Political discourse in perspective

There's this e-mail list I'm on, made up of gray-haired Israeli men who all served together in the Armored Corp in the 1970s, then served together as reservists for twenty-some years, and now get together only rarely as a full group to swap stale tall tales about times long past. (There's a Whatsapp list too: we're technically competent. No Snapchat, tho. There has to be a line somewhere.)

Anyway, one of the fellows has taken to broadcasting his hard-core Right-wing political opinions. Earlier today one of the other fellows responded thusly:

Dear Y,
I love you dearly, as you well know. We've been like brothers for more than 40 years. But please, take me off the mailing list of your idiotic screeds. As you well know, I'm a bleeding heart Lefty, and at my age, there's nothing you might say to make me change my mind. On the contrary, if you and your God Almighty have to keep on sending your silly arguments, all that says to me is that you're both insecure. So from now on, stop bothering me with the spam.
R.
PS. Next Friday at the usual place, obviously.

I recommend these sentiments to those of my occasional readers who are losing the ability to talk to their political rivals. Chill.

Sovereignty means being sovereign to decide: two decisions Israel makes differently

The New York Times has two very different but equally troubling stories. One is about Donald Trump and his relationships with women ; the other is about Hart Island, where the city of New York has dumped more than a million (!) dead people over the past 150 years.

Well, maybe they aren't equally troubling. The one about Trump has a bit more to redeem it than the one about the island. But they're both mighty troubling. Together, they tell something significant about how Israeli and American societies go about their business in very different ways.

Trump first. It turns out that he's quite the womanizer and always has been, no surprise there; that many women he's encountered over the years have come away hurt or mortified and sometimes scarred; that his memories differ significantly from those of the women; and also, perhaps a bit more surprisingly, that he has repeatedly promoted women, launched their careers, and supported them in important ways. None of these outcomes are mutually exclusive. Sometimes it was "all of the above".

As an Israeli, you look at this story with disbelief. Over the past 25-30 years Israeli society has put in place a series of stringent laws about sexual harassment, and powerful Israeli men who act the way Trump does go to jail. Itzik Mordechi, retired general, minister of defense, then a viable candidate for prime minister. Moshe Katzav, previously Israel's president. Nowadays there isn't even the need for due process: Yinon Magal, a charismatic young-ish MK, was banished from politics after a young journalist wrote on Facebook that he'd made a lewd comment to her; Silvan Shalom, one of Likud's top figures, was recently ejected from politics when a number of his erstwhile staffers alleged to the media that he'd made passes at them... poof, he was gone. And these are just prominent politicians who come to mind; were I to start naming the generals and police commissioners whose careers have ended abruptly this would be a long and repetitious post indeed.

The story of Hart Island is more depressing, and many shades darker. Over the past 150 years New York has dumped more than a million people in its trenches. Almost 7,000 a year, almost 20 people a day, decade after decade, generation after generation. Who are the people are buried there? The poor who can't afford a proper burial. The rich who have lost contact with their families. People with burial insurance who sink into dementia and are allocated by a court to the tender care of lawyers whose primary interest is to collect their fees. Regular folks who are sent to a medical school to serve as teaching props for future physicians, until there's no use in them any longer and they're cast into a trench, three boxes deep. If these are the dregs of society, you must have a very wide definition of dregs.

And even if dregs, what kind of a society treats its dregs thusly?

It's easy, as an Israeli, to read these two articles and feel smug. In Israel, powerful men who abuse the women around them cease to be powerful, they don't launch political campaigns and garner millions of votes. In Israel, the basic funeral service, paid for by the state, is good enough that almost everyone uses it, it being dignified enough; cadavers are treated with dignity and undertakers apologize to the deceased before covering their graves for any inadvertent indignity they may have caused. Most important of all, people don't slip through the cracks of society and vanish with no trace, not before they die, and not afterwards.

Better to refrain from the sensation of superiority, so as to make a more important point, which is that the single most important reason to have and maintain sovereignty is to make sovereign decisions. Israelis make different ones than Americans. Israelis care less about political correctness, they raise their children to be respectful of concepts such as enemies and using violence as a legitimate tool when others don't suffice; they don't think same-sex marriages are something they wish to have (civil unions have been legal for many years), and they live - while kvetching - with interventions by clerics in marriages and divorces in a way Americans cannot begin to accept. Ah, and the concept of  gender-free public bathroom seems as ridiculous to them today as it did to Americans a decade ago. We're told that Israel is distancing itself from the Liberal values many American Jews hold dearly, and this may be true. Yet this doesn't mean they don't have values. It means they've chosen different ones. Not to abandon anyone to limbo; not to accept sexual harassment at least in public figures and hopefully nowhere else, either; not to cast lost souls into trenches on remote islands within the view of a teeming city of millions.

Different values, not lack of them.

Tarek Abu Hamed appointed to a senior position

Tarek Abu Hamed was appointed today to the position of Deputy Chief Scientist in the Ministry of Science. This is big news. Not gigantic, not an historic event to be recorded in the annals of the Levant, but significant nonetheless. In order to understand why, I need to tell a bit about Israel's Civil Service.

The Civil Service is a formidable place. Over the years it has acquired layers of complexity far beyond what non-civil servants recognize, making it much harder than necessary to get things done. Cabinet ministers, for example, usually have only very little long-lasting influence. They're not in the system long enough to figure it out, and even when they're experienced operators the system is geared to slow them down and limit their ability to do things. (There are some exceptions). The folks who have real power are the ones who are high in the system, but not so high they'll be moved within a year or three. The ones who are high enough to be in regular contact with many others of their general rank, as well as with the really top figures when they have the need.

The job Dr. Abu Hamed has just landed, therefore, is potentially a powerful behind-the-scenes mover, in a corner of the bureaucracy which itself has real significance: the allocation of funds and apportioning of government support in developing scientific and technological programs. Not anything to be sniffy about.

Dr. Abu Hamed is Arab, as his name indicates, but that's not the surprising part. There are higher ranking Arab civil servants, including some in positions which require high security clearance. The thing about Dr. Abu Hamed is that he's not an Israeli citizen. He's a Palestinian of East Jerusalem, a permanent resident by legal status, but not a citizen. Yet look what job he has just won.

Noteworthy. I certainly wish him the best.

The convoluted process of electing an Israeli government

Being a civil servant I'm not allowed publicly to express political opinions. But I don't see why that should stop me from explaining how the political process happens. So, just a few hours before voting begins, here goes:

All citizens from the age of 18 can vote. Each citizen has one vote, which is cast for a party list. Not for an individual. There's no mandatory process to construct the list. It used to be that each party appointed a team of power-brokers who met in a smoke-filled room, and a list emerged from the room. In the 1980s some parties began experimenting with ways to appear more receptive to public opinion or at least to aspire to some sort of transparency, and they replaced the Vaada hamesaderet, the organizing committee, with elections in a large central committee, or eventually even with a primary election by all card-carrying party members. Nowadays some parties have primary elections (Likud and Labor, Meretz and Beit Yehudi), others have rabbis who choose for them (the various ultra-orthodox parties), lots of backroom deals (the Arab list, I think), or simply powerful leaders who decide between their two ears (Lapid, Liberman, Kahlon, Livni).

The lists are submitted to the Central Election Committee a month or six weeks before the elections, and then locked until the next election. If at any point from then on someone drops out for whatever reason - boredom, say, or death - they're replaced by the top candidate from the list who is not yet in the Knesset. This means there are no by-elections or special appointments to the Knesset. In the past there have been cases of MKs who resigned days before the elections and were thus replaced for those remaining days; in this election Uri Orbach passed away a few days after the lists were submitted, and everyone below him (he was 5th in Bayit Yehudi) moved up one notch.

This system means MKs are responsible to various constituents or political strongmen, but not directly to voters in a national election.

There are 120 seats in the Knesset. Until not long ago the threshold for entering the Knesset was 1% of the votes, which means not much more than the 1/120th required in any case. In recent elections the threshold has been rising (well, the Knesset keeps passing laws to raise it, it doesn't happen of its own accord), and this time it stands at 3.25%, which means a list must have enough votes to garner four seats, or else it doesn't enter the Knesset and all its votes are regarded as disqualified. The first result of this change is that the three Arab lists, none of which were certain they'd pass the threshold on their own, created a joint list which may end up the third largest party.

The actual act of voting is done by inserting a small rectangular piece of paper into a blank envelope. There are no hanging chads in Israeli elections. The funny thing about these ballots is that each of them bears a letter or combinatoin of letters which are not the name of their party. This goes back to the early years of the state, when large numbers of new immigrants couldn't be counted on to be able to read the names of parties in Hebrew. This was resolved by allocating a letter to each party. By an astonishing coincidence the top political party of the day, Ben Gurion's Mapai, ended up with the letter A (aleph). The National religious party got B (bet), the ultra-orthdox got C (gimel) and so on. There have since been about 1,456 permutations of parties, and today the only party which still has its original latter is the Gimel party, which has however changed its name from Agudat Yisrael to Yahadut Hatorah (more than once, I think). The distant descendant of Mapai, which in this election calls itself the Zionist Camp, somehow acquired the letters aleph-mem-tav back in the 1960s; since these letters spell the word Emet, Truth, the party changes its name just about each electoral cycle but always holds on to its letters. A matter of superstition, perhaps.

The polls are open from 7am to 10pm, tho in cases where people arrived before 10pm the voting sometimes goes on for another bit. At 10pm sharp the various TV stations publish their exit polls, based on something like 25 voting stations of thousands. These exit polls are rarely precise, and tend to differ from each other by one or three seats, and also from what will eventually be the official results. This makes for fine and nail-biting drama for many hours into the night, but doesn't effect the real results.

The bulk of the ballots are counted by early next morning. There are still no final results, however, since the soldiers of the IDF, many tens of thousands of them, have voted on their bases in what are called double envelopes, because they're double. Each anonymous vote goes into a blank envelope. Each envelope then goes into a second envelope on which the soldier writes his or her full name and ID number. These envelopes are all sent to the Knesset, where large teams of folks check each name against the names of people who voted in the polling stations. Having identified the voter and ascertained they didn't vote twice the outer envelopes are discarded and the real envelopes then sent to a different table where they're counted. This takes a few days, so the final results are unknown. Even then there can be last-moment changes, since there are elaborate mechanisms to divide the final portions of MK seats which are left hanging - say, between a party with 5.6 seats and another one with 38.4. The larger party will probably get the entire seat, but not always. Don't ask.

When results are close it can happen that the outcome of the election remains hanging for almost a week after polling day. Which isn't as bad as it sounds, since in any case elections are merely a milestone along the road to creating a new government, not a final outcome.

Once the official results are in, and then another few days pass for the central election committee to prepare a letter to the president containing the information everyone already knows, the next stage of the process can begin.

In theory, the president chooses an MK - any one of the 120 new MKs - and tasks him or her (should I say "it"?) with creating a government which will receive 61 votes of support from the 120-member Knesset. If only it were remotely so simple!

No party has ever won 61 seats, so every Israeli government ever has been a coalition. (And this will most likely remain so for the next few centuries, opinionated and argumentative Jews being opinionated and argumentative Jews). The thing is, it used to be a mildly predictictable coalition of three parties, say, or four. These days it's rather more challenging. I'll write about the present alignments in a follow-up post; here I'm simply describing the mechanism.

The president invites each party in the Knesset to send him a delegation which will recommend whom he should task with building a coalition. Often the outcome of these deliberations is clear in advance, when there's a large party and a reasonably plausible set of parties to build a coalition from. Sometimes this isn't the case. Two elections ago Zipi Livni "won" the elections with 28 seats, but Netanyahu, having "lost" with 27 seats, set up a coalition and ruled because he had more potential partners, and they recommended him to President Peres.

This time all polls suggest this stage will be nightmarish. Which means the results of the elections may prove to be no more than general guidelines, or vague recommendations; the real result will be hammered out much later.

Once the president (his name has recently changed from Peres to Rivlin) tasks someone with building a coalition, that someone has about 5 weeks to get the job done. This ensures that it won't happen in less than five weeks: what politician would agree to finalize such fun negotiations before the end of the allotted time?

Having convinced at least 61 MKs to support him, the fellow goes to the Knesset, presents his new cabinet and is voted in, thereby becoming Prime Minister. All the while until then the previous one is still on the job. There was one case in the late 1980s when Shimon Peres (he who was later president) found out he lacked 61 votes only at the very last minute, when he was already in the Knesset building. Zipi Livni in 2009 was tasked with creating a coalition but failed. So it ain't finished till it's finished.

I think that more or less covers it all, except for the intricacies and crucial minutiae. In the next post I'll try and talk about who's running this time and who they'll never join in forming a coalition. All the while without indicating where my own preferences might lie, which I'm not allowed to tell.

On Jewish political murderers and chauvinist bullies

I had an interesting e-mail exchange the other day with a fellow, on the topic of Jewish politically-motivated murderers and other chauvinists. It occurs to me that part of my side of the discussion might be of more general interest, while falling deep enough into consensus-territory that I need not be inhibited to express it in public in spite of my vocational need to stay away from politics. So here's what I wrote:

1. The Internet in general, all over the world, encourages some types of people to express ugly hatreds: racism, misogyny, etc. Just yesterday I was reading vile stomach churning comments on the website of The Economist! A respectable, cool-headed and rational publication if there ever was one. Armed with hatred, enabled by the ease of use, and under cover of anonymity, dozens of readers piled on with comments that you'd be hard-pressed to hear in a pub at midnight after everyone has had too many pints. Is this hatred and barbarism new? I doubt it. It's been there forever. But it's easier to find it, to express it, and to join virtual crowds of like-minded bullies.

2. There have always been chauvinist Jews who were willing, under some conditions, to commit serious crimes in the service of their extreme agenda. Most of the time they mutter and rant in the darkness of their souls or perhaps among narrow circles of like-minded extremists, and no more. Every now and then, however, they take criminal action. This has happened in every single decade since the 1930s - tho probably not in every year, and certainly not at any given month. I"m talking about violence and murder, much worse than mere ugly facebook campaigns. The facebook campaigns are happening for the reasons I mentioned in (1).

3. As a general rule, Jewish society since the 1930s condemns its murderers and thugs and restrains them. Not always with full success, sadly. But our overall track record is pretty good, as good as any other free society, and in a completely different league than our enemies - and this has been the case all along. Not connected to the "occupation".

Re-inventing the Archives

Two and a half years ago I mostly shut down this blog, except for the occasional foray, and took the position of Israel's State Archivist. One can't be a civil servant and run a political blog; and anyway, as time was to prove, there was precious little time to do much blogging anyway.

Newborn people require about two years to get a grasp of language. My experience has been that two years is often the amount of time it takes to understand other things, too. Most presidents need about that long to figure out their new job, for example, though the media loves to overlook the fact for better or worse. In my case, it took almost exactly two years for me to understand the system enough to launch my bid to change my part of it, and then another four months to cajole the surrounding environment to support us. Last month the Cabinet passed decision number 911 (no mystical significance) which effectively re-invents the Israel State Archives, along with some other bits of the environment too.

In an nutshell, the decision and its accompanying budgetary decisions says the following:

The State Archives must become digital in the full meaning of the term, and thereby put all possible documentation in the hands of the broadest possible public. This is to be done on six main tracks.

1. Identify all the historically significant documentation produced by the entire government and bring it (or a copy there-of) in digital form to the archives. (This is trickier than it sounds).
2. Scan the entire collection of paper documentation accumulated in the ISA so far (at a rate of 2 million pages a month this will still take decades).
3. Preserve the digital documentation for posterity. (Think about this for a bit and you'll see why it's such a major challenge for archives worldwide).
4. Catalogue and declassify the collections. (There's a sad story behind this one).
5. Make all that boring bureaucratic stuff fascinating for the general public.
6. Pay for the entire thing by making the government stop storing paper. (The budget of the ISA has been significantly expanded, but the money has to come from somewhere).

So was it a good thing I stopped blogging (assuming you were of the small group that thought it was a worthy thing to be doing in the first place)? I hope so.

Have Israeli Archives been Hiding Files?

Over the weekend Shai Hazkani published a long article in Haaretz about Israeli crimes in 1948 and attempts to cover them up, first by David Ben Gurion and now, in recent years, by the archives. I'm not going to deal with the content of the article itself. However, I was perturbed by Hazkani's claim that unpleasant files which had been opened in the 1990s have recently been re-sealed, even though in the meantime historians had seen them and quoted from them. Given that I"m the State Archivist, I received a number of enquiries from various folks: "Tell us it ain't so, Yaacov!"

So I looked into the matter by contacting Haaretz and eventually talking to Hazkani so as to understand what he was describing. The answer is troubling.

First, it's not the censor. There is a censor in Israel, but she and her team don't deal with influencing historical narratives, only with stopping publications which contain an immediate danger to Israeli security, and they're watched closely by various agencies, chief of them being the Supreme Court. They have a very narrow mandate, and they stay within it.

It's not the State Archives, at least not as a policy of blocking uncomfortable or unpleasant documentation. The readers of our blog may have noticed this. However, it turns out there have been cases where declassifiers have re-sealed files, when their directives have been sharpened. Finally, there are the declassifiers at the IDF Archives: when I asked them they confirmed that indeed, some files have been re-sealed because of their content.

So Hazkani at Haaretz was right.

Now what? Since I stopped being a blogger and became a civil servant, I acquired authority and responsibility, but lost the luxury of simply speaking out on whatever topic crossed my mind. (I also mostly stopped bogging). On this matter, also: I can no longer simply say how I think things need to be without much chance of influencing them to be that way. I need to address the full complexity of the matter, and deal with all the stakeholders. I can hope to change things within my sphere of authority, but I must use the tools the system has given me, not those I used to use. It's trade-off: I may be able to change things (and I many not), but I can't simply spout opinions.

So on that note I'll have to end this report, at least until - and if - there's something else to report on.

Independence Day Flags

It's Yom Hazikaron today, the mournful day of commemoration for the 25-thousand-plus Israelis who have died in our century-long conflict with the Arabs. In a few hours it will morph abruptly from one of the two most solemn days of the year (the other is Yom Kippur) to Independence Day, one of the more joyous.

Israelis appreciate their country, and are proud of its flag. Earlier today I wandered around a bit and took some snapshots of flags.

OOPS!

Thanksgiving

Operation Pillar of  Cloud, as it was called in Hebrew, is over. At the end of this blogpost I'll shut down once more. Before signing off, however, here's an immediate summary of what I saw. I'm not going to say what will happen next because I don't know, and, being the civil servant I am, I'll do my best to stay away from Israeli politics.

So far as I can tell, many Israelis are angry today. They saw the IDF inflicting considerable pain and damage on Hamas without destroying it, and they wished us to unleash the power of the ground forces to break Hamas and leave no doubt who won. I've repeatedly heard the refrain, since yesterday afternoon, "What have we achieved? In a year or two or three we'll just be back in the exact same situation? So why not break Hamas now? Why Wait?"

This may well prove true; it's at least as plausible as not that the next round really isn't more than a few years off. On the other hand, it's hard to see the scenario in which our being more destructive now would prevent the exact same next round. The urge to harm us isn't going away, and where there's a will there's a way. The question What the Gazans think they're doing, what they possibly hope to achieve by their actions, isn't easy to answer, and I don't pretend to know. It certainly doesn't look like anything rational. It's not as if anything they might throw at us will make us go away.

Yet - with all the care I need to take in pronouncing on internal political matters -  I don't think the operation was a failure at all. Not miltarily, not morally, not in the media or international relations, and not in leadership.

First, the military and moral issues.

1. Iron Dome is magnificant! Not perfect, sadly, but very very good. And it will get better. And we owe thanks to the Americans who have been financing much of it.

2. Preparedness: The number of layers of society which need to be prepared for such an onslaught on civilians is large, from the police and health services to the kindergaten teachers and the baby-sitters, not to mention the civilians themselves. Israel has just demonstrated that it has this preparedness, and the resilience and determination which underly it.

3. The air force (IAF) carried out more than 1,500 attacks, in what is often described, with a bit of hyperbole, as one of the world's most crowded areas. (Hyperbole because it's crowded, yes, but Manhattan and Mumbai are both more crowded. Cairo, too). In 1,500 sorties, something like 150 Gazans were killed. Some, tragically, were innocent bystanders, but many weren't. One way or another, the numbers mean one person killed for every ten attacks. At most, since some of the casualties were probably killed by more than 100 Hamas rockets which fell on Hamas civilians.

This is a mind-boggling statistic. I dare anyone to find another army in the world which can do that. As a matter of fact, any army in the history of mankind.

4. The extremely limited amount of collateral damage wasn't happenstance. It was the result of lots of hard work:
4.1. Detailled intelligence gathering and data-crunching.
4.2. Aquisition of weapons systems and ordinance that fit the decision.
4.3. Training. Lots of it.
4.4. Developing and honing procedures. The fact that the operator of a drone has the technical ability to stop an imminent attack because a civilians just wandered into the frame doesn't mean the attack will indeed be aborted. There have to be procedures, worked out and practiced in advance.

The heart of the matter is that there needs to be a decision, and it needs to be understood and accepted by everyone in the system, from the bean-counters authorising the significant expense to the young woman with her finger on the button. The decision has to be made from top to bottom. Or, to put this into more precise language: Israel killed so few Gazans in spite of weilding such awesome power, because Israeli society decided to do it that way. Is Israel the most moral society ever to be at war? I don't know. But it's very high in a very small league.

(I can hear the haters screaming: "So few!??! Palestinian lives aren't important for you!!! You're a racist, and a monster!" Let them froth at the mouth. Facts remain facts even if you really don't like them).

Second, the media. Look, the BBC can't help itself, and the Guardian neither. Their animosity towards Israel is so deap-seated and partially even subconscious they can't tell the story in a balanced way. Not capable.

Yet much of the media actually told it essentially as it is. The howls of rage over at Mondoweiss, a top purveyor of Jew-hatred, as they saw Jodi Rudoren of the New York Times trying to be professional, was a pleasure to see. So far as I could see Rudoren hasn't yet picked up her Elders of Zion membership card, but to hear the invective hurled at her was a fine demonstration of how far gone the true haters are, and how reasonable a professional journalist will be if allowed to see the events and report on them. Hamas was exerting itself with all its sinews to kill Israeli civilians, and Israeli soldiers were exerting themselves not to kill Palestinian civilians. This stark reality often did come accross in much of the reportage. (Not all, of course).

Then there were the social media. Israel seems to have grasped the concept of talking to people directly, not through the media. A week ago the IDF had 70,000 followers on twitter; by last night there were more than 200,000. Some will now wander away, but there will remain a large number who don't need the BBC to hear Israel's version of events (which will never be supplied by the BBC anyway). Having suceeded once, Israel will now put thought, effort and funds into improving its capabilites on this battlefield, too. Contrary to the moans of many despairing supporters, Israel isn't obviously losing the ability to tell its version of events.

International relations: they played out well, don't you think? If there was any light between the Israeli and American governments, I didn't see it. William Hague, a British fellow not know for giving pro-Zionist speeches, was supportive. His German counterpart traveled over to say Israel has a right to defend itself and Hamas has no right to be shooting at Israeli civilains. The UN passed no resolutions - and now won't set up any new version of the Goldstone Commission, either.

None of this happened by accident. Israel doesn't get international support by default, and certainly not at time of war. Just as with the the military and media aspects, someone worked hard in advance to achieve the result. Syrian bestiality helped, as did blatant Hamas ciminality, but the diplomats have apparently been earning their upkeep by the sweat of their luggage.

Egyptian President Morsi: now there's a pleasant surprise! I doubt he's about to join Likud, but no-one's asking him to. (Update: Hours after I wrote this Morsi annointed hiself Dictator of Egypt. It's an odd world).

One final comment in this section: Yes, violence works. No, violence can't solve many of the world's problems. But faced with a gang of armed thugs suh as rules Gaza, the careful appliance of violence is not only legitimate, it can be an important tool for making things better, even if only as one tool among others, and even if only for a while.

Leadership: We've got an election coming up so I"m going to be very sparse in words. Yet one must say that all the above are the result, along other things, of leadership. I do recommend people go back and read what's been said about Israel's leaders in recent years, and then see if the descriptions fit the actions we've just seen; if these actions were predictable given the descriptions.

One more comment about leadership. Important Israeli pundits and activists said, in 2006 and 2009, that Israel's initial air attacks against Hezballah and Hamas were legitimate, but the subsequent decision to keep on going and throw in ground forces was wrong. OK. So this time we listened to their advice. One hopes this will be duly noted, though it probably won't. More important: the theses has been put to test. Now we'll see if it proves itself.

Enough. As I expalined last year when I stopped blogging, I have made a decision to desist from public punditry about Israel in return for the opportunity to make some changes real changes. To do, rather than to talk. In the past year my colleages and I have set out on the road to dramatially altering the way Israel deals with it's documentation. If we succeed at what we're currently beginning, by the end of the decade Israel will be a world leader in proccessing its documentation: in creating it, appraising it, preserving it, cataloguing and declassifying it, and offering it to its owners, the public. Given the size and complexity of the challenge, I don't expect this to be visible before 2015 at the earliest, but - rather like preparing for war, actually - impressive results require years of hard preparatory work. So I thank the thousands of readers who have come by this past week, and this blog will now return to it's semi-dormant condition, with perhaps a post once every month or three. Although, come to think of it, you're welcome to follow the archives' blogs (Hebrew, and English). We're a bit proud of them and feel they're worth taking a peek. They're active most days of the week but not on the weekends.

Finally, I wish a happy Thanksgiving to those of you who'll be celebrating this evening. I can easily empathize with a nation giving thanks for all that is worthy of celebration.

Thank God I don't blog anymore!

Because if I did still blog, I'd have to spend this entire morning deleting everything I'd written this past month, and hacking into any other blogs or websites which had quoted me to scrub any mention they'd made; and I'd be hoping no-one read a word I'd said, and that the few who had, would be struck by a miraculous bolt of amnesia that would erase any memory of all the wise and learned nonesense I had pronounced. Because every single word of what I would have written is now demonstrably false.

Whew!!!

Israel at the End of 2011: Better than Ever

No, this blog is still dormant, as explained here. However, I still post every now and then, so the Google overlords won't delete the entire blog for having gone entirely silent. The end of 2011 is a good moment to reflect on Israel's condition, which, if you believe much of the media, is catastrophic. Growing numbers of folks dislike us, we're told, our isolation is growing ever more dire, our democracy is crumbling, we're forcing women into second-class status, America's Jews are turning away in growing disgust, and so on and on and on...

Well, no.

Back in my blogging days I used to propose three criteria for measuring the long-term robustness of Israel. So let's start with them:

Economics: While the European economy enters recession if not worse, and the American economy is in a protracted funk, the Israeli economy continutes to boom. Here, check it out at the Economist website, which tells that GDP is growing higher in Israel than in any European country, the US, and lots of other places too. Unemployment, you might be interested to hear, at 5.6%, is not only lower than in most countries, it's at its lowest in Israel for decades and by some estiamtes, the lowest ever. If things stay this way until the next elections there will be no need to speculate on how crazy the Israeli voters have become to re-elect that supposedly universally hated government: any government running for re-election with an economy like this would stand a fine chance of re-election.

The BDS campaign to destroy Israel is not obviously working, apparently.

Culture: is Jewish culture thriving, stagnating or declining in Israel? This is a rhetorical question. There's no measure I can think of by which to claim there's any stagnation or decline. It has been thousands of years since the Jews have had such a broad-based cultural creativity, which isn't surprising if you remind yourself that for the first time in millennia there are millions of Jews living in their language in their own society (and their own land).

How does cultural creativity fit into disappearing freedom of thought, you ask? It doesn't. The disappearing freedom and democracy exist only in the minds of a certain section of Israeli society and the multitudes of ignorant foreign reporters and politicians who avidly agree with them whenever they criticise Israel. Apart from them, it's not happening. There's a racuous debate about all sorts of things, of course, but in other countries that would be called democracy, not facism.

Demography: here the question is simple: are there more Jews in Israel today than a year ago. Of course there are. In an aside, there are growing indications that the demographic pendulum has peaked and is swinging back in favor of the Jews over Palestinians, whose birthrate is either declining or tumbling, depending on the data-sets one uses. (Here, for example).

Terrorism is mostly dormant, by Israeli standards. 2011 was one of the most peaceful years Israel has had since 1947. (The Palestinians had a rather peaceful year, too, since there's some correlation between the two).

The internal clash with the Haredi sections of society seems to be moving in two contradictory directions. The crazies are growing ever more crazy; but there's a long-term trend in which ever-growing numbers of Haredi are slowly acquiring modern education and entering the labor market; some thousands of young Haredi men are even finding their way into special programs in the IDF. I can't say which trend will ultimately be more important, but I feel confident in hoping for the better outcome.

The Arab revolutions seem likely to create ever more outlandish-looking societies. I don't see how normal Westerners (as distinct from the chattering classes) will look at them in 5, 10, or 15 years, and then look at us, and not prefer us.

You'll hear endless punditry about how bad off Israel's Arab citizens are. Well. The reality I see is that growing numbers of them are integrating into mainstream society. I have Israeli Arabs working under me, as well as alongside me, and they are just regular folks and treated as such. I see Arabs - Israeli citizens or East-Jerusalem permanent residents - everywhere: in markets, at the university, in professional groups, in hospitals, at universitities, and so on. Also in the hallways of the government ministries and even in classified installations.

Whinch brings me to my final point. I stopped blogging when I joined the civil service, and went behind a wall of security clearance and the need to shut up about it. Indeed, I won't report on what cannot be reported. But I will say that what I find there is very heartening. Alongside the usual, and universal, red-tape and mediocracy, there are large numbers of highly talented Israelis purposefully going about their jobs of making this a better country, stronger, more successful, better able to withstand whatever gets thrown at it.

Yes, there are lots of folks out there who dislike us, but that's always been so. These days we don't have to give them too much attention. Seen historically, 2011 was probably one of the best years in millennia of Jewish history.

Follow-up on Leaving the West Bank

Here are a number of responses or follow-up comments to the discussion of my post yesterday, about how Israel should leave most of the West Bank, and disengage from the Palestinians. I have no way of knowing what most readers thought of all this, but the ones who commented tended to be critical of the idea.

1. It occurs to me that I didn't say explicitly what should have been obvious. The entire project of leaving the West Bank will require significant legislation on many topics, which cannot be passed by the current coalition (though it could be by a different coalition in the present Knesset). Therefore, the project will need to be sanctioned by the electorate long before it happens. Having closely watched Israeli politics for almost 40 years, since my late teens, I'm convinced such a proposition, formulated correctly, would be a winning platform for any large political party, though Kadima is currently the best positioned to run with it since it was essentially invented for this purpose. But Likud, Lieberman's party or even the almost defunct Labor party could also run with it, and were any of them to do so, they'd probably win the elections. (The formulation would be important).

Such a move wouldn't be a putsch by Leftists, it would be the expression of the Israeli will as formulated through the political process. As such, it would be accepted by a majority of the settlers.

2. An early part of the legislation, the proposition to assist settlers to move, has already been under discussion for a number of years; surprisingly - or not at all, depending how much you know about the reality - many settlers themselves are eager to have such a law passed. At the moment, many thousands of non-ideological settler families who moved to acquire cheap housing, cannot move out since their homes cannot be sold at reasonable prices. Were the government to alleviate this in some manner, they would move immediately. This piece of legislation alone would noticeably reduce the number of settlers, it would send a message to our friends abroad that we're serious, and would have no impact at all on the Palestinians' ability to harm Israelis. (On the contrary: there would be fewer Israelis on the West Bank to be harmed).

3. Water, aquifers and so on are not relevant in the mid- or long-term. As I wrote recently, Israel is already on the road to supplying its needs by desalination and purification of used water. This isn't because of the West Bank, it's because we've already exhausted the natural resources. Moreover, Israel supplies water to the Palestinians, not the other way around.

4. The line to be moved back to - I offhand said it would be the line of the security fence - is not the same as the line of 1967, though it isn't very far from it, either. So of course the state of war with the Palestinians would continue, and anyone who loves to damn us for any inch of occupation will be able to continue to do so. I never said otherwise. This is inevitable in any case, since reaching an agreed line of partition with the Palestinians is not possible, as I explained yesterday and many times previously. On the other hand, Barack Obama himself seemed in his recent speech to be suggesting the same thing, or at least something resembling it; so far as I understand the dynamics of international relations, such a move, or even merely its initial steps, would significantly improve Israel's relations with foreign politicians who are not automatically anti-Israel. Such figures would include, at the moment, people like Angela Merkel, Nicholas Sarkozy, Silvio Berlusconi, and as I said, Barack Obama. I don't see how this would be bad for Israel.

5. Canny Israeli leaders should indeed be able to get some political gains from America and even Europe for such a policy. There is no doubt about it.

6. Palestinians and Israelis in the remaining narrow parts of Israeli-occupied West Bank: I don't know what would happen to them. Were Israel to annex the areas, the local Palestinians would be offered Israeli citizenship, and all Israeli laws would apply to anyone living there, Jew or Arab. However, I rather doubt they'd be annexed. There are good reasons why Israel hasn't ever annexed these areas, and they'd still be in place.

7. Gilad Shalit doesn't fit into this discussion. Lots of things don't. It's not a suggestion to correct the world's ills, rather to deal with a specific part of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

8. Regarding the objection that I'm advocating fleeing under fire, and that the missiles will rain down on Tel Aviv and Jerusalem (where I live): Guilty as charged, only in the opposite way. Yes, I'm suggesting we leave the West Bank without any expectation of peace with the Palestinians - because such an expectation can't be fulfilled anyway. No, I'm not suggesting that Israel then live with a rain of missiles on Tel Aviv etc etc. I don't regard myself as a fool, nor will the Israeli majority that votes for this project be made up of more fools than any regular electorate. I know all about Gaza (some of you may remember that I had a son fighting there in 2009), and Southern Lebanon, and the mistakes of Oslo, and the Second Intifada, and all those things. I look at all those cases, and see general calm on all fronts, and I deduce that the calm is no coincidence. Hizballah, many West Bank Palestinians, and Hamas in Gaza all hate us as much now as they did previously, and yet over the past few years they've all decided to stop most of their violence against us for the time being. As did the Syrians, Jordanians, and Egyptians before them. At the moment, the weakest link in the chain are the settlers on the West Bank, who are the hardest to protect, just as the settlers in Gaza were effectively impossible to protect before 2005 - a matter never mentioned, somehow, in all the rhetoric about how awful it was that Israel left Gaza.

Unlike Hizballah, the Palestinians are susceptible to various types of Israeli pressure. Their economy is essentially dependent on Israel's, while Israel isn't dependent on them. They're dependent on Israel for water, electricity, and indeed their very currency (they use ours, for reasons of their own). The thing is, Israel has never had a policy of full disengagement from its control of the Palestinians, and thus has never been in the position to claim that it owes them nothing. Were there to be such a policy, the entire equation would change. True, Palestinian violence against Israeli civilians would remain part of the equation, but only one part among many. I don't see why Israel's cards in that game would be weaker than the Palestinian hand.

Anyway, as I've repeatedly written, the Israeli occupation of Palestine has become the Palestinians' worst weapon against Israel, worse than any military threat they might pose. It's time for Israel to disarm that weapon. That is the base of my position, and all the talk about missiles on Tel Aviv doesn't change it.

Demographics and the Long-Term Israeli Victory

Not long ago I read an article about some Israeli legislation in the 1950s. It was sobering to see that I'd never heard of almost any of the legislators involved in the matter; even the high-ranking cabinet member who had been presiding over the circus was a fellow I'd never come across before, and in the interval have once again forgotten. Fame is fleeting, it seems.

This is one of the main drawbacks to blogging, as I've noted before. It's extremely contemporary, which means, it's of the most fleeting importance. No one reads blogposts from two months ago, and why would they? No-one remembers that Bill Clinton and Yitzchak Rabin got off to a cold and stony start, as did Bush II and Sharon, not to mention Reagan and Begin, or Carter and Begin; Bush I contributed significantly to the downfall of Yitzchak Shamir in 2002: Nu, so what? Did it make any real and lasting difference, the kind that anyone will remember in 50 years? (Shamir who? Or, let's see who can arrange the following presidents in correct chronological order: Taft, Roosevelt, Hoover, Wilson, and the other Roosevelt).

Barry Meislin has uncovered an article in the Asia Times (of Hong Kong) that takes a very long look. So long, as a matter of fact, that none of us will be alive to test his full thesis, which deals with the year 2100. Yet the demographic trends he discusses will be felt - or not, if he's wrong - well before the end of the century, demographic developments being what they are.

Like the vanishing point in a perspective painting, long-term projections help us order our perceptions of what we see in front of us today. Here's one to think about, fresh from the just-released update of the United Nations' population forecasts: At constant fertility, Israel will have more young people by the end of this century than either Turkey or Iran, and more than German, Italy or Spain.

With a total fertility rate of three children per woman, Israel's total population will rise to 24 million by the end of the present century. Iran's fertility is around 1.7 and falling, while the fertility for ethnic Turks is only 1.5 (the Kurdish minority has a fertility rate of around 4.5).

Not that the size of land armies matters much in an era of high-tech warfare, but if present trends continue, Israel will be able to field the largest land army in the Middle East. That startling data point, though, should alert analysts to a more relevant problem: among the military powers in the Middle East, Israel will be the only one with a viable population structure by the middle of this century.

That is why it is in America's interest to keep Israel as an ally. Israel is not only the strongest power in the region; in a generation or two it will be the only power in the region, the last man standing among ruined neighbors. The demographic time bomb in the region is not the Palestinian Arabs on the West Bank, as the Israeli peace party wrongly believed, but rather Israel itself.

The key part of the article is this:

The right way to read this projection is backwards: Israelis love children and have lots of them because they are happy, optimistic and prosperous. Most of Israel's population increase comes from so-called "secular" Israelis, who have 2.6 children on average, more than any other people in the industrial world. The ultra-Orthodox have seven or eight, bringing total fertility to three children.

Europeans, Turks and Iranians, by contrast, have very few children because they are grumpy, alienated and pessimistic. It's not so much the projection of the demographic future cranked out by the United Nations computers that counts, but rather the implicit vision of the future in the minds of today's prospective parents.

And then this:

This, I believe, explains the implacable hostility of Israel's neighbors, as well as the Europeans. It is the unquenchable envy of the dying towards the living. Having failed at Christianity, and afterward failed at neo-pagan nationalism, Europe has reconciled itself to a quiet passage into oblivion.

Israel's success is a horrible reminder of European failure; its bumptious nationalism grates against Europe's determination to forget its own ugly embrace of nationalism; and its implicitly religious raison d'etre provokes post-Christian rage. Above all, it offends Europe that Israel brims with life. Some of Europe's great nations may not survive the present century. At constant fertility, Israel will have more citizens than any of the Eastern European countries where large numbers of Jews resided prior to the Holocaust. 

From there on it gets better. Read the whole thing, if only to raise your spirits. By the time he gets disproved we won't be here to notice anyway.

The B'Tselem Witch Trials

I continue to be offline, sorry for the inconvenience. In the meantime, here's an interesting article about a subject I often write about. Noah Pollak takes a long hard look at B'Tselem.

Israel at 63

We're approaching 8 million people: ten times the population in 1948, but still one of the world's smaller countries, not that you'd know it from all the noise about us.

Yad Vashem generally estimates the number of Jews murdered in the Shoah as close to 5.8 million. The number of Jews in Israel today is 5,837,000. Most of the 322,000 non-Jewish immigrants are culturally Jewish, and their definition has more to do with the politics of religion than with reality.

For a demonstration of how committed Israelis are to their national project, I recommend Alex Stein's blogpost yesterday. Alex is decidedly to the left of most of us, but not in a loony way. He's description of Israel and his feelings about it are easily echoed by almost all of us, and the disagreements we'd have with him are much less important than the agreement.

I posted my own thoughts on the matter in a concise way on Independence Day three years ago; the words are exactly right today still. Israel's First Century.

Diversity in Israel's Left

Alex Stein, an occasional reader of this blog, has reactivated his own blog. Alex is rather to my left, and he and I disagree on much, but he's solidly within the healthy diversity of opinion any functioning democracy must have.

After I posted last week on some pernicious radical-left Israelis who support the families of murderers as they defame Israel, I had the dubious pleasure of observing some of their attempts at apologetics. The best they could come up with was that since the Machsom Watch visit to Awarta had been before the gag order on the investigation was lifted, they couldn't have known better; this in spite of the obvious fact that their visit and subsequent reports took place after the conclusion of the investigation itself, when there was widespread unofficial knowledge about its results.

At least whoever was making those excuses had some sense of shame. When I contacted Didi Remez to hear his opinion, he refused to utter a single word of criticism of his friends of the radical left, preferring instead to attack me personally. The reason I occasionally pick on Didi is that while he has no impact on policy or even on the Israeli political discourse, in the parts of the world which love to hate Israel and use Israelis as their sources of malice, Didi is a significant figure.

The insight I gleaned from the exercise is that Israel's radical left doesn't criticize the society it comes from as part of an attempt to make it a better place; rather the motivation draws on estrangement and revulsion. On that level, the radical left aren't capable of testifying about Israeli society at all, since they've severed their relationship with it.

On a related note, here's a very funny talk by Souad Amiri, a Palestinian who uses humor to confront Israel. Of course I could point out the fallacies in her narrative, and so could most readers of this blog, but she's still funny. Enjoy.

Radical Israelis Prefer Murderers

For years I've believed - and have said in print - that for all my disagreements with far-left Israelis, they were a legitimate voice and deserved respect for criticizing from inside the war zone: if proven wrong, they'd be here to pay the price; when Palestinian or Hisballah murderers do their best to kill random Israeli Jews, the far-left Israelis are here along with all the rest of us. This creates a qualitative distinction between them and their foreign fellows in malice.

I'm no longer convinced. As I've long been documenting in this blog, the contribution Israel's radicals make to the Big Lie against Israel is immense; sometimes the entire anti-Israeli argumentation comes from them. Absent them and the hatred of the Jewish State wouldn't go away, but its purveyors could present far fewer arguments.

This week we've had a further example which to my mind crosses all the lines of simple human decency. The Hebrew part of the Internet has been all a-buzz about the story of the Israeli radicals who went to the West Bank town of Awarta to give succor to the families of the murderers of the Fogel family, while disseminating unforgivable slander against the IDF and the law enforcement agencies.

The story of the investigation was under a gag order for a month, until its successful conclusion. Still, Israel being the very small place it is, anybody who cared to know had a pretty good idea what was going on. In brief, immediately after the murder trackers identified tracks of the suspected murderers from Itamar to the nearby town of Awarta. We now know that the two suspected murderers walked back home after the massacre of the Fogel family, where a number of their friends and relatives burned their clothes and hid their weapons near Ramallah. The investigators, who had reason to believe the murderers and potential accomplices were in town, but couldn't yet have known who, how many, how well armed, and if they intended to murder again, sealed off the town and began to investigate. At a minimum, the investigators knew the murderers had the two M-16's stolen from Itamar. At one point they collected DNA samples from most of the men. Had anyone come forward and admitted their part in the massacre the investigation would have been greatly expedited, but this didn't happen, so the investigators had to find their men in a hostile environment. They succeeded in less than a month. The week before the gag order was lifted the suspected murderers were brought to Itamar to re-enact the murder, so everyone in Itamar knew they'd been caught; soon, everyone else who cared knew, too, even if the precise identities of the murderers were not yet known.

At this point a delegation of radical Israeli leftists visited the town: after the investigation, mind you, since as they openly said in their subsequent reports, during the investigation itself they couldn't get in.

There are two extraordinarily incriminating pieces of evidence for the malice of the radicals. The first is a report by Yaakov Manor, of the Alternative Information Center. It was written in Hebrew, and published on their website. It describes the violence of the Israeli forces, and attributes it to their need for revenge. It is based largely on eye-witness reports of local townspeople, the exact same people who had been obstructing the investigation for most of the month. The head of the town informs Manor that the reason the IDF spent so much time in town was to prepare the confiscation of agricultural land. Then Manor went to visit the family of Hakem Awad, one of the suspected murderers. Here's the English translation of what they found:

The horror that we saw with our own eyes in the home of Mahmoud Awad cannot be described as anything but a pogrom, primate and brutal vengeance intended solely to impose fear in the heart of the residents.

All rooms in the home were turned upside down. Most of the furniture and electronic equipment was broken. Food from the kitchen was dumped on the floor and on it a large vat of oil was poured.

The mother of the family, Shama and the children Majd, 14 years old and Alaa, 6 years old, who were not detained, related that the army’s invasion of their home began at 4am and ended around 11am. Family members were dragged out of their beds and not permitted to bring warm clothing or blankets. A soldier who saw the little girl trying to shield herself from the cold ripped the blanket away from her. Alaa relates that “they took my blanket and I was very cold and afraid, and waited outside until the soldiers left. Majd notes that “I was handcuffed, my eyes were covered and they beat me. All in all I’m a little boy, what did I do wrong?

The father of the family, Mahmoud, 45 years old, the son Majdi, aged 20, a third year university student and the son Amjad, 19 years old, a first year university student and the son Hakhem, 17 years old, were detained. Their cousin Ayman, 21 years old, was also detained. The mother claims that soldiers took 2,500 Jordanian dinars from a drawer and 5 mobile phones. The mother looked broken, in shock and in deep grief. The fear and terror had not yet left her eyes.

It gets worse. Hagit Beck, a member of Machsom Watch, describes on her blog how she and some other women went to visit "the 2 homes which had been ransacked". The second of the two was the home of Hakem Awad. (Isn't in interesting how in spite of all the horror, the reports all seem to focus on the same one or two homes?). The blog-post has been put up also on the Machsom Watch website: they're obviously proud of it. While in the house, Raya Yaron, the Machsom Watch spokeswoman, tried to comfort Shama Awad, mother of suspected murderer Hakem Awad, and wife of one of the men suspected for destroying the evidence. If proven in court, this will mean Shama Awad hid her murderer son from the police for most of a month, knowing fully what he had done. This is the woman Raya Yaron is embracing, and Hagit Beck is celebrating.

For what it's worth: The Alternative Information Center is cited on page 555 of the Goldstone Report as one of their sources. Also, some of the Hebrew websites are claiming that the two NGOs are or have been supported bythe NIF. It's plausible,but I haven't checked. Something worth looking into.

Why Oh Why Don't the Downtrodden Israelis Revolt?

Yuval Elbashan, a 40-something Israeli lawyer who'd like to rectify all the social woes of Israel (wouldn't we all?) moans about how the downtrodden masses are so downtrodden they can't muster the energy to revolt.

Of course, one might argue that the downtrodden might be better advised to invest their energies in actively bettering their situation and generally getting on with their lives. One might ask if that hasn't been the broad trajectory of most Israelis over the past six decades since most of them arrived mostly penniless and were stuffed into refugee camps by very harried officials, until the present day when most of them (not all, alas) live reasonable lives in a wealthy society. One might ponder whether theorizing about the dearth of revolution is actually as useful as pursuing capitalist occupations such as making money and spending it.

But then one wouldn't get published in Haaretz. On the contrary. One might well get sneered at by Haaretz.

Long Term Structural Things Israel Does Right

The Israeli economy continues to grow faster than expected. The annual rate of growth recorded in the final quarter of 2011 was 7.8%. If we manage to keep it going like that, we'll soon enter Indian territory, from a higher starting point. Part of the growth is a fine rise in exports, which is happening even as the exporters have been kvetching and wailing about the strength of the Shekel:

Israeli industrial exports in the December 2010 to February 2011 period jumped 23% - in annual terms - mostly as a result of a steep rise in high-tech exports, 28.1%, the stats bureau reported. The increase in exports came despite exporters' complaints in recent months over the fall in the dollar against the shekel, reflecting the recovery of Western economies.

This is the sort of thing Jon at Divest This! likes to write about: the more the boycotters strive, the faster Israel's economy grows. I rather doubt there's any correlation, but the growth is welcome and important; keep in mind Yaacov's Three Parameters for measuring Israel's strength, the third of which is economic.

The Economist last week has a long special report on pensions (it begins here). What looked like a great idea in the late 19th century when invented by Bismarck, the eligibility of folks to live off a pension from a certain point in time until the ends of their lives, now accepted nearly universal as a basic right, will cause enormous economic stress in many countries over the next few decades (though the problem may go away by the late 21st century, if that's reassuring). The subject is complex, and actually not the sort of thing this blog usually tells about, but the outlines are simple, and the report sums op the four main issues:

The first is that people are living longer, but they are retiring earlier than they were 40 years ago. A higher proportion of their lives is thus spent in retirement. Second, the large generation of baby-boomers (in America, those born between 1946 and 1964) is now retiring. But the following generations are smaller, leaving the children of the boomers with a huge cost burden.
Third, some employees have been promised pensions linked to their salaries, known as defined-benefit (DB) schemes. In the 1980s and 1990s the true cost of these promises was hidden by a long bull market in equities. But the past dismal decade for stockmarkets depleted those funds and left employers on the hook for the shortfall. Private-sector employers have largely stopped making such promises to new employees; the public sector is beginning to face the same issues, particularly in Britain and America.
Fourth, private-sector employers are now providing pensions in which the payouts are linked to the investment performance of the funds concerned. These defined-contribution (DC) schemes transfer nearly all the risk to the employees. In theory, they can provide an adequate retirement income as long as enough money is paid in, but employees and employers are contributing too little. Both sorts of funded schemes, DB and DC, essentially face the same problem. “The aggregate amount of pension savings is inadequate,” says Roger Urwin.

The situation is Israel is different. There is no baby-boom generation which hangs over its predecessors and descendants. There have been ups and downs in rates of fertility, but at no point have the rates ever been negative. Looking forward, each retiring generation will be followed by a larger one. In spite of this, Israel already has raised the age of retirement to 67, higher than almost anywhere else (though a few far-seeing countries have recently moved to peg the retirement age to longevity; given Israel's high life expectancy, we'll probably have to do the same).

Most Israeli workers are paid from pension funds, not the government budget, and in DC schemes; since these are mandatory by law, most people contribute to them automatically their entire post-student working lives. The pensions are computed as a rough average of contributions throughout one's career, so there's no way to artificially raise decades worth of pension by tweaking the final year or two of a career, as is often done elsewhere.

How is it that Israel seems to have mostly sidestepped a strategic predicament that looms over most developed nations? I don't know. Perhaps we've had some reasonable decision-makers along the way. Netanyahu raised the pension age in 2002 when he was Finance Minster; other parts of the configuration were in place earlier.

Contra Jeffrey Goldberg: Lozowick is an Anti-J Street Blog

Jeffrey Goldberg is angry that Israelis are fuming about J-Street, and has proclaimed on his blog that "Goldblog is a pro-J Street blog". I'm not going to cut and paste any segment of his; you should read it in its entirety. It's a good post, written with the passion of his anger.

I like Jeffrey, personally, and although I don't always agree with everything he writes, I like his blog - actually it's the first one I read every day. Yet in the Jewish spirit of a squabble among friends, I've got to say that Lozowick is an anti-J Street blog.

Since Jeffrey starts with his personal credentials, here are some of mine: I have gone to war for this country. Both of my sons have, too, as we raised them to. I have been in favor of a Palestinian state alongside Israel since the late 1970s. Just for context: back in those days Jeffrey may have been too young to have an informed opinion on the matter; Barak Obama almost certainly was, and for all I can tell, so was Jeremy Ben Ami, the boss of J Street. Also, the late 1970s were more than a decade before the PLO grudgingly began talking about the two-state solution; as late as 1989 their official and practical position was that Israel must be destroyed, preferably by the force of arms.

Also, I have been against the settlements for all those years, and am against them till this very day - though I know the large settlements that straddle the Green line will never be removed, and I'm strongly against the division of Jerusalem which will cause war, not peace. So far as I can tell, these are the positions of a large chunk, and probably a significant majority, of the Israeli electorate; contrary to what Jeffrey seems to think, no-one is shutting my mouth, banning me from saying what I think, or branding me a traitor for saying it. Nor do I need faraway outsiders such as J Street (or President Obama) to inform me what's good for Israel.

I am also a historian of Nazism, and a student of history. I know that words are dangerous things, since they are the tools with which we formulate ideas, and ideas are what motivate people to do things, and justify their actions for them. Persecution of Jews over many centuries was because of anti-Jewish words and the ideas expressed and disseminated in them. Call them a series of Big Lies about Jews. The freedom and equality enjoyed by America's (and these days, by Europe's) Jews are the result of words and ideas. Call them Rational Enlightenment.  The war against Israel is also first and foremost because of words. Because of a new set of a Big Lie.

The Big Lie of our day has a number or versions. The Jews are not a nation and deserve no state. The Jews have no historical rights to the land they call Israel, and even if they do, they're anachronistic and cannot justify harming the Palestinians. The Palestinians have been in their homeland for time immemorial, and were pushed out by the Jews. The Jews continue to aspire to ever more control of the land, and to ever more oppression of the Palestinians. The Jews' way in war is uniquely evil and cruel. The Palestinians yearn for peace, but the Israelis refuse to allow it, because they haven't finished taking Palestinian land, or because they don't recognize the Palestinians as equally human. The Jews protect their nefarious projects through sinister control of power-brokers, most importantly the United States.

One of the odder parts of the story is of course that the most important propagators of this Big Lie are not only Jews, they're Israelis. No one persecutes them for their malice: we're not Islamists, not Arab dictators, not Argentinian generals or Bolshevik commissars or Gestapo or anything of the sort.

Do Jeremy Ben Ami and his J Streeters believe in the full set of lies? No. But remember, the Knesset member who lead the hearing against him last week, Otniel Shneller, is from Kadima, not Likud; moreover, he's a settler who openly espouses the dismantling of settlements - probably including his own - if that's the price for peace. What distinguishes him from Ben Ami, therefore, isn't the idea of partition and dismantling settlements; what distinguishes them is the idea that Israel is the reason there's no peace; that pressure must be brought to bear on Israel to force it out of Palestinian territories; and also, alas, Israeli willingness to use force to protect its interests.

In other words, what distinguishes Otniel Shneller from Jeremy Ben Ami is that Ben Ami and his organization agree with parts of the Big Lie about Israel, and promote it. If in response a significant segment of Israeli society wishes to ostracise him and his organization, this seems to me a moderate and measured response.

In his final sentence Jeffrey seems to be saying that there are many American Jews attracted to J Street's message. This may be true - I'm too far away to judge. If so, it's a serious problem - first and foremost, of those American Jews who prefer the Big Lie to the Jewish State.