Americans, would support. I mean the peaceful development of Palestinian civil society in parts of the West Bank where cities are growing and, border or no border, settlers have crossed all bounds.

Connected Cars: The 'Killer App' For The Smart Grid--And The New Driver of Growth

2009-11-04T03:47:00.015-05:00

Job figures are lagging indicators but nobody feels reassured right now. It is hard to imagine Americans returning to something like the full employment of the 1980s and 1990s without new industries like telecom and computers engendering a vast new ecosystem of entrepreneurial businesses; companies in which American technological talent can distinguish itself; companies that either require local workers for infrastructure projects, or, design and manufacture products and components whose labor content is too small for managers to consider outsourcing to the Far East.

The good news is that the electric car is around the corner. The bad news--which is the best news of all for the economy, ironically--is that the electric grid cannot begin to cope with the electric car's demands and possibilities. Layering in all the network technology that will smarten the grid, and preparing electric cars to communicate with it (and each other), will transform our economic and physical landscape. These changes will require a new role for government--something the Obama administration seems to understand. I explore the new ecosystem and its implication in the current Inc. Magazine:

At ground level, electric cars like GM's Chevrolet Volt -- due to be launched in November 2010 -- are pretty much everything the U.S. economy is banking on. The cars promise innovative engineering and a resurgence of the American auto industry. They mean an America that is manufacturing things rather than just bundling financial instruments. Cosmically, electric cars mean green technologies that will migrate to China, India, and Brazil, where they will allow for Western styles of personal freedom yet not threaten to overheat the earth.

And you don't have to be George Clooney to want one. Electric cars may be vaguely cool, but GM executives are counting on drivers with nothing more than a householder's logic, something like the good sense to refinance a mortgage when the 30-year-fixed drops more than 2 percent. Jon Lauckner, GM's vice president of global product planning, tells me that his team set out to trump gas-powered cars as a matter of straightforward economics, especially as economic recovery pushes the price of gas back over $3 a gallon. "At that level," Lauckner says, "the cost of running a Volt in full electric mode will be about one-sixth that of a gas-driven car of the same size, 2 or 3 cents a mile rather than 12 to 15 cents a mile. We figured that, for most people, this means a savings of about $1,500 a year." Sticker prices will be high; the suggested price of the Volt will be about $40,000. But federal tax rebates are anticipated to be as much as $7,500, not to mention various state incentives. So the actual price will probably be closer to $30,000 -- not a bad deal, given that borrowing costs will be low for some time.

When he speaks of "full electric mode," Lauckner is acknowledging another barrier he expects the Volt to take down, namely range anxiety, the fear of getting stuck with rundown batteries while driving in a snowstorm, bumper to bumper, on a 150-mile trip to the in-laws'. The Volt will come equipped with a small gas engine, unlike its forthcoming competitors: the smaller Nissan Leaf, BMW's plug-in Mini Cooper E, and Ford's electric Focus. This engine will not drive the wheels, as with the hybrids now on the market (actually, GM likes to call the Volt an "extended range electric car," not a hybrid), but will act as a dynamo to supply the electricity for the car after 40 miles of running on stored power.

The Volt's designers assumed, per Department of Transportation data, that nearly 80 percent of Americans drive 20 miles or less to work. This is why GM was able to make the technically true but sly announcement that the Volt earned a 230-mpg rating for city driving from the EPA. "Most drivers will hardly ever use this engine," says Tony Posawatz, the Volt's line director. "We may have to educate people to change their oil because it hasn't been used for a year! Anyway, when the range-extending engine kicks in, drivers can go up to 300 miles, like a conventional car. In a pinch, they can make use of the existing gas-station infrastructure."

And so, assuming these cars prove safe and reliable, American consumers will almost certainly consume them. U.S. auto companies will make them, and that's good for the planet, right? Yes, but.

Continue with the article here.

Palestine Economy: Update

2009-11-03T07:28:00.015-05:00

I spent the day in Ramallah yesterday, attending a meeting of information technology and telecom entrepreneurs, and catching up with some of the folks I reported on in last month's Harper's: Palestinian business leaders who are, slowly but surely, laying the ground for Palestinian civil society; people fighting the limitations of occupation at every turn just to keep their businesses afloat, while the Netanyahu government boasts about "economic peace."

I reported, for example, on the stalled efforts to launch Wataniya, the Palestine Investment Fund-backed cell phone provider, which had been promised 4.8 megahertz of spectrum by the Israeli government. (Wataniya was conceived by the PIF to compete with Jawal, in effect, the monopoly provider that had been started by the dominant PALTEL, and which now has a million and a half subscribers.) It is important to understand that Wataniya would be stiffening the spine of the Palestinian economy as a whole by inducing competition, and bringing down prices, for services every emerging business desperately needs.

Wataniya--so its Chairman, the PIF's head, Mohamed Mustafa, told me--was organized to offer Palestine's first 3G network. When I wrote my piece, Israel had released only 3.8 megahertz but kept the rest without explanation, suggesting Jawal share what it had. Mustafa was threatening to bury the entire deal, rather than launch Wataniya with one arm tied behind its back. Anyway, Wataniya finally launched a couple of days ago, a "soft-launch" Mustafa told me, not without good cheer, practicing his elevator speech. The company would not be able to offer all the services it had prepared for; it would focus instead "on customer service" while offering 2.5G services like text and messaging.

It is hard to imagine a management more persistent or forward-looking. The conference was buzzing with hopes engendered by the PIF's various investments, not only in telecom, but in commercial office parks and micro-lending. Yet PIF investments are hamstrung by, among other things, its being shut out of Jerusalem. One feature of competition in Palestine's telecom industry is customer poaching by Israeli providers. (Palestinian companies have exclusive rights in Area A, the centers of Palestinian towns and cities where the Israel Defense forces tend to stay out; but in Areas B and C, where the army and settlers operate freely, and in East Jerusalem--altogether, in two-thirds of the Palestinian territories--Israeli cell phone companies operate illegally but with impunity.) In East Jerusalem, Palestinian providers have no access whatsoever.

WHICH BRINGS ME to increasingly ominous economic trends in East Jerusalem, the once and historic hub of all West Bank cities, including Ramallah. The former economics minister of the Palestinian Authority, Bassim Khoury, recently sent me his summary of depressing data ferreted out of Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics. The conclusions suggest why Ramallah's business class may well lose the race to preempt a Bosnia-type violence that may engulf them and Jerusalem both:

Per capita income of Arabs in Jerusalem is less than half of Jews, who are on average the poorest in Israel. Unemployment among Arabs is 25%, 10% higher than in the West Bank as a whole. Infant mortality is almost double that of Jews, though the birthrate is about the same. About 85% of the municipal education budget goes to Jews, 15% to Arabs, though Arabs are about 30% of the grade school population. 50% of Arabs live under the poverty line, while 25% of Jews do so. This means both Arabs and Jews have about 125,000 people officially defined as "impoverished," but the Jews get 88% of the welfare budget. The city of Jerusalem spends about five times more on Jews than on Arabs per capita for municipal services of all kinds (sewage, garbage collection, etc.). Jews get 98% of the "cultural" budget.

Remember, East Jerusalem is now separated from the other West Bank cities by a wall. The idea was to fence out deadly violence. But the trajectory of social relations in the city suggests violence is only being fenced in. (This was predictable.) Last week's disturbances at Al-Aqsa suggest how it will start, which is pretty much the way violence has started in Jerusalem since 1920. Considering the Jewish people's past, it would be rude to call East Jerusalem a kind of ghetto. So let's just call it a walled-in, patrolled, increasingly impoverished enclave for people with diminishing political rights and unlimited encouragement to leave.

Yasir Barakat, among the most established merchants in the Old City, tells me he knows "nobody whose educated children are not planning to leave Jerusalem if they can." Yasir is one of my oldest friends in Jerusalem. He is not sleeping well. His daughter is now in Dubai, a son is studying in England, and another son, with a degree in network security from England, is working (for now) in Ramallah. “Let’s be honest. There is no give-and-take anymore. The Jews think this all belongs to them and that’s that.”

Peacemakers: Palestine's Business Class

2009-11-01T03:34:00.002-05:00

For those of you who wanted to read my piece in the October Harper's on Palestine's business class, but were deterred by having to buy a Harper's subscription to access current articles, you may now download the pdf. here.

The Law Of Return: 'Oh Learned Judge!'

2009-10-30T09:17:00.013-04:00

Undaunted in his campaign to ferret out “anti-Zionists,” yet apparently wondering if his own powers may be faltering, Jeffrey Goldberg has called in his Balthazar, “the erudite Yaacov Lozowick,” to deal with a hard case:

"My impression of The Hebrew Republic thesis is that [Avishai is] talking about medinat kol exrachai'ah, the country of its citizens. This idea was formulated and mostly promoted by folks who were not only non-Zionist, they were anti-Zionist; it was a ploy to weaken the Jewish aspect of Israel until eventually the Jewish state would be submerged into its Arab environment. Yet Avishai isn't Azmi Bishara. I get the impression he's a caring Jew who is attracted to the medinat kol exrachai'ah idea because it fits so nicely into his broader Weltanschauung, the one that praises the European Union as the way of the future, the goal of human history and so on. On that level, he's non-Zionist because he's joining forces with a particular group of enemies of Zionism, even though he and they are using the same concepts for very different goals."

There is more to his letter. You cannot really understand the surreal quality of intellectual life in Israel today—the rhetoric you hear from talk shows to academic conferences—unless you take a moment to digest it whole.

Yet beyond the glib “impressions” of books unread, the illogic (“non” = “anti”), the cozy appeal to dogma (“the Zionist way”), the guilt by association, the condescending tone, the last-minute finessing of obvious contradictions (viz., “the Zionist way” that takes Israeli Arabs as a “constituency and responsibility”), even the yanking-in of hackneyed German to sound, well, “erudite”—beyond all of this transparent demagogy—is a common claim that requires a moment’s thought.

It is that people who argue Israel should be a state of its citizens cannot believe Israel should be a “Jewish state.” Presumably, “state of its citizens,” medinat kol exrachai'ah (actually, this should be ezrakheha), is an idea that originated with “enemies of Zionism” such as Azmi Bishara.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hebron Letter: A Good Man

2009-10-26T22:38:00.005-04:00

This, from my old friend David Shulman, who is continuing his campaign of witness in the south Hebron hills, still led by by the indomitable Ezra Nawi:

No settlers anywhere nearby, no soldiers, nothing will happen today"— Ezra keeps reassuring our Palestinian friends on the cell phone as we drive down to south Hebron in the early morning. By the time we reach our meeting point near Samu'a, a good group is in place: some twenty Palestinians and another eight or nine Ta'ayush activists. Most of the Palestinians belong to Samu'a, and the fields we are heading toward through the wadis belong to them, though they have no access to them any more. The "illegal outpost" of Asael, one of the uglier and more malignant in this area, has stolen them.

Ezra seems in good spirits despite the handing down of his sentence on Wednesday, three days ago. Judge Eilata Ziskind, who had already found him guilty of assaulting two Border Policemen in February 2007—a trumped-up charge, in my estimation—sentenced him to a month in jail, a fine of 750 Israeli shekels, another 500 shekels to each of the allegedly traumatized policemen and, the real killer, a six-month suspended jail sentence, in force for the next three years, to be activated any time Ezra is arrested again for "unlawful assembly" or similar heinous crimes. She clearly wanted to neutralize him for the coming years. In addition, she used the occasion to read out a moralistic sermon about orderliness and democracy. "Freedom of expression," she said, "is not the freedom to incite and take actions that prevent or disrupt police work… Democracy cannot allow this, for if the law enforcement system collapses, anarchy will reign and democracy and freedom of expression will be no more." It's more or less what one could have expected. After all, one wouldn't ever want to disrupt, by non-violent protest, the work of the police or the soldiers, not even when they come to knock down the rickety hovels of Palestinian shepherds as they did that day at Umm al-Khair. Ezra threw himself in front of the bulldozers, thus delaying the demolitions by a few minutes—an excellent reason, no doubt, to send him to jail. If you don't, anarchy may reign.

Maybe the appeal will quash this verdict. The international campaign clearly has had an effect. In the meantime, it's business as usual; it will take much more than this to stop Ezra Nawi. So here we are in the sun-baked fields of Samu'a, in the mid-morning sun, just below Asael. I have to say these fields don't look too promising. There was little rain last year, and the land seems terminally dessicated, almost beyond redemption. 'Id, walking beside me, can see at a glance that even the thorny bushes they call natj have remained untouched for a long time by the goats who usually feed on them. Apparently, the settlers have driven the shepherds off. The few goat droppings he can see, with his farmer's eyes, are very old. The only fresh droppings are from the wild gazelles that roam these hills: recently 'Id saw a herd of twenty of them, magnificent in these open spaces on the edge of the desert. To make these fields arable again, they will have to be cleared of stones and rained upon; the first task, a forbidding one, is ours. I glance over the first plot, at the bottom of the hill; at a conservative estimate, some 10,000 rocks, of varying shapes and sizes, will have to be pried out of the clay and re-instated as a terrace that will stand up to the water that will, hopefully, come pouring down the hill when the rains do start. By comparison, Sisyphus had an easy time.

We begin working with pick-axes and our bare hands, and as always there is the joy of doing it and especially of seeing the rightful owners of this land returning, at last, to care for it. I'm especially moved watching a middle-aged Palestinian woman working, face partly covered, hands heavy with thorns and stones, beside me. Of course we can't remove all the rocks, but the plot is looking more inviting by the minute, and soon we drift to the next terrace up, and the next one, getting closer at every step to the outer perimeter of the settlement on top of the hill. Naturally, we haven't gone unnoticed. A heavy-set settler in his Shabbat white is staring down at us, and beside him there are soldiers, first only a few, then more and more, and in less than an hour, with the horrid sense of inevitability that so often signals human folly, they are clumsily descending in our direction. They are proudly waving the piece of paper that can only be the order declaring this area a Closed Military Zone.

The senior officer, bearded, young, opaque, reads it out: "By the authority legally vested in me, etc. etc." He gives us exactly ten minutes to desist from our subversive activity and to disappear. Well drilled in these rituals, we argue with him. If this is a CMZ and we are supposed to leave, we say, then why do those settlers on the hilltop get to stay? Ah yes, "by the authority vested in me, those whom I allow to stay can stay. You now have nine and a half minutes." Amiel leaps to the occasion. He carries with him, always, the text of the Supreme Court's ruling that local military commanders have no right to declare these closed military zones whenever the whim strikes them, and above all they are prohibited from using this mechanism to keep farmers away from their lands. Amiel reads out the text of the court's decision. The officer is utterly unimpressed. "You have eight minutes left."

We go back to work, and now each rock I pry from the recalcitrant soil seems to have some special meaning, as if defiance, however quixotic, were imprinted on it. The Palestinians also accelerate their pace. As always, the South Hebron hills are a good place for unexpected encounters. One of the soldiers, smiling, suddenly greets me by name. I don't recognize him at first, in his fancy-dress costume—helmet, uniform, rifle—but he tells me his name: Spartak, a former student. He studied Sanskrit with me, wrote a very good M.A. thesis. I haven't seen him for some years, but I announce at once to whoever wants to hear: "I don’t mind being arrested, but only if Spartak carries out the order." It would be nice to hear his views on the task he is engaged in. "Seven and a half minutes." By now a genial policeman whom we know well from many such occasions has also turned up and announced, in his mild-mannered way, that by refusing to leave the CMZ we are committing a crime, hindering a public servant in discharging his duty (shades of Judge Ziskind). I figure this merits a response, so I say to him: "And what about those settlers? Their very presence here is a crime by international law and by any ethical standard." He smiles and nods. To my surprise, he agrees with me. "True," he says, "but that's not relevant now." "How could it not be relevant?" "Six minutes left before we start making arrests."

...

You remember what Priam said to Achilles, how he kissed the hand that had killed his son, and how the two of them wept together, Achilles remembering his old father, and how the whole huge war and everything that had been said or sung about it suddenly seemed so futile and foolish and unbearable, a world empty of anything remotely like glory but suffused by shame. You remember how you didn't really want to get up so early this morning and go off to South Hebron because it all seems so futile, and now that today is over it still feels futile and yet strangely beautiful, as if some intimate chord had been struck even if no one could hear it, even if you could barely hear it yourself. Maybe, you might think for a passing moment, it's beautiful because it's futile—but actually you don't believe that. You remember how when you were driving down this morning there were ragged children playing ball by the roadside and the ball rolled onto the highway and Ezra stopped the car right there in the middle of the vast desert and waited for them to cross over and retrieve their ball safely, and you thought: it's a small, everyday gesture, hardly worth noticing in the midst of the madness, but this is the act of a good man.

American Jewish Power: A Clarification

2009-10-23T18:19:00.004-04:00

In a previous post, I wrote this:

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

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

In response, Philip Weiss has written a long, thoughtful post taking issue with the statement that "Congress will care what Jews want." I won't try to reproduce his arguments; you can read them here.

What I should have said, perhaps, is that Congresspeople cannot respond to Jews, or indeed, any ethnic or national sub-group in America, apart from the ways they are presumed to inform or contribute to the common good of Americans as a whole. Jews are powerful, alright, but (much as Phil shows) because of the ways they enrich America's view of itself. This must also be true of the ways Jews inform foreign policy decisions. I thought the point was self-evident; with interest group and identity politics so second nature these days, the point is sometimes lost.

Goldberg: The Last Word (At Least From Me)

2009-10-22T16:03:00.013-04:00

A couple of days ago, Jeffrey Goldberg explained why he was disinclined to associate with J Street, in spite of his sympathy for a two-state solution:

So I'm comfortable in many ways with J Street's basic worldview. On the other hand, I don't think the group has put forward a well-articulated vision of what a progressive Jewish democratic Israel should look like. This might be because, in addition to having progressive Zionists as members, it also has anti-Zionists (these are the types who are happy with Stephen Walt's tragic endorsement of the group) and it's obviously very hard to put forward a positive vision of a Jewish Israel when some of your important supporters -- Bernard Avishai comes to mind -- don't even believe in the idea of a Jewish state.

Now Goldberg denies that "anti-Zionists" like myself are actually keeping him away from J Street's conference. We would know this, presumably, if we had read a different one-line blog post, in which he says, with obvious sarcasm, "I'm sorry I'm going to miss this conference" (which, in context, if you follow his link, reads like "I'm sorry I'm going to miss this circus"). Then, en passant, Goldberg explains his evidence for my "anti-Zionism."

On the more important question of Zionism and anti-Zionism, all I think I need to say is this: Avishai, the author of a book called "The Tragedy of Zionism," believes that Israel's Law of Return should be repealed. This is the law that grants Jews anywhere in the world to claim citizenship in the newly-reconstituted Jewish state, which was meant to be a refuge for persecuted Jews. The law is the raison d'etre of Zionism, and of Israel's existence. I don't think I was being "vicious" in pointing out that Avishai's conception of what Israel should be is very different from the mainstream Zionist position. By the way, J Street's position, as officially enunciated by its head flack to me, is that the group's core mission is to preserve Israel as a "Jewish democracy." Though maybe I should ask J Street if it believes the Law of Return as currently written and implemented is undemocratic.

This is unworthy of Goldberg's talents. It would also be unworthy of our time if Goldberg were not a well-regarded journalist, burying those talents under cozy prejudices that are shared widely among decent American Jews; people who do not have the time Goldberg has to get things right or think things through; people who look to Goldberg to give them direction.

1. Yes, I wrote a book called the Tragedy of Zionism in 1985. William Appleman Williams wrote a book called the Tragedy of American Diplomacy. This did not mean he was opposed to American diplomacy. Tragedy does not mean catastrophe except, perhaps, to tyro reporters covering car accidents on the local news ("This is Shannon Williams reporting from the scene of the tragedy.") Tragedy means we cannot fully undertand the implications of our actions.

The Tragedy of Zionism argued that the Zionist revolution put up a kind of scaffolding in the Palestinian Yishuv, institutions that made great sense in their day, but which were never taken down when the state was organized. In effect, Israel has continued for the past 60 years as two Jewish states: a democratic, Hebrew-speaking civil society (the real triumph of historic Zionism), and, encased by this "Hebrew republic," an heroic settler-state that, covering itself in neo-Zionist rhetoric, gives material privileges to certified Jews, and requires an official rabbinate to certify them.

I argued that this embedded settler state threatens the coherence of Israeli democracy and, thus, the survival of Israel, given the understandable alienation felt by Israel's one-fifth Arab minority. Tragedy, you see, does not come from doing the wrong thing but the right thing too long. I won't say more about this here; readers of my blog posts surely know the arguments by now.

2. Since Goldberg brought this up, let's look at the Law of Return in this context, a perfect example of an institution that fit its day and is now both unnecessary and inflammatory.

Let me be clear: it makes sense for Israel to have an immigration law that gives (what Canada calls) "landed immigrant" status to anyone who can show that he is a refugee from anti-Semitism; or even give preference to someone who can explain to an immigration officer why he reasonably counts himself a member of the historic Jewish people. All western democracies have had messy criteria like this (i.e., claims about persecution, quotas based on ethnicity). The point is, they also then have a process of naturalization, so that citizenship is granted only after immigrants learn the language and culture and civil laws of the country.

The Law of Return, which grants immediate citizenship to anyone who can prove to a rabbi that he is Jewish according to Halacha, or has a one Jewish grandparent (i.e., anyone Hitler would have called "Jewish"), precludes the idea that citizenship requires naturalization: that Israeli identity is something that can be learned, acquired. It makes a nonsense of the idea that Arabs or any other minority can be Israeli. Leave Brookline, get on a plane, poof, citizen.

This law, in other words, makes the idea of an inclusive Israeli nationality (a patently Jewish nationality, that might assimilate others) impossible. Goldberg says he cannot see "a well-articulated vision of what a progressive Jewish democratic Israel should look like." He might if he opened is eyes to precisely what I'm talking about; to standards that are second nature to people all over the Western world. Why not simply bring Israel up to code? The notion that the Law of Return is "the raison d'etre of Zionism, and of Israel's existence" is so much bond-dinner blather. The law made sense for a revolutionary time of ingathering. It makes no sense for a multi-cultural, global Hebrew (that is, Jewish national) democracy.

3. Which brings me to Goldberg's last dig: that my views are "very different from the mainstream Zionist position." Since I have chosen to live mostly in Jerusalem, I am not sure what mainstream position I have to belong to, well, belong. I consider myself a cultural Zionist in the tradition of Achad Haam, Weizmann, and Ben-Gurion; I think everything was worth it just to get Yehuda Amichai's poetry. Anyway, some rightist jurists, like Ruth Gavison, have problems much like I do with the Law of Return, as Ben-Gurion had problems with the persistence of all Zionist institutions after the movement so obviously succeeded in achieving its goals.

Yet the sheer superficiality of Goldberg's dig does not render it harmless. Israel's future is not unchallenged and its citizens are not without real enemies. To call people anti-Zionist in this context is a way of announcing they are traitors to living, struggling fellow citizens, in my case, students and friends I love. It is like calling someone unpatriotic or anti-American.

Back when I published The Tragedy of Zionism, the guardian of the mainstream du jour, The New Republic, reviewed the book and put on its cover, "Jew Against Zion"--in consequence of which I was subject to a blackballing in Jewish organizations (and most mainstream media) of the kind alleged "Reds" had been subject to a generation before. It was shameful for the magazine's editors to have engaged in this kind of thing then. It is shameful for Goldberg to engage in it now.

Ezra Nawi, Jailed And Fined

2009-10-21T17:52:00.003-04:00

I have written about Ezra several times before. The verdict is now in. Read it and weep.

Apropos the grim realities of occupation, which many American Jews refuse to view apart from their sense of the Jews' suffering at the hands of European others, yesterday's snipe at me by Jeffery Goldberg comes on the heels of his column celebrating Tarantino's "Inglorious Basterds." As it happens, my wife, the Hebrew University literary critic Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, wrote the following letter to the Atlantic in response, which they chose (at the last minute) not to publish. She wrote this:

I find Jeffrey Goldberg’s interview with Quentin Tarantino (“Hollywood’s Jewish Avenger,” September Atlantic) troubling because it unapologetically valorizes stereotypes of Jews to, of all people, Jews.

The enduring image of the victimized Jew in Western culture was indeed earned by a long history capped by the Holocaust, but the reality of Jews exercising power—financial, cultural and, in Israel, political and military—is what has defined Jews in the last fifty years. Yet we are being asked, in the film and in Goldberg’s presentation of it, to accept that the most adequate expression of Jewish power is vengeful and brutally violent. As if the Elephant in the Room is not the fact that Jews actually use sovereign power, among other things, to maintain a settlement regime and an occupation.

Tarantino claims that all his Jewish friends love the film. Goldberg acknowledges fantasizing that “when I came out of the screening room…I was so hopped up on righteous Jewish violence that I was almost ready to settle the West Bank—and possibly the East Bank.” What kind of dots are being connected here? Are we really being asked to believe that the daily humiliation of Palestinians is somehow belated revenge for Nazi atrocities? Does Goldberg not know better?

Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, Jerusalem, Israel

Jeffrey Goldberg's Absurdly Cheap Shot

2009-10-20T13:29:00.002-04:00

I am just about to board a plane for the US, so I am unable to answer this remarkably ill-informed (and, under the circumstances, vicious) shot from Jefferey Goldberg: the idea that he cannot go to the J Street conference because "some of [its] most important supporters -- Bernard Avishai comes to mind -- don't even believe in the idea of a Jewish state." I would simply ask readers to consider this post, or this, or this interview. Or just watch this lecture on You Tube. Goldberg has, alas, started to speak about "the idea of a Jewish state" a little like the way FOX News celebs talk about "America." Complexity is for sissies. Very sad. When he was at the New Yorker, his work on the settlers was the best there was.

J Street And World Order

2009-10-18T09:44:00.019-04:00

J Street calls itself "pro-Israel, pro-peace"; the "therefore" is implied. And the priority given to "pro-Israel" in the branding suggests, what most commentators reasonably assume, that J Street aims to give a home to American Jews who, comfortable with identity politics, suppose their anxiety about Israel constitutes a kind of secular Jewish identity; but Jews who also think that successive Israeli governments have hurt Israelis (and, by association, Jews everywhere) with settlements and a repressive occupation--you know, Jews who poll as "progressives" and have felt that Jewish leaders in Washington do not speak for them. (I have assumed something like this case myself.)

Though he downplays this gracefully in various public appearances, J Street's extraordinary Jeremy Ben-Ami obviously means "pro-Israel, pro-peace" to compare favorably with the stance of AIPAC supporters: increasingly rightist American Jews who will favor attacks on Iran if necessary, continued occupation if necessary, and who look to the Israeli government to say what's necessary. These AIPAC Jews, Ben-Ami reminds us, are only a quarter of American Jews; but they've captured the high ground on Capitol Hill for a generation.

Yet putting things this way--"pro-Israel, (therefore) pro-peace"--may be underestimating both AIPAC’s achievement and J Street's opportunity. For AIPAC actually became influential in Washington because it defined itself at a critical time not as "pro-Israel, pro-(well,) toughness" but as "pro-freedom, (therefore) pro-Israel." AIPAC's claim may have been wrong but the sequence in the rhetoric mattered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Outlines Of The Mentor State

2009-10-03T14:00:00.007-04:00

In my last post, I told the story of taking my old BMW to Dave Marshall’s garage in New London, New Hampshire; of the novel opportunities for entrepreneurial growth the new technologies have bestowed on him. I suggested the ways he was keeping up his end of a new social compact, and I ended the post by suggesting also that there was another side to this compact, a novel role for government—which I’ve nicknamed “the mentor state”—whose responsibilities to the commercial ecosystem we are just beginning to understand.

Given the often heated reaction to this post, let me hasten to reassure readers, what I took to be self-evident, that the first responsibility of any democratic government (including the one we ought now to envision) is the cultivation of citizens; obvious things like the comparatively excellent public schools in New London, or the New London hospital, which enjoys a measure of municipal support, or land conservancies that make New London beautiful. Kant once said that all things, including people, can be seen as both ends and means; that as ends we have a dignity, as means we have a price. The first role of government is to attend to our dignity.

But unless we commit to socialism in the full sense, which has its own obvious pitfalls, we resign ourselves to the ways of market economies. Governments, Smith said (and who disputes this?), also have to “facilitate commerce in general.” They enforce contracts, protect property, inhibit monopolies, and build roads and bridges. How has the new economy changed, extended, the scope of government action? What will the mentor state do differently?

Actually, Dave's story suggests one of the most important new responsibilities—well, not exactly new, but novel in its importance—which Dave saw clearly, but makers of public policy usually see more dimly. In this particular case—Dave’s repair of my car’s computerized heater/air-conditioner—the federal government had acted some years before, largely behind the scenes, to determine critical standards upon which all mechanics like Dave now depend—standards it set deliberately, without waiting for market conditions to evolve them haphazardly. These standards opened the playing field for entrepreneurs like Dave, while the big car companies would have preferred no standards whatever:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unemployment Or Unemployability? A Story.

2009-09-27T11:29:00.006-04:00

So the recession is over but unemployment is not falling, at least not yet. How on earth can a recovery be "jobless"? And how might this fit with the fact that, in the 1960s, about 60,000 new businesses a year got started in the US, while over a million a year were getting started in the years before the collapse? Here's a little story; bear with me:

In the summer of 2003, I drove my aging BMW over to Dave Marshall's garage, a converted two-bay service station on Pleasant Lake near my summer home in Wilmot, New Hampshire, hoping to find out from Dave—the solid son of the former Chief of Police—where in Concord or Manchester the nearest BMW dealership was. The “climate control” system was gone, a system governed (I correctly surmised) by a complex little computer module—not your change-your-oil-by-the-beach kind of problem. Dave got behind the wheel, confirmed the symptoms, shrugged, and told me he could handle it. I told him I doubted it. He smiled, not quite condescendingly. I followed him inside.

Sitting down at a terminal, Dave tapped a few soiled keys, and logged on—so he took pains to explain—to a network he paid a nominal price to access—a network of tens of thousands of independent, certified mechanics just like him, nationwide. He took a history of my problem—year, make, type of failure, etc.—and transmitted my description in some detail; then he gave me a coffee, told me he'd be back to me when he could “work up a report” and sent me home.

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

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

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

Dave's platform did not just enable him to fix the problem with my car. It meant he could learn to fix ever more complex problems on a proliferating number of cars. It enabled him to become (or at least perform like) a master technician without having to go for additional formal training. The key was to have good information about information.

For every problem with every car, in other words, Dave now saw an opportunity to assemble snips of knowledge into a “deliverable”—a bundle of technical know-how with market “know-about.” He became a better business strategist as well. He might procure components and tools from suppliers from virtually anywhere—California, Mexico, Canada, even the Far East—and then use inventory control software to track how to maintain margins on parts, distinguishing between parts used everyday (such as bolts), and parts ordered only once in while (such as ball-joints).

Dave could learn what his competitors were charging, or paying for parts. He could instantly explore the burgeoning roster of mechanics who were also his brains-trust. He could help maintain the evolving skills of his employees, anyone of whom might become a competitor.

In short, the platform enabled Dave to offer—not standard services—but custom “solutions,” much like an IBM consultant or a Siemens engineer. The platform meant that Dave could compete with, not go to work for, the dealers in Concord or Manchester. It meant not having to offer only “commodity-like” services, like oil changes—and then see his prices (and style of life) eroded by competition from the Jiffy Lube a half-hour away off south 93.

AND ANOTHER THING. Dave would not be (as Adam Smith once put it) “mutilated” by repetitive, mind-numbing tasks in some industrial division of labor. The platform meant that he would have to out his mind to things, even that his wife Carla, a literature graduate of the local college, Colby-Sawyer, could work with him on the myriad human problems involved in customer care—and not get swamped by tedium. It meant that, together, they could establish something like a family practice for cars, and charge accordingly, hiring two or three like-minded people to the team.

What would life have been like without the platform? Had Dave worked only on tire changes and lubrication jobs, he would have had few opportunities to speak his mind or even open his mouth. But now his work day-in and day-out—learning, teaching, serving, persuading—reinforced the skills he needed to perform as a citizen. He had to cultivate a reputation for excellence, and learn to manage all kinds of personalities in stressful situations. For nothing but his reputation could stop others from opening up on the other side of the lake. He had to challenge the prevailing wisdom about what a local garage was, and move his customers to expect ever greater sophistication from him—even to become a community resource. (Every week, Dave now takes out an ad in the local Shopper, answering questions about car repair like the “Car Talk” duo on NPR.)

Was there a social compact here, an implicit deal between citizens and their commonwealth? There certainly was, and Dave’s side of it was to take ownership of his professional life. To make the most of his information resources, Dave had to commit to progress in a technical field, much like a physician. The solutions Dave provided entailed complex engineering, but none of the people at Marshall's Garage had to be an engineer. The knowledge they competed with was embedded in a virtual community which could be instantly called upon. What the garage team really needed was an openness to teamwork, or more accurately, to the act of problem-solving itself.

BUT HERE IS the sad reality impinging on unemployment. For there was greater social risk to the compact, too, and it was not hard to imagine what became of car mechanics who, unlike Dave, were not prepared to hold up their end of the deal. You ran into many such people in rural New Hampshire: not-quite-enough schooling, too much beer, too much TV. One year, a guy I came to know was pumping gas in New London, until self-service equipment did in his job. The next year he was working as a clerk in a convenience store, where inventory control software had turned his job into a minimum wage job.

Once, when Dave was growing, up such badly educated people held more or less steady (though, let’s face it, distasteful) assembly jobs in the gear factories, or wool mills, or shoe factories that had studded the roads and rivers of the state. People with high school education had held sales jobs in small retail stores and banks. Most of those jobs have been lost to the platform in the larger sense, that is, to networks connected to robots governed by custom software or computer-integrated machine tools; or to scheduling and book-keeping software, or even just to ATMs. Most famously, perhaps, such jobs have been lost to Wal-Mart’s outsourcing logistics, while the low prices of the things ordinary wage-earners buy at Wal-Mart keep them in what resembles a middle class.

Labor unions could not make a difference here. It was precisely because direct labor used to be so simple, mechanical and yet critical to value creation that labor unions made sense. The logic behind unions may still apply to some kinds of work—fast-food servers, apparel assemblers, hospital orderlies. But any job that is simple and repetitive, that requires so little individual creativity that an employee would rather join a union than negotiate an individual career path, has become a prime target for the computer-integrative technologies.

All of this has meant that tens of millions of people—people with children, people hobbled by dullness and self-doubt, people who played by rules that simply evaporated from the time they were 15 to the time they were 35—are hard pressed to see a future. When President Obama spoke during the campaign of people consoling themselves with guns and fundamentalism (and, he might have added, FOX), he was putting his finger on the crisis. After all, the school system we conceived, the union movements we adjusted to, the “leading” economic indicators we tracked, the Government programs the New Deal put in place—none of these things assumed that virtually every member of society would need the equivalent of college-level skill just to get a decent job. Paul Krugman said he hoped Obama would be a new FDR. But FDR is not what we need. By comparison, FDR's challenge was simple. We need the equivalent of nation building here at home.

For people with college educations like Dave and Carla, working conditions have generally improved, no doubt, even when we do not work for ourselves. Salaries for college graduates, on average, are more than 100 per cent more than for high school graduates. And then there are the perks. But everyone, including highly educated people, are dealing with higher levels of risk. Knowledge companies do not survive like the old industrial ones did. On the whole, the old command-and control corporation has been replaced by the love-'em-and-leave-'em corporation. (Duke University’s Arie Lewin has shown that even Fortune 500 companies fail or are acquired at a rate three times faster than was the case in the 1980s.)

So the dangers of the knowledge economy are clear enough, but so are the opportunities. Once, in an economy defined by the industrial division of labor, a person who owned none of what Marxists called the “means of production” was helpless and periodically desperate. The welfare state acted to assure that all citizens remained consumers—which stimulated the economy as it saved their lives. But the great danger was once periodic unemployment for have-nots. Now it is chronic unemployability for know-nots. The challenge is to be a qualified producer, not just a qualified consumer. What we need, rather, is a mentor state, about which more in the weeks ahead.

Palestinian State In The Making

2009-09-20T11:06:00.005-04:00

President Obama will be hosting both Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Abbas this week. The subject, presumably, will be how to advance the prospects of a Palestinian state, and the agenda, almost certainly, will focus on such things as settlements and security arrangements. What has been getting less attention, but seems the biggest emerging fact on the ground, is the West Bank economy which is being driven by an exceptional, rising business class: the key to Palestine's civil society, around which a state must form.

I have spent a good part of the summer talking to these leaders, and report on their achievements--and urgent requirements--in the current Harper's. The bottom line is this: Israel could not invent more appropriate partners to build a Palestinian state, economically federated with itself and Jordan; yet in spite of Netanyahu's exhortations, Israel seems to be doing everything to foil Palestine's economic development. Obama's chief objective must be to get Israel out of its way. (Alas, only Harper's subscribers will currently have access to the entire article. Below are excerpts from the article's opening.)

Benjamin Netanyahu ran for prime minister last winter rejecting a Palestinian state but promising to advance “economic peace.” In his much anticipated speech at Bar Ilan University in June, he cautiously reversed himself on statehood but returned to his favorite theme: “Economic peace is not a substitute for peace, but it is a very important component in achieving it. . . . I call upon the talented entrepreneurs of the Arab world to come and invest here.”

For Netanyahu’s boosters, the phrase often means little more than increasing jobs for Palestinians on Israeli construction projects, including settlements that ring Ramallah, and in tax-exempt industrial zones; as well as more opportunity for West Bank farmers to sell to Israeli fruit wholesalers (who, in a grotesque twist, then pad their profits by controlling the distribution of their produce in Gaza). Economic peace slyly implies that Israelis can have no “partner” for a political settlement until Palestine looks more like Delaware. Meanwhile, presumably, fuller bellies and fatter wallets will make Palestinians more tranquil.

Nevertheless, economic peace prompts a reasonable question. If a Palestinian state rises, will it work? Does not the prospect of sovereignty presume a class of resilient entrepreneurs and professionals, people who will build competitive businesses that will, in turn, employ a burgeoning population? The median age in Palestine is nineteen. It is likely that 2 million refugees will be returning in the event of a deal with Israel. Palestine will inevitably become an Arabic-speaking megalopolis spreading east toward Jordan from Jerusalem, yet interlocking with Israel, itself a mainly Hebrew-speaking megalopolis spreading north from Tel Aviv to Haifa. Together, Israel and Palestine will look something like greater Los Angeles. In that environment, fellahin harvesting their olive trees are going to seem beside the point.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Outliers: We Stand On Guard For Thee

2009-09-10T12:43:00.012-04:00

I did something embarrassing this past summer. I bought and read the (then) #1 non-fiction best seller: Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers. I expected the usual Gladwell, smart, off-beat, the distiller of academic psychological data for people responsible for judging (and perhaps marketing to) the rest of us. What I found was a profoundly humane grasp of ordinary fate. Consider reading Outliers in the silence induced by President Obama's closing words to Congress last night.

Gladwell purports to write about what makes unusual people successful. But it's the negative space that stays with you: the things we all need to catch a break. I mean the luck to be born at the right time and place. The luck to have local ways to develop ones' talents. The luck to be born to a family that assumes you will indeed have talents to develop and then demands the rigor to master difficult tasks. The luck to be born to a culture that allows you to fail and continue learning, or (what is often the same thing) to speak your mind without undue discouragement from hierarchy.

The luck, in short, to be born, if not a Kennedy, then (as Gladwell and I were ) a Canadian. For you add up the lucks and what you have is really something quite predictable: the benefits of a welfare state--or what I like to call (since this is a knowledge economy) a mentor state.

Everybody born in today's America was born at the right time and place. But how to develop talents without good schools, universities and clinics that don't bankrupt you--or a community that correspondingly assumes discipline as well as the obvious freedoms?

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

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

Cooperatives: The Best Public Option

2009-09-09T11:09:00.015-04:00

Perhaps I am too immersed these days in the novelties of the electric car's "ecosystem," or just cranky contemplating returning to Israel and trading Obama for Bibi, but I am finding various threats to the president from Democratic progressives about the public option shrill and unpersuasive. A progressive seems to be somebody who brings to analysis of public policy none of the astounding progress we've made in commercial information and social networking technology during the past generation--except, of course, when talking about the virtues of blogosphere. (Just watch this short interview with the Daily Kos' Markos Moulitsas on MSNBC and you'll get the idea.)

For God's sake, you no longer need a single, Medicare-style insurer to get efficiencies in claims processing, or buying leverage with pharmaceutical companies, or the sharing of best practices. If you did, you'd still need General Motors to tell suppliers exactly how to make every part, or one big blog to keep the cost of bandwidth low. If, as seems likely, key Senate committees will insist that the public option be delivered through non-profit cooperatives, that may not only be "good enough," it may--with certain collateral regulations--be better than any Medicare-style insurer.

I CAN'T ADD much to Steve Pearlstein's excellent observations about how cooperatives could be best in transforming medicine to the results-based care Atul Gawande famously advocates--provided, as Pearlstein writes, cooperatives are "big enough and built around networks of hospitals and physician practices that accept a fixed, annual fee for treating patients rather than billing for every procedure." I will note that Michael Porter wrote some time ago that the cost and quality of care would benefit from institutional specialization, much the way commercial ventures and universities benefit, which is exactly what cooperatives built around existing teaching hospitals and medical networks encourage.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

State Within A State

2009-08-26T11:46:00.005-04:00

Unlike Yasir Arafat's periodic declarations, Salam Fayyad's announcements that his government is preparing the institutions of statehood, irrespective of negotiations with Israel, should be taken seriously--and welcomed. As I argue in a forthcoming article in October's Harper's, Fayyad is no mere technocrat. He represents, and is organizing, precisely the business and professional class that can bring off his vision.Palestinians, too, can create facts. Ironically, Fayyad's political strategy mirrors historic Zionism's success.

It has become a settled wisdom (viz., our president, the day after his Cairo speech) that Israel's founding was a kind of answer to the holocaust, or to put it another way, that were it not for the holocaust, Israel would not have come into being. There is half of a truth here: just go back and read Andrei Gromyko's speech to the UN in support of the 1947 partition resolution.

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

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

Doesn't Solve Anything--But Pain

2009-08-18T15:12:00.014-04:00

More than a dozen friends and acquaintances have asked me to respond to the Agha-Malley oped in the New York Times, rather unfortunately titled "The Two-State Solution Doesn’t Solve Anything"--a follow-up, it seemed to me, to their rather bleak, and not entirely conclusive article in the New York Review last June.

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

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

I have learned much from Malley and Agha, but not this time. In fact, the entire framing strikes me as a little childish. Anyone who has--how would Dr. Phil put it?--"moved on" has learned that worldviews go on forever, but people nevertheless look for ways to improve their lives, or prevent their loved one's suffering, or both. If divorcing couples had to agree on the narrative of their marriage's dissolution before agreeing on custody arrangements, what child would survive the fight?

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

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

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

Coda: A Single Star

2009-08-10T09:20:00.004-04:00

Just a little musical coda to my last post. Take a couple of minutes.

The song says simply:

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

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

Israel: Coming Into Its Own

2009-08-08T19:13:00.010-04:00

Once again, the Netanyahu government is demanding that Israel be recognized as a Jewish state. Once again, Palestinian leaders are balking. As if either side knows just what a Jewish state means. It occurred to me that those who have not read The Hebrew Republic might enjoy the conversation I had with a group of my former students a few summers ago: young Israelis, struggling with this very question, to whom I gave the book's last word. I still find the conversation inspiring, as much for its moral seriousness as its views.

I assembled a group of my former business students at the Interdisciplinary Center—not a scientific sample, but not a monolithic group either: all in their late twenties, some married, some still messing around. They all live in the Tel-Aviv area now, digging in—young Israelis at their best, talkative, hopeful, diligent, liking things their own way. They had lived in other places, New York, London, Miami—India. They were determined to make their lives right where they were. There was Milly, the sparky niece of a former Likud minister, always hating the practice of law, always sticking with it; Yaacov, the religiously observant son of a Mizrahi immigrant in Kiryat Gat, already carrying himself like the family scion; Assaf, the former fighter pilot still living on his parents’ moshav, now flying for El Al and teaching yoga; and finally Yaron, the Tel-Aviv entrepreneur with a brother in New York and a genius for punch-lines. They knew something of amy views and that I wanted to know theirs. Milly, as usual, jumped in first.

“When I was five,” she said, starting with the basics, “we moved to Long Island for a while, and my father, who was from a religious home—you know, knitted yarmulkes—sent me to a Yeshiva, so that I’d learn Hebrew. Those Jews were so hostile to Israelis who were obviously not religious. My brother, who was twelve, had a little ponytail from Israel, and the Rabbi came up to him while he was waiting for the bus and just cut it off—which was, like, illegal. We went to synagogue on Yom Kippur, and sat in some empty seats, and the woman there started yelling at us that seats were supposed to be paid for. The energy was awful, all about being fashionable, ‘Jappy’—you know, ‘Jewish American Princess’—I couldn’t wait to get back home.”

“That’s why I want to raise my children here,” Yaron broke in. Speaking about raising children comes naturally to young Israelis, in a way it doesn’t to Americans. Did everybody make the same decision? I asked. Yes, they said—“That, and not to make decisions,” Yaron said.

But what exactly does here mean, I pressed them. “Last week-end, my husband’s family—a very leftist family—got into a discussion. The idea of a Hebrew republic”—Milly had read an article of mine—“kicked off a two-hour discussion. We started to really get into the details—what does it mean to earn Israeli citizenship, is it to be Israeli or Jewish, what it means for Arabs here. I don’t think a lot of people here want to hear that Israel should be Israeli the way France is French.” Why not? I asked. “Because most want Judaism. They want it without repression, they want the holidays, that sort of thing. Norms, not laws. They want Kashrut along with the right, which is widely exercised, not to be kosher, in restaurants and hotels. It’s a joy not to have travel on Yom Kippur, but make it a law and everyone will drive. Norms, not laws.”

I wasn’t sure why this Israel was not like France. But before I could push back, Yaacov took things in a different direction: “I’ve gone through a change. The country used to be more united, people had more in common. But in the past ten years—call it globalization—we have become more developed, we have wanted to see more, experience more—Jews always want to jump to the head of the line. And we’ve become more like the outside world—we’ve developed and advanced. And this is affecting what we mean by Jewish and democratic. Religion reflects more primitive—well, not primitive, ancient—values, more historical consciousness, which has to keep up. Fine, I have all kinds of ideas about how Judaism might accommodate modernization. But here comes the disintegration. Seculars will say, OK, I’ll circumcise my son, but I don’t want a rabbi, I am in the center. Everybody for himself”—

“Or perhaps they can come together to support the legal conditions that make a secular society possible,” Milly broke in, obviously concerned by Yaacov’s direction, not appreciating what a profound point she had just made; “Coming together to support a society of choices is also social consciousness”—

“Yes, true, Yaacov replied, “but I still think we are too focused on ourselves, on what’s good for us, and not on the community that is all around us. My folks are from Libya and Morocco,” he says. “My grandmother tells me about how she gave up everything to make it here, and it breaks her heart that any of us would leave. They came here for a Jewish state, Jewish values, connection, safety. Now this is all weakened. How this affects ‘Jewish and democratic,’ walla, who knows, since we’ll always want to be Jewish, but democratic is a sacred word, we’ll never want a totalitarian country, so we’ll always continue the tension, a secular majority against an orthodox minority.”

“But the Arabs have to be taken into account,” Milly replied, “the demographic trends will bring us a growing Arab minority that will confront a growing Haredi minority. There will be an explosion here. It hurts me, too, to think about everything there was here, the kibbutzim, and the pioneering hats, but the question is now how to get to the 21st. century. How are we going to have a state that fits with the people who are living in it today—Haredi, secular, whatever? What will solve the social divisions, which reflects us younger people, who see things differently. We need to keep an open mind to immigration and education, to preserving a Jewish character, but find a formula to bring people together, without repression, secular and dati, Jews and Arabs. Ten years from now, I don’t want to see an Arab majority or a Haredi majority. We can start by finding a way to give Russian immigrants the citizenship they deserve but can’t get because their ‘Jewishness’ is not pure. Our tests for citizenship should become more sophisticated, and include, at least, language and knowledge of our history, like in America.”

ASSAF, THE PILOT, serene as a Buddha, now took over the controls, homing in on his conclusions as if on a landing strip. “I think there is a trend in the Western world as a whole, of which we are a small part, toward a kind of spirituality, a fatigue with the ‘me.’ At the same time, Jews have tried to return to ‘sources’ and there is a fatigue with the sources. We don’t want Judaism as such, dat. We want ‘religious’ values, spiritual values, but don’t want hatred of ‘goyim,’ or war over land, or the keeping of commandments over the lives of human beings. This trend creates a vacuum, which has to be filled by an all-encompassing frame—one that answers the individual, fullness, happiness, what religion sometimes gives you. But it has to be complete, inclusive, of Arabs, and of all the complex reality we face. And we are very, very far from this.”

“We—the people who believe this—are a minority,” Assaf continued, apparently including his interlocutors, “but an influential minority. People with political, economic, and social leverage. Small numbers, and getting smaller—but this does not mean the future is not in our hands. The vision is very far, and it doesn’t matter how vague, or resented, or mocked we are. Maybe not for this generation. But you see people working toward this vision and you have something to hope for.”

"And I mean the vision of a constitution, “ Assaf continued, “based on what is most beautiful about Judaism. We have to engender this constitution on a temporary Jewish majority, since the numbers and identities are changing all the time. Partly because of assimilation, partly because of Arabs. The responsibility of this Jewish majority generation, nevertheless, is to bring our society forward as far as we possibly can, and then perhaps evaporate. No funds for synagogues. But funds for schools that teach all students the best values of the historic Jewish people. We can’t assume a permanent majority of Jews, but we can still bring the state to the highest possible stage of humanism, social consciousness, liberal democracy, as Jews—leave something structured and more permanent, do our job and let go.”

Assaf seemed to understand that he was saying something that had been left curiously unsaid. So he moved quickly to fill in the white space: “Let’s look at what is happening elsewhere in the world, after all—there are societies more enlightened than ours, other countries originally founded on religion”—at which point Milly broke in: “But you are already conceding the loss of a Jewish state!” Assaf had thought this through: “Look, in the not too distant future, there will not be states in this sense—little by little, things are melting. If you just look at the big trend, the long years ahead, you see the direction, European integration, globalization, a human being as a human being. Religion gets you apparent solidarity, while secularism get you pluralism, a different kind of solidarity, perhaps, but not as fierce. Anyway, I choose pluralism.”

Assaf had finished—simplicity after complexity. Religious imagination was assured in this vision, but not state-supported religious institutions. National and ethnic feelings were assured, but not nation-states or “ethnocracies.” Yaron took this all in and found his opening:

“I don’t think we have a real democracy here, or that Israelis know what this is. Either you have democracy or you don’t, sort of like sex—Bill Clinton not withstanding. And perhaps we shouldn’t strive for a democracy if the people here aren’t ready for it. I grew up largely in America, which is a democracy, though since Iraq, they’ve been doing not very democratic things for many years. But as long as we have this religion in the background, we have this optical illusion called democracy. I agree with most of what Assaf said. You look at Europe, and the Treaty of Rome is the top thing. But we have to be patient. Ireland, say, which was founded on a religious distinction, still tries to avoid issues that will inflame Catholics. We’ll have to do the same here.

The debate was suddenly joined from all sides, point upon point, things we had all heard before, but could not be said too often. Why secularize? Did that really mean repressing religion? No, that meant giving freedom to religion; it is orthodox religious authority that represses freedom. Does democracy mean majority rule? No, it means much more. Were we not all proud to be Jews, and yet was not the Jewish religion racist? But could not racialism be retired by focusing Jewish identity on national life—the language and culture of the new Jewish nation? Always, the logic circles back to ordinary freedoms.

“Clinton said a wise thing,” Assaf began, summing things up; “He said, ‘The things that are good in America are able to fix the things that are bad in America.’ I think the same can be said of Judaism, which is ultimately about the hunger for justice, knowledge, the truth. Freedom is very much a part of this—it, too, is truth. It works on people over time, and plays into our hopes. So all we can do is work to create the conditions for freedom to evolve.”

Milly had to leave and was growing impatient. She had a dream and was itching to share it: “Jewish and democratic is a cliché. OK, there is a Jewish majority and majority rule, but also all of the contradictions—inequalities for some citizens since they are not Jews, laws that privilege rabbinic things, which bother us more or less, and the anger from people who push off religion because of radical rabbinic power plays. But if I could shut my eyes and open them to a Jewish and democratic society, this is what it would be like a year from now.

“First,” she said, as if drawing conclusions for all the assembled, “everybody should celebrate their holidays, the Sabbath, commandments, as they please. I don’t eat milk with meat and shrimps, but I drive on Shabbat. My husband doesn’t agree to the diet. Whatever is good for whomever. Each in his or her own way, Jews and non-Jews. But on Yom Kippur, there should not be cars in the streets, not because it is forbidden, but because that’s the custom. Two, I want a country in which young people would not have to think about going abroad for freedom or money. Three, I want a country with a lot of immigration from all over the world, not only Jews, but people who feel connected to our Jewish history and struggle—because of the holocaust, or the Bible. People who won’t have to ‘convert’ to acculturate. Four, we have to preserve the Jewish character without assuming Jewish force, through education, experience. I want to see a country where people say they are ‘Israeli.’ When I was in America, I didn’t say I was Jewish; I said I was Israeli—Israeli. It is based in Judaism, but that is not its essence. In fact, maybe we should punt this ‘Jewish and democratic’ designation and just say Israeli.”

This might have been the last word, but it was not. Their conversation went on for hours more, though I listened less and less to their specific points, and sank back into a loving admiration just for the way they made them—the way parents do with their grown-up children more often than they’d care to admit. But I also felt a rising disquiet, thinking what a misfortune Israel would suffer if, after all, more of these remarkable young people would get caught up in futile escalations or just left the country to pursue their freedom. This was not a hypothetical fear. I thought again about that poll, that nearly half of Israel’s young people “do not feel connected” to the state, while a quarter of them do not see their future here.

Israeli leaders, centrists all, will tell you how appalled they are by that poll. Some question the willingness of young people to sacrifice, blaming themselves for tolerating hedonism. Some will publicly lament how the Jewish state was supposed to be a “light unto the nations.” Perhaps they could just learn from the nations for a while.

Give Us A Border

2009-07-24T08:24:00.005-04:00

The following column, adapted from a former post, appears in today's Haaretz.

There is something about the Netanyahu-Obama stand-off on settlements that seems beside the point. Had Ronald Reagan, following Jimmy Carter's lead, demanded a total freeze in 1980, the idea might have worked. Today the demand for a freeze reminds me of the joke about the implacable customer at a restaurant who, having waited too long for his dinner, says he can be appeased only by being served "15 minutes ago."

President Obama clearly wants to make a clean break with the past, and even make a show of force to Israeli extremists. But a total freeze is now out of the question. About 400,000 settlers live in crowded communities more or less contiguous with Israel (like Gush Etzion), or in Jerusalem suburbs (like Gilo and Ma'aleh Adumim). These urbanized areas are clearly not going to be moved or dismantled. And they cannot stop growing. Rather, a new border must be drawn around them and Palestine will have to be compensated in some way. Even the Geneva Initiative negotiators agreed on this.

The people who will be moved as part of any conceivable peace, who have turned Palestine into strangulated enclaves, are the 75,000-100,000 residents of settlements scattered around Hebron and between Ramallah and Nablus - vexingly, the very people who are most mobilized against any kind of deal and must be confronted by the international community and mainstream Israelis. (Salam Fayyad's offer of Palestinian citizenship to Jews who are more attached to the ancient land than the modern state will be scoffed at by most of these settlers.)

All of which raises a question. Clearly, the issue here is not a settlement freeze. The freeze has become a proxy for the larger question of where to locate an internationally recognized border between two states. Why, then, should Obama fight - with little chance of success - over a symbol and defer the fight over what is symbolized, which will eventually require a hard line from America and the world anyway?

Consider another approach, that taken in Geneva. The fact that large settlements are immovable means the June 4, 1967, border is not feasible, but the principle of defining a border on the basis of June 4 certainly is. America needs to offer support, and fast, for a 1:1 land swap to insure that territories allotted to Israel and Palestine are equivalent in area to what existed on June 4. It should appoint a Quartet commission, answerable to Senator Mitchell, to suggest a map. Palestine is not Israel's internal affair, nor will Palestinians ever accept the border envisioned by Netanyahu. Only a new "international" map will reconcile the Arab League peace initiative with the difficulties of moving settlers back into Israel.

Sketching a border will bring obvious immediate benefits, such as helping government officials, businesspeople and others on both sides to plan and invest. But it will also help prepare the ground to evacuate those who must ultimately be moved. This will take years, just like moderating Hamas by rehabilitating the Palestinian Authority will take years. The Israel Defense Forces and the police could never muster enough manpower to simply move these settlers by force - anyway, many IDF officers sympathize with settlement.

And to get these people out, you have to do four things: marginalize them politically, that is, create a conflict of interest between settlers living within an agreed-upon border and the more fanatic types outside; induce them to return to agreed settlements or to within the Green Line with time-limited financial compensation; threaten them with power and water cuts; and, should all else fail, remove them by siege or, if necessary, force. All that is going to be very hard. As it withdraws, the IDF should work with NATO forces to replace its own soldiers.

There is nothing fanciful about projecting a border. For most Israelis, the line between Israel and occupied territory is self-evident. Palestinian leaders have all but said they're willing to compromise on the 1967 line, and effectively demilitarize their state, so long as a way can be found to compensate Palestine with land that is as much and as good as land annexed to Israel, and compensate and resettle the original refugees of 1948 in a Palestinian state - or, as one Ramallah friend suggested, so long as the futures of Israel and Palestine are linked to larger federal arrangements. Nor do you need more than common sense to see where the contention will come. For example, Ariel (smack-dab between Ramallah and Nablus) could never be part of a future Israel. Olmert insisted that it must be, which is one reason his talks with Mahmoud Abbas went nowhere. Here is where America's view becomes crucial, so why not apprise the sides of it now?

In any case, Obama is right to try and keep new settlement projects from being added to the 160 that already exist - that is, to insist that Israel remove new outposts, and prevent construction that fills in the gaps between existing settlements; and to forestall projects that would further compromise the viability of East Jerusalem as the capital of a future Palestinian state. But we are beyond the talk of the road map's freeze now, or should be. What we need is a destination and a driver.

Hat On Your Head, Hope In Your Heart

2009-07-20T11:06:00.003-04:00

Those of us who laughed and nodded our way through Christopher Hitchens' God Is Not Great, yet put the book down thinking the author had somehow (well, entirely) missed the point, have a counter-text in Angels and Ages: Adam Gopnik's beautiful little book, ostensibly about Lincoln and Darwin, but really about how liberal minds make sense of the divine, that is, the immense thing left over once they make sense of the facts--a book as valuable for its tone as its arguments, indeed, a book whose main argument is about the tone Lincoln and Darwin needed to be trenchant and, therefore, loved.

I won't try to recapitulate Gopnik's way of getting into his subject. I'll only say that he leaves you understanding something those of us who grew up in Montreal, and came of age day-dreaming our way through McGill's Stephen Leacock Building, knew from the air--especially given the contrast between the Victorian atmospherics on the campus and the clannish residues of rural, ultra-montaine Quebec (and, for that matter, immigrant, Jewish, St. Urbain Street). It is that liberal civilization is an achievement. Liberty derives from the way we collect and adjust to evidence. It derives from the way we prepare for and argue a case in court. We are otherwise lost in our families, instincts and appetites.

"You have to be taught to hate," we hear from "South Pacific." Nonsense. Every child knows how to hate. You have to be taught toleration, which is not a simple thing, and takes years of learning moral tact. And yet what an enlightenment education cannot teach you, or even explain, is the need to assume ordinary human dignity: the personal poetic that distills from one's culture, the desire for fugitive truth. For this you need a leap of (there, I've said it) faith. "There is more to man than the breath in his body, if only the hat on his head, and the hope in his heart," Gopnik ends his book. Every sentence that gets you to that succinct conclusion is worth your time.

The New GM: Maker Of Mobile Devices

2009-07-10T10:18:00.006-04:00

Wilmot, New Hampshire. It is hard to think of a more wrong-headed take on the new GM than today's Times report on how a new muscle car will save the company. Imagine someone writing that a new Bee Gees will save Warner Music; imagine a government stupid enough to be 2/3 owner in such a venture, especially a government committed to reducing global warming and greening the economy.

In fact, the government gets one real prize with the new GM and that's Voltec, the working name for the electric power-train that is being integrated into the Chevy Volt, Cadillac Converj, and other vehicles scheduled for release over the next couple of years; a power-train whose 40-mile range will be extended by a 1.4 liter engine, acting as a dynamo when the battery pack runs down. (The tough little engine, by the way, was snared from Opel before its sale, a good example of finding components from within the global GM group, something the company will have to be great at in the future.)

I'll be saying a lot more about this electric vehicle and its commercial "ecosystem" in the weeks ahead (I'm writing a feature for Inc., and will be blogging about it with the magazine's permission). Suffice it to say for now that Voltec has a fighting chance to remake GM the way cell phones remade Motorola in the 1980s (a failing consumer electronics company in the early 1970s). Indeed, GM has a chance to be the first to reconceive the car as a the ultimate mobile device, embedded in both a rich information network and a smart electric grid; the first, that is, to set standards for the operating system that will manage the battery pack, and the communications protocols that will allow millions of electric vehicles to syndicate information and communicate their requirements to smarter (hence, greener) public utilities.

In short, GM has a chance to become the software powerhouse of the newest new economy, not just a manufacturing and assembling company (margins from these activities will drop to near zero, as with the manufacture of laptops and cell phone handsets), but primarily a design hub and anchor for hundreds of new software solutions companies that will focus on the tiers of communication the electric car portends: battery-pack to vehicle, vehicle to electric utility, and utility to sources of renewable energy. (Think of GM's OnStar's global positioning platform migrating to a communications platform that collects and interprets information about the timing of recharging of vehicles for power companies; think of, say, Accenture working with a half dozen start-ups to smarten Duke Energy's grid in a way that communicates with OnStar.) This would mean tens of thousands of new economy jobs, and little companies going global, much like Qualcomm did. It means utterly transforming what GM means by a supply-chain.

Of course, GM could blow it. Apple was hardly the leading contender to launch a digital music player and, hence, come to dominate new generation mobile PDAs. For GM to win, it will have to think of the car in the context of its various networks, much like Apple did with the iPod. The fact that the government both owns GM and also has the capacity to create convergent standards for environmental and safety reasons should give GM a great initial advantage. But none of this will happen if GM management, and the business press aiming to keep it honest, thinks about (or with) muscle.

Chess, Not Checkers

2009-07-04T14:55:00.013-04:00

The following notes may be found in President Obama's breast pocket.

Opening: Make Hilary Secretary of State (that is, remove the leader of the opposition from New York). Show the Arab and Muslim world--a place where honor matters--an abiding respect. Embrace the Arab League peace initiative of 2002 and frame the Israel-Palestine conflict in regional terms. Set out the long range goal of a Palestinian state, albeit in vague terms, but along with the insistence that settlements cease--code for some variation on the 1967 border. Draw Egypt and Jordan into the mix, implying their participation as forces on the ground. Open a diplomatic channel with, and through, Syria.

Middlegame: Cultivate the Palestinian Authority's new government, providing training to its police forces, while providing the promise of new investments to its business class. Use channel to Syria to bring Hamas into negotiations with the PA. Encourage rejection of Islamist radicalism in Palestine by implying American pragmatism; leave the Iranian regime to discredit itself and, in the process, the democratic pretensions of Hamas and Hezbollah. Challenge Israeli government on settlements' "natural growth" to establish future position on a 1967ish border. Work with Quartet to establish a consolidated front of world opinion and great power fiat; imply complete diplomatic isolation of groups in Israel/Palestine that defy the "peace process."

Attack: Broker a deal, with Egyptian participation, for the return of Gilad Shalit, in exchange for the release of Palestinian prisoners and the opening of the Gaza crossings. Visit Russia. Visit Damascus. Prepare the ground to isolate Iran diplomatically. Welcome the creation of a joint Palestinian negotiation team, led by the PA, but including Hamas officials; accept the principle that any deal will be put to a referendum; accept that all groups that agree to abide by a referendum can enter into a dialogue with Washington. Call for renewed, bilateral negotiations between Israel and the PA presided over by George Mitchell.

Endgame: Present American formulations (Clinton parameters, etc.) to resolve the problems of Jerusalem, refugees, and borders; make these public as the negotiations proceed. Announce that the result of the negotiations will be presented to a regional peace conference, including the Saudis and the Syrians. Meanwhile, the latter establish low level diplomatic and commercial contact with Israel under American auspices. In advance of the conference, announce a Syrian-Israeli peace deal based on a demilitarized Golan, returned to Syria, but open to Israeli tourism and including Israeli commercial interests. Rally Europe and the Quartet to Marshall Plan scale investment package for the Palestinians. Provide for a three year plan to isolate the settlers who must be repatriated and compensated. Announce inclusion of Israel in NATO, and sign Israel to nuclear non-proliferation agreement. Prepare speech for Oslo prize ceremony.

Switching Gears

2009-06-30T11:55:00.003-04:00

We are off to New Hampshire for the summer, where I'll be refocusing on the electric car: its commercial "ecosystem," the implications for public policy, and so forth--about which more soon. Watch this space also for updates and reflections on Obama's Middle East peace initiative as seen from the other side of the world.

If you've been thinking about becoming an email subscriber, you might pull the trigger. I expect posts will be more infrequent during the summer. Also, if you'd like to drop a line with suggestions, or simply to tell me how the blog is working for you, I'd be grateful: bernard.avishai@gmail.com.

I confess I am looking forward to spending time in America, to feeling the ambient pressure of ordinary liberalism, rather than the pressure of heroic solidarity. At the same time, I shall miss the narrowing instances of their combination, as captured in this marvelous poem by Lea Goldberg:

Is it true - will there ever come days of forgiveness and mercy?
And you'll walk in the field, and it will be an innocent's walk.
And your feet on the medick's small leaves will be gently caressing,
And sweet will be stings, when you're stung by the rye's broken stalks!

And the drizzle will catch you in pounding raindrops' folly
On your shoulders, your breast and your neck, while your mind will be clean,
You will walk the wet field, and the silence will fill you -
As does light in a dark cloud's rim

And you'll breathe in the furrow in breaths calm and even,
And the pond's golden mirror will show you the Sun up above,
And once more all the things will be simple, and present, and living,
And once more you will love - yes, you will, yes, once more you will love!

You will walk. All alone. Never hurt by the blazing inferno
Of the fires on the roads fed by horrors too awful to stand,
And in your heart of hearts you'll be able to humbly surrender,
In the way of the weeds, in the way of free men.

You can hear Chava Alberstein's wonderful rendition of this song-poem here. Take the time: it is lovely. (My thanks to Ganze Jahr Freylach, whose translation I am poaching.)