The Israel Test

Now.”

“I have never tried to run away from my Judaism,” he explains. “As a Jew growing up I heard many stories about the sufferings of Jews, the fear, the Holocaust. As a Jew I’m obliged to be sensitive to the suffering of others. The occupation is making us less moral and less sensitive to the suffering of other people. I don’t want to occupy other people. It is important for Americans to be good. I fear that Israelis are losing their moral bearings.”

“I want the Palestinians to have a better life,” he says.

“The reality today is we’re sitting here in this nice restaurant having a nice dinner and an interesting conversation while 4 million Palestinians live in misery.

“I support the Peace Process and the withdrawal from the territories.”

I point out that withdrawal will not help the Palestinian Arabs but betray them to terrorists. As Jonathan Adiri, a top advisor to President Shimon Peres, told us earlier that afternoon, withdrawal is not that simple. I recall standing on a promontory near Gilo in Jerusalem looking down across the valley into the West Bank. We contemplate an elegant four-story mansion a few hundred yards away from which a stream of bullets had issued during the intifada toward an Israeli apartment complex on the top of the hill. Pointing to the entangled weave of ethnic communities, Adiri told us of the failure of all efforts to separate the Palestinian Arabs from the Jews. “We expected the Palestinians to gravitate to their own communities but instead the prosperity and growth in the Jewish parts of Jerusalem acted like a magnet.”

From the beginning, the Arabs have been attracted to parts of Palestine that the Jews have been enriching. They don’t want to move toward the existing Palestinian communities. They vote with their feet. It is the Palestinians who would benefit from the overthrow of the leaders sacrificing them to the jihad — leaders who say they would rather their people suffer for “a hundred years” than prosper by working with Israelis.

I try a new tack, pointing out that “Arafat died in a house with piles of Mein Kampf.”

Olmert laughed bitterly and then launched a riff familiar on the Israeli Left: “Yes, I know we did a terrible job in picking our enemies. A lousy job. I apologize. Next time we should do better. We will do better. I promise. We’ll audition them better. Find nicer guys to oppose us. I’ll give it more thought.”

Until then they would seek “Peace Now.”

Before meeting him, I already knew that Shaul was not all fun and games. I had read of a petition that he had signed urging Israel’s reserve forces to refuse to serve in the “territories.” I also learned of his famously lesbian sister Dana, who had joined a rowdy protest march against the Israel Defense Forces for their apparent responsibility for a deadly explosion on a beach in Gaza that accidentally killed eight members of a Palestinian family. “The Intifada Will Prevail,” read a placard in the march.

The Olmert family accepted the rebellion of Dana, according to Shaul, and Shaul apologized for embarrassing his father. But they did not recant their positions. As Shaul explained: “My father is paying the price for being a liberal person. It kind of reminds me of this movie Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?, this movie in which two parents raised their daughter to be very liberal and very open-minded and one day she comes home from college and brings her new boyfriend and they find out that he’s an African American and they are trying to be very liberal and politically correct about it, but they’re also kind of stunned by their daughter’s choice.

“So I guess that my father was in a similar sort of internal debate throughout our childhood because we definitely used the freedom that we were granted and the encouragement to think for ourselves and develop our own views, and we developed our own views, which happen not to coincide with his.”

Nonetheless, the Olmert kids were altogether too trigger-happy in blaming Israel first for violence instigated by enemies set on their country’s destruction. In the end, he and his sister are privileged children assuming costly moral postures that are inevitably paid for by the less fortunate. Jihadists will inevitably see pacifism and other dissension in Israel’s then “first family” as a sign of weakness. Conspicuous weakness is a prime cause of war.

Olmert reminded me of Bernard Avishai, a similarly impatient Israeli leftist who has published a passionate book entitled The Hebrew Republic in a kind of quest for a separate Peace Now. A shaggy professor with a plaintive manner of speech, as I recall from his editing one of my articles for the Harvard Business Review some twenty years ago, he has long seen Zionism as “a tragedy.” Nothing that has happened in Israel in recent years has dissuaded him from the view that the country as currently constituted is a gigantic mistake. His catalog of complaints echoes Shaul Olmert’s: discrimination against Arabs, sorely maldistributed wealth and income, a runaway engine of West Bank settlements that represent an imperial “occupation,” and an impending demographic catastrophe caused less by the more procreative Arabs in Israel than by philoprogenitive Haredim and other ultra-Orthodox Jews. Over the last twenty years the Orthodox share of the population has risen from 10 percent to around 25 percent. By any reasonable standard, these defenders of the faith represent the answer to the demographic crunch caused by secular Israelis with their abortion culture and their gay-rights marches. Yet it is Orthodox population growth that disturbs the Israeli Left.

All in all, in Avishai’s vision, Israel is a deeply flawed democracy twisted by special laws favoring Conservative religious Jews and Judaism, by racism and segregation, by the Law of Return, by a labyrinthine separatist wall, by an ethnocentric national anthem and a Davidic flag, and by other grievous offenses to Palestinian Arabs.

In his book, Avishai collects his petitions and amasses his complaints from the usual trio of eminent Israeli writers: Amos Oz, A. B. Yehoshua, and David Grossman. But he adds a variety of Palestinian Arab, Arab Israeli, and Christian Arab vendors of politically blighted belletristic angst, all seeking — with suitable ironic glosses and abraded sensibilities — to blame Israel first for a failure to achieve Peace Now.

The general posture of all these Israeli cosmopolitans is a belief that the conflict in the Mideast is somehow the fault of the Jews, who are too religious and too xenophobic and insufficiently democratic, tolerant, pacific, idealistic, sensitive, sacrificial, and visionary to negotiate a satisfactory peace.

Knowing that in general capitalism does not work amid violence, Avishai contends that the prime supporters of Peace Now should be venture capitalists and entrepreneurs. And indeed, like Shaul Olmert, many of them are. Avishai’s prime source is none other than Dov Frohman, the inspired inventor and Intel executive whom we have met before. Now he fears that his proud new Intel Fab 18 at Kiryat Gat in the southern Israeli desert will be exposed to attack from the latest generation of rockets in Gaza.

Frohman has long been one of my heroes. He was the pioneering entrepreneur in Israel. But he now lives in the Dolomite mountains in northern Italy for much of the year and has absorbed the syndrome of Euro-pessimism about Israel.

“The vital signs seem okay,” Frohman tells Avishai, “but we are really in the dumps, socially, morally, culturally, everything. This is a drugged democracy, which is worse than a dictatorship, because in a dictatorship you try to rebel — and in this place you don’t do anything. We need some kind of catalyst to get people to the streets. We need to start talking about social issues — and without the generals doing the talking.”

That will do it, I thought. That’s just what Israel needs to rev up its economy and impress the jihad: more street protests and more prattle about “social issues.”

Frohman is glum even about the technologies he pioneered — which brought me to Israel — and are attracting entrepreneurs and investors from around the world. Told that Bibi Netanyahu deems Israel’s increasing lead in technology as a durable basis of national strength, Frohman retorts: “This is bullshit. Bullshit. Investors will not come to us in a big way unless there is political stability… What Bibi says is demagoguery. He’s done some of the right things, which in a healthy environment would have been pretty good. But before these policies can have an impact, we’ll have more violence.”

Frohman disparages the surge of investment in Israel during the first decade of the new century. “There is a lot of financial type of investment but little production type of investment — these are investments which can be taken out at will. And in the meantime, we are losing our reputation as a place for global companies to pioneer.”

He asks Avishai: “What will make our entrepreneurs want to stay in Israel, if they don’t have quality of life? There is continuous movement of people, they will want to stay elsewhere… But the really critical thing is keeping our young people here. I don’t need to do a poll to know that 50 percent of the young people would go.”

Frohman and Avishai have absorbed the Peace Now mantra and message that Israel has become an aggressive and even imperialist power. They don’t like the Orthodox religious forces in Israel that are the hope of the future demographically, the quarter of the population that bears most of its children. They don’t like the politics