Israeli book editors are less likely than their American counterparts to demand major manuscript changes of an author. For better or worse-and it’s both-that has been clear to me for a long time. And it was confirmed by four emerging novelists who spoke Wednesday night at Jerusalem’s Tmol Shilshom literary café in the framework of Jerusalem’s International Writers Festival.

As both a writer and an editor, I have mixed feelings about this. Like all writers, I get annoyed when an editor tells me that parts of my pieces are unnecessary or uninteresting, and that other things are, in his or her opinion, missing. Like all editors, I almost always see faults in manuscripts that come my way, and believe that if my clients will take my advice, the works will be better. I had very productive and pleasant experiences with the editors of my two books, and I think the manuscripts were improved by their suggestions. But from the stories I hear, my experience is not necessarily typical.

I haven’t read the novels of any of the four writers in question (Sami Berdugo, Avirama Golan, Alon Hilu, and Yirmi Pinkus). The main reason is that a huge amount of fiction gets published in Israel every year compared to the country’s size, and there’s no way even a dedicated reader can keep up with it all. From the readings they offered and their presentations of their works, each of the four sounds like a writer worth reading. Notably, each in their own way is an experimentalist-for example, Hilu’s The House of Dajani tells of the Palestinian family that owned a piece of land that is now square in the middle of downtown Tel Aviv, and is written in the Hebrew of the first Zionist immigrants of more than a century ago. They all said that their editors had been extremely helpful but had not sought any fundamental changes in their work.

When I read an Israeli novel I often wish that the publishing house’s editor had leaned on author more. David Grossman’s See Under: Love is a truly great novel, but in my humble opinion would have been even greater without the second of its four parts. Yael Hedaya’s Accidents, which I’m reading now (and which I’ll write a post about when I finish it) has much to recommend it but would be even better with a hundred fewer pages. My editor self would have loved to work on these manuscripts with the authors, helping them to make their books leaner and stronger.

But my writer self is jealous. There’s something to be said for a publishing tradition that allows writers to publish their works intact, without too much interference, in keeping with their original conceptions and their own instincts about their stories’ pace and timing. It allows writers to fulfill their personal visions-and to learn from their mistakes.

My assumption has always been that the reason for this different Israeli tradition is that the Hebrew reading public is small and publishers don’t expect to make a whole lot of money even on a moderately successful book. Golan said that she thinks rather that American editors of fiction are under pressure to mold manuscripts according to the successful formulas of the day.

I don’t know their sales figures; I would suspect that the number of readers these four authors have been able to attract would be considered small by American standards. But the room at the café was filled with fans of their books, so they, and the Israeli publishing industry, must be doing something right.

Since Haim quoted me on the subject of voting in America - and since his father disagreed with me - I’ll explain how my view developed.

In my Jewish home, growing up, I learned that voting was a primary mitzvah, the mark of a responsible human being. In 1980, the first US election after I came to Israel, I tried voting. I wasn’t a citizen here yet. My absentee ballot arrived from California two days before the election, with a punchcard and a little curlycue of a wire to punch the chads out. Mail was taking about two weeks to get from Jerusalem to Los Angeles in those days. There was no way I could get the ballot back in time. For a while, I used the curlycue to clean my garlic press.

After that I didn’t try again for years. Experience showed that I probably wouldn’t succeed. Besides, like Haim, I felt that my life was here. I voted and protested here and wrote about Israeli politics, and called my wife every two hours when I had reserve duty in the ninth month of her pregnancy. In the ancient days of the 1980s and early 90s, I got my news of America from the foreign page of Ha’aretz, in Hebrew, in small doses. Why should I vote over there?

In 2004, I changed my mind. In the Internet era, with a journalist’s appetite for news, I knew more about what was happening in US politics than most Americans did. In 2000, a few hundred votes had made the difference between a qualified president and one who was making matters even worse in the Middle East than back in America. This time, I registered online, got a ballot early, and sent it back by three-day express mail, and damn the expense.

Is it right for me to do so? Is it fair, as Abu Haim asks?

From the point of view of the American polity, I’m an expat. The rules of American elections allow for absentee ballots. For those who’ve asked, we expats are registered in our last place of residence in the U.S. We’re also required to file tax returns - and to pay American taxes. True, we get certain tax breaks, but I assure you, our loopholes are nothing compared to those of the average hedge fund manager, and they’re allowed to vote. I have to pay social security tax on the self-employed part of my income, though the current administration’s economic policies daily reduce the forecast of what I’ll get in return. As I think I learned in third grade: No taxation without representation.

The rules of American elections are admittedly bizarre. A few hundred votes in Florida were worth more than thousands elsewhere. Every state has different rules on disqualifying ex-cons, rules that often have racist consequences. In some states but not others, an absentee ballot is valid even if the voter mailed it in and then died before election day. (LBJ would be blissed to know that there are legal ways for the dead to vote.) These are strange laws, but they list me and other permanent expats as qualified voters. Both major political parties have active branches for expats. The voting rules and tax policies of my native country both inform me that I am considered part of the polity.

And, yes, US elections have a deep impact on my life here. It’s true that in the 21st century, every country effects every other. But the relative weight of the impact is not equal. The United States is the Empire. It is the blind elephant in the china shop of the world. Its effect is immense, its wars are fought far from its shores, and most of its citizens, safe behind the moats of the Pacific and Atlantic while their newspapers shed foreign coverage , have no clue what their government is smashing in its stampede. If we expats have been permitted to bring some expert knowledge to the electoral process, we should do so. Especially when we have a chance of getting the ballot on time.

I’ll be participating in a special New Israel Fund webcast on Sunday:

Religion and State: Fundamentalism or Freedom?

With Naomi Chazan, Frances Raday, Jafar Farah and Gershom Gorenberg

Sunday May 18

8 pm Israel time, 1pm EST, 10am PST

www.nif.org/webcast

Please join us then.

• As I mentioned earlier , the Bush administration’s obstruction of peace talks between Israel and Syria has helped Hezbollah and Iran push for control of Lebanon. My new piece on the subject is now up at the American Prospect :
  

  The time, according to Hilal Khashan, was ten minutes past the ceasefire. That was another way of saying ten minutes after another Hezbollah victory, Khashan explained. I phoned Khashan — head of the political science department at Beirut’s American University — several days into Lebanon’s latest armed upheaval. He spoke in a strangely dispassionate tone I’ve heard before in Jerusalem and Ramallah, the voice of a man taking refuge from chaos in careful analysis.

  So far, Khashan said on Sunday night, the crisis that erupted last week has yielded “a major achievement” for Hezbollah. Iran, Hezbollah’s patron, has extended its influence in Lebanon. The obvious loser is the pro-Western government of Lebanon’s Prime Minister Fouad Siniora. From Beirut, U.S. support appears to be a phantom; Bush unwilling or incapable of supporting its Lebanese allies.

  From the slightly greater distance of Jerusalem, I’d add, there’s another implication of the fire burning anew in Lebanon: The Bush administration’s Middle East policy of confrontation, of trying to isolate opponents, is in tatters. In particular, the administration’s resistance to peace talks between Israel and Syria has only served to strengthen Iran. And time is working in Teheran’s favor. …

  Read the rest here .

• Even for those practiced at believing six impossible things before breakfast , it can be hard to accept that Barack Obama is a Muslim, a follower of a controversial black pastor , and a Marxist too. Edward Luttwak proposed this neat solution : Obama is really an apostate Muslim, subject to the death penalty in Islam. So he will actually be more hated in the Muslim world, and in more danger, than the president who invaded Iraq for no purpose that has withstood historical scrutiny.Ali Ateraz provides a valuable guide to why this thesis contradicts Islamic law and Islamic social realities in a half-dozen different ways.But don’t expect the Obama-as-Muslim smear to vanish; it will merely change shape, as the phantasmagoric fears produced by bigotry always do. For precedents, see under Jewish communist-banker-Zionist-cosmopolitans.
• Trying to dispell the idea that he’s somehow anti-Israel, Obama gave this interview to Jeffrey Goldberg. I realize he has to do this, but my late mom, who introduced me to the line, “Senator, do you still beat your wife” would have warned that Obama is letting himself be baited in a similar way. He should, and could, have responded more forcefully: His opponents’ policies are dangerous to Israel. It’s true, and would put the burden of defense on those who need to defend outdated views.

“Are you going to vote for Obama?” my 14-year-old daughter, Misgav, asked me the other day.

“I don’t vote in American elections,” I replied, “because I’m Israeli.”

“But you could vote, right?”

“I could,” I acknowledged. “I’m also an American citizen. But the last time I voted was in 1980. Once I decided to make my life here and began voting in Israeli elections, I didn’t think it would be right to vote in American ones, too.”

“You should vote for Obama,” Misgav said.

“Maybe I should,” I acknowledged.

It’s a dilemma. I retain my American passport and file a tax return with the IRS every year, but I don’t maintain a residence in the U.S. I have served in a foreign army and have no intention of ever returning to the country I grew up in.

On the other hand, the results of American elections undoubtedly affect my life as much as do the results of Israeli elections. As Gershom pointed out yesterday, my family is less physically safe because of the Bush administration’s misguided invasion of Iraq and its failure to pursue a vigorous diplomatic initiative between Israel and the Palestinians. My income, largely dollar-based, has declined by more than a quarter over the past year because of the Bush administration’s insane economic policies. And I’m involved in the discourse over American issues and policy through my work as a journalist, writer, and blogger.

Gershom tells me that he once agreed with my position but began to vote when George W. Bush acceded to the presidency after loosing an election. The fiasco of 2000 showed us that every vote counts.

This coming U.S. election will in large measure set the course of my children’s lives. So maybe Misgav is right. Maybe I should set my principles aside and cast that vote.

Go into a trendy clothing store, sports outlet, or home improvement warehouse emporium in Israel these days and, as often as not, it’ll be an Arab who helps you find just the right jeans, running shorts, or the doohickey you need to fix your leaky faucet. In today’s Ha’aretz, Ruth Sinai documents this social phenomenon and asks whether service jobs like this represent progress for Israel’s Arab citizens, or just another way to get exploited.

I won’t weigh in on the economic benefits or lack thereof, but this trend is certainly a step forward for ethnic integration in Israel. Historically, Israel’s Palestinian citizens have worked in agriculture, construction, and behind the scenes service jobs like washing dishes in restaurants. In such jobs they were largely invisible, and where visible their jobs marked them as unskilled, alien, and quite often physically dirty.

Compare that to the fashionably-dressed, tastefully made-up, and high-spirited young woman who has become my favorite sales clerk at my local Golf clothing store. I’m not exactly a walking display of the latest fashions-I don’t have a native instinct for choosing the threads that look best on me. So I need the advice and encouragement of a patient and sympathetic attendant. The process involves conversation and interaction with a very visible member of my country’s minority.

Sinai cites incidents in which customers refused to be served by Arab staff, but in my experience here in South Jerusalem such incidents are rare. And even such displays of racism have a positive side to them-precisely because they play out in the public square, they put the issue of ethnic relations front and center. It was easy in the past to ignore the Arab in the kitchen in the back of the restaurant or dismiss the dust-covered plasterer your contractor brought in as part of his renovation team. But if you’re going to stage a public display of hatred toward the polite, knowledgeable, and clean-cut kid at the local appliance store, you’re going to have a hard time justifying your actions.

Arab college graduates still have a hard time finding work in their fields. We’re still a long way away from adequate minority representation in most of Israel’s high-

status and high-earning professions. But, in a society based increasingly on a service economy, omnipresent Arab sales clerks are a step forward toward full integration.

Dan Kurtzer, the former U.S. Ambassador to Israel and an Orthodox Jew, is in Jerusalem for the 60th anniversary celebrations. This morning my wife heard him being interviewed on Israeli Radio, in Hebrew, about the U.S. election. Kurtzer explained that he’s backing Barack Obama.

This was not exactly a revelation. Kurtzer has explained his reasons for backing Obama at length . Here’s some key snippets:

…we have had eight years of disaster with respect to our foreign policy, and I have to share with you as an analyst, we have had eight years that have [compromised] the security of the state of Israel.
An administration that has ignored the search for peace in the Middle East to a point where you have chaos in the Palestinian Authority, and you have a sham process called the Annapolis process, in which our Secretary of State, whom I admire personally, travels to region and announces when she gets there that she is bringing no new ideas.
You have an administration that hasn’t engaged in the peace process, and so inherited a bad situation in 2001 and is leaving it in a worse situation in 2008. And you have an administration that has gotten us engaged in a war in Iraq that has not only cost American lives… but it’s now being called the $3 trillion war…And I would share with you that the cost to the security of Israel is incalculable.
I was in Israel [as Ambassador] when this was being contemplated and when it started… Now, you’ve heard the nonsense which is out there which suggests that Israel or the Jewish community or the Israel lobby pushed this war on the administration. And I can tell you it is nonsense, because there was not one Israeli official and not one Israeli academic who suggested that this war was going to end well. They all warned against exactly the problems we have experienced since this war started…

Knowing this, Kurtzer said, he considered which candidate was likely to improve Israel’s situation. The answer was Obama, and the reason is very simple:

We have one candidate who is prepared to do diplomacy. Only one candidate…
We have had eight years of no diplomacy, and you have two candidates out there who tell us they don’t want to talk to our enemies…
There is one candidate who believes in diplomacy and his name is Barack Obama.

There’s nothing complicated about what Kurtzer is saying. Strangely, though, some Jews seem to be having doubts. Marc Ambinder cites Gallup’s tracking polls , showing that currently 61% of Jews would vote for Obama, 32% for McCain. This looks like a blow-out, but it’s actually a considerably poorer showing than a Democratic presidential candidate normally gets among Jews. (Note that the percentages are based on aggregate of tracking polls for the entire month of April - presumably because the number of Jews polled on any given day is too small for any sample. So the numbers are out of date; they’re from a long period; and they’re from a time when Obama was taking a lot of blows. Caveat lector.) Those figures, in turn, lead to articles such as this one in the New Republic, suggesting that a poor showing among Jews could cost Obama Florida.

I assume the swing voters among Jews aren’t leaning toward McCain because of his deep knowledge of the economy, or because they can count on him to appoint justices who will protect the separation of church and state. Presumably, at least one strong reason is the suspicion fomented by rightwing mass-emailers that Obama is somehow bad for Israel. The stuff recycles; a political reporter reports that Obama has a Jewish problem; the media herd grabs the story; the less-informed believe the next crank email they get because - hey - didn’t you hear that Obama has a Jewish problem?

Kurtzer has it right. In four easy steps, here’s why Obama is the best candidate for Israel:

1) As the ambassador says, the Bush administration has been a disaster for Israel. The war in Iraq has empowered Iran. It has pushed a wave of refugees into Jordan, endangering the stability of Israel’s neighbor and strategic ally. The Bush administration has managed to miss every diplomatic opportunity for renewing the peace process with the Palestinians. When Bush came to power, the Second Intifada was still in its early stages. Bush turned his back on any negotiations that could have slowed or reversed the escalation. He missed the chance when Arafat died. As detailed in a report by the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London last year, and more recently in a Vanity Fair investigative article , the Bush administration’s actions led directly to the takeover of Gaza by Hamas. The administration’s veto on Syrian-Israeli negotiations has blocked Damascus from making a deal in which it would switch allegiances from Iran to the West, and end support for Hezbollah. The outcome is the current crisis in Lebanon, which could soon fall entirely under Iranian control.

“There is a major gap between the perception that Bush has been good for Israel and the reality of Israel’s terrible circumstances,” former US ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk told me back in 2004, with immense diplomatic understatement. Since then, the gap between rhetoric and reality has gotten much wider . (Indyk, I have to note , has been supporting Team Clinton, showing loyalty to his original political patron but not the best foreign-policy judgment.)

2) John McCain promises another four years of Bush’s mistakes. McCain’s understanding of the Mideast is so weak that he doesn’t know the difference between a Sunni and a Shi’ite. McCain wants to continue Bush’s failed policies in Iraq. McCain actively sought the endorsement of John Hagee, whose policy on Israel is based on eager expectation of apocalypse, bloody battles on Israeli soil and the conversion of the Jews. As I’ve noted before , Hagee has expressed uncommon sympathy, in writing, for Yigal Amir, the terrorist who assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in order to prevent peace. If Hagee’s constituency is the one that McCain wants to satisfy, he will avoid any diplomatic involvement in the Middle East. Israelis will pay the price in ongoing conflict and in rising Iranian influence.

3) Since Hillary Clinton says she’s still in the race, I have to point out that she is running on a Mideast policy that is more hawkish than Bill’s positions, and more hawkish than the Israeli government.

The most forgiving explanation I’ve heard is that she is pandering to those Jewish voters who don’t realize that Israel’s centrist leaders have reevaluated the country’s strategic needs - or that she is still caught in the post-9/11 mindset that a Democratic has to be even more bellicose than a Republican to show she’s not soft. The less forgiving explanation is that she really is hawkish, as demonstrated in her disastrous vote for the war in Iraq.

4) The one candidate who speaks in clear terms of taking a new approach to the Mideast is Obama. This is what scares the small coterie of American Jewish rightists who would eagerly fight to the last Israeli. If you care about Israel, you should hit “delete” when you get their emails.

Obama is the one candidate who had the sense to oppose the war in Iraq. He’s the one candidate whose statement on Israel expresses support for a two-state solution, which is the country’s path to peaceful future and is today the consensus position in Israel. He’s the one proposing a clear break from the disastrous Bush policies, and a turn to trying diplomacy.

Ah, say the cynics, but why believe that diplomacy could work? As Haim wrote in his recent post on the Geneva process,

…in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the devil is not in the details. The devil is the conflict of narratives.

That is, the two sides have such a different account of history, of what is at stake today, and of the meaning of symbolic events and landmarks, that they seem unable to negotiate. They don’t even agree on what went wrong in previous talks (as I explain in this article from the American Prospect).

But narrative isn’t fixed. The past isn’t dead; it’s constantly rewritten. The meaning of symbols can shift - to exacerbate conflict or make compromise possible. A few rare leaders understand this, and work to recast the stories and the symbols. In his speech on race, Obama showed that he is capable of aiming for that. If he can apply that skill to the Mideast tangle, there’s a chance he can move diplomacy forward. He’s certainly the only candidate who seems to be considering how to do so. Dan Kurtzer is right.

Low salaries, high taxes, terrorism, not enough jobs–why, one wonders, do any college graduates stay in Israel at all? So why don’t Israeli colleges and high-tech firms do what their counterparts all over the rest of the world do? I mean hire non-Jews.

In the spring issue of Azure, Marla Braverman sums up Israel’s brain drain problems. She calls for free-market reforms in the higher education system to create greater incentives for academics to remain at Israeli universities, noting that faculty salaries here are very low compared to those in the U.S., and that collective wage agreements means that all profs get the same salary, no matter how much they and their field are in demand.

But even in the absence of wage agreements, could Israel’s universities–whose funding comes primarily from the public purse–afford to pay salaries competitive with those in the U.S.? Hardly likely.

In fact, Braverman acknowledges that money is only part of the story. Another part is cultural:

There is no doubt that today’s young Israelis, perhaps more than the citizens of any other country, need a good reason to commit to living in and sacrificing for the ongoing project that is the Jewish state. Unfortunately, today’s Israeli society is more cynical and individualistic than ever before; ideals like devotion to and sacrifice for one’s country have fallen out of fashion. Moreover, if the Zionist ethos, which sanctifies the individual’s obligation to the collective national endeavor, can be said to be in critical condition, then in Israeli academia-entrusted with the cultivation of the country’s best minds-it no longer has a pulse. For this to change, economic and structural reforms in institutions of higher education are not enough. Israel also, and more importantly, needs a comprehensive overhaul of the educational system, one that addresses its inability-or unwillingness-to instill in the younger generation those values which strengthen the connection between the individual, his people, and his homeland.

So, along with free market reforms, Braverman calls for a return to the Socialist-Zionist communal spirit that produced things like a public higher education system and collective wage agreements. In other words, we must be capitalist and global, and we must be socialist and insular. What’s a Zionist to do?

Pundits who moan about the brain drain never mention the other side of the issue. Academic institutions and high-tech firms around the world hire the best candidates they can find, regardless of race, religion, and nationality. And, increasingly, these candidates may come from other countries. But you’ll find hardly any Chinese or Indian researchers at Israeli universities beyond the grad student level, and precious few in its high-tech companies. Indeed, when Israeli universities go head-hunting to fill a faculty opening, they almost always look only for Jewish candidates.

Yes, we want to maintain a Jewish state. And not many foreigners are going to want to move to a country with Israel’s security, political, and economic problems. But a few dozen or hundred non-Jewish scholars could significantly boost the quality of our colleges while barely diluting the country’s Jewish majority. Furthermore, a more pluralistic academic world would be a less hidebound one, more open to innovation–including innovation in labor agreements.

Of course, Israel would have to figure out how to treat these profs’ families. Their non-Jewish children would grow up here as Hebrew-speakers, with an Israeli identity–yet, because they would not be Jewish, they’d be outsiders in the society. A dilemma–but one we’re facing already at the low end of the labor market, with foreign workers.

We’re draining brains because the Israeli meninges allow brains to flow only in one direction–out. It’s time to match the drain with a funnel that will bring new brains in.

Prof. Yedidia Stern came to my shul yesterday to give a lecture in honor of Independence Day on creating a constitution for Israel. Stern teaches law at Bar-Ilan University and is a fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute, a think-tank that has been assiduously pushing the idea that Israel needs a written constitution. Stern is brilliant,articulate and - at a congregation made up largely of American immigrants - should have been preaching to the choir. As often happens to me, I found myself listening to the sermon agnostically.

Years ago, another brilliant law prof, David Kretzmer, punched a large hole in my American 5th-grade-civics-lesson faith in written constitution. A constitution is worth no more than the judges interpreting it, he said. The Soviet constitution looked gorgeous, but was irrelevant to how the Soviet Union was governed. Bolivia has had more constitutions than anyone seems able to count. It hasn’t made the country a mecca of democracy. Meanwhile England refined parliamentary democracy without ever writing a a constitution.

A few weeks after I had that conversation with David Kretzmer, my wife and I happened to be in Florida. Very bored, we grabbed the chance to interview a former U.S. soldier who’d just lost a Supreme Court case. He needed the Court’s permission to sue the U.S. Army, which had used him as an unwitting and involuntargy guinea pig in a medical experiment over 20 years earlier. To find out whether LSD could be used as a weapon, the army fed him large doses. The after-effects destroyed his military career and his marriage. But in a five-four decision, the highest court of the best known constitutional democracy ruled that civil rights did not apply to soldiers. Though I hope there will never be a test case, I’m fairly confident that the Israeli Supreme Court - more sensitive to the precedent of Nazi medical experiments - would have made the opposite ruling. As we wrote up the news story, it seemed to me that a constitution might be worth less than the paper it is written on: Before it was written, that paper could still have been used for a grocery list.

Without a constitution, the Israeli Supreme Court daringly created the right to a free press in the 1953 Kol Ha’am case. As Yedidia Stern pointed out, in Israel someone can still be jailed by administrative order - and thousands of people, mostly Palestinians, have been imprisoned that way. I’d find that argument convincing were it not for Guantánamo today and Executive Order 9066 , under which 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry were jailed without trial in the US during World War II.

Still, Stern had one very powerful argument: Liberal Israelis have largely put their faith in the Supreme Court to protect civil liberties. But the attacks on the Court have become much stronger. In part, I’d argue, that’s because former chief justice Aharon Barak spoke loudly and carried a small stick: He vociferously promoted the Court’s powers, especially its ‘constitutional’ authority to overturn laws. In practice, the Barak Court was usually timid on the critical issues of human rights in the occupied territories and of state-established religion. If Barak had done things the other way around, he might have accomplished more and produced fewer enemies.

The greatest enemy of the Court - and therefore of civil liberties - is the current minister of (in)justice, Daniel Friedman. In the past Friedman has sought legislation that would bar the Supreme Court from dealing with budgetary or security matters. Last week the Court heard a suit against the Citizenship Law, which blocks the path to citizenship for a Palestinian who marries an Israeli citizen. Though purportedly aimed at protecting security, the law’s real point is ‘demographic’ - to prevent an increase in the number of Arab citizens of Israel. Two years ago, the Court barely refrained from overturning a previous version of the law. Afraid that the Court might finally intervene, Friedman’s solution is to propose that citizenship matters be placed outside the justices’ purview.

So perhaps a written constitution, with a written bill of rights, would protect us. Still, I have qualms. Any constitution that could win a wide majority in the Knesset today would be likely to contain compromises that would enshrine current injustices. In the past, I recall, there’s been discussion of winning the approval of religious parties by protecting state-established religion. Can a constitution be anti-democratic? Well, yes. The US constitution includes the anti-democratic electoral college and the Senate. Both institutions were born of late-eighteenth century political compromises, and today insure that residents of Alaska have far more power than residents of California.

As we walked out, I questioned Stern about the religion and state issue. Since it was Shabbat, I wasn’t taking notes. Any inaccuracies here are my fault. But as I understood his suggestion, he proposes that the realm of religion and state simply be left out of an Israeli constitution. For the moment, that would prevent the Supreme Court from intervening in the gross injustices of the rabbinic courts. But it would also prevent enshrining those injustices in a constitution. We’ll all be free to keep fighting. I’m not entirely convinced, but I’m considering the idea that three-quarters of a constitution might be worth more than a whole one, or none at all.

What could Israel look like in 20 years, if we do things right? My article looking forward is now online at the National Post in Canada:

In Israel, 2028, Ibrahim Abdullah Hapalit is the reigning literary star. His first novel, Sinai, is based on his childhood escape from Darfur, across Egypt and the Sinai desert to the promised land. The last chapter, "Light," describes his parents’ ambivalence when he asked to light a Hanukkah menorah so he could be like the other children in his school. Critics rave over Hapalit’s Hebrew, built out of Biblical language and the Chinese-West African slang of south Tel Aviv’s immigrant alleys.

In Israel in the summer of 2028, no visitor to Jerusalem would skip outdoor Friday night services on the promenade overlooking the Old City from the south. Dozens of congregations meet there, a grand bazaar of Jewish religious styles. Rabbi Sarit Avihai, who invented a mesmerizing manner of chanting psalms after staying in a Himalayan ashram, has the largest following among young Israelis looking for a new way to be Jewish.

As for politics, the government is teetering as usual. The Populist Union, a Jewish-Arab party, is threatening to bolt the ruling coalition unless the budget includes more job programs for poor Galilee towns. In a Knesset debate, party leader Abd al-Karim Jubareen cleverly bolstered his case by citing the writings on charity of the great medieval Jewish sage of Egypt, Moses Maimonides, known in Arabic as Mussa bin Maimon.

Read the whole article here .