Sticking Together: The Israeli Experiment in Pluralism

Transcript

MR. E.J. DIONNE, JR: I am very honored that Bob Litan asked me to moderate this event today. This is a fascinating book and we have a wonderful group of people to discuss it.

The book, as some of you know already, is a wide-ranging discussion. It was written by Bob Litan, our Vice President and Director of Economic Studies and Yaakov Kop, the Director of the Center for Social Policy Studies in Israel.

The authors had three main purposes in writing this book. The first was to explain to non-Israeli audiences who see Israel primarily through the prism of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the successes and the challenges of the pluralistic model in Israel.

Their second purpose was to argue that although Israelis have been successful under extraordinary challenges in holding their society together so far, they will need to do much more in the future, and that will be the main topic that Yaakov Kop will address.

The third was to extract lessons from Israel for other pluralistic societies, notably the United States, the subject Bob Litan will address.

The authors, and I'm going to do this for them, I suspect they'll do it themselves as well. They want to stress that they do not address in this book how to solve the current Israeli-Palestinian dispute. That, as they say, was beyond the scope of this project. It seems to be beyond the scope of a lot of people at the moment.

Nonetheless, they believe that there is a hidden story about pluralism in Israel that needs to be told.

We'll start the day with short summaries of the book who's tape proofs I think you have already. The real book is coming out on Monday. But we held the event now because we wanted Yaakov who has come all the way from Israel to be able to be with us and we're very grateful that he's here.

Afterwards there will be short commentaries on different aspects of the book from our four distinguished panelists. Amitai Etzioni of George Washington University, the father and godfather of the communitarian movement in America and someone who is very knowledgeable about both Israel and the United States.

Martin Indyk a Senior Fellow here at Brookings, a former Ambassador to Israel and a former Assistant Secretary of State.

Paul Glastris, the Editor of the Washington Monthly whom I suspect has a particular interest in some of the national service aspects of this. Paul has written widely and thoughtfully on that subject.

And Doris Meissner of the Carnegie Endowment and the former Commissioner of the INS.

Once we finish with these presentations we will open it up for discussion and we urge all of you to participate.

We will begin with Yaakov. Welcome, and thank you for coming.

MR. YAAKOV KOP: Good morning.

I would like to use this occasion also to pay tribute to the memory of Joe Pechman who I'm sure would have loved very much to see the fruits of cooperation of our two institutions.

Joe Pechman was very helpful in funding this Center for Social Policies study by JDC, the American Joint Distribution Committee under the presidency of Henry Taub who is now also Chairman of the Board of the Center for Social Policy Studies and [Rob Bowman] who was Vice President at the time, so it's good to see that there are very good fruits of the cooperation that started between Brookings and the Center for Social Policy Studies.

I would like to say a few words about the connection. My connection with Brookings started 30 years ago when I spent a year assisting Joe Pechman in his tax project and with other friends, some of them are here, (unintelligible) and others.

I think that in a way this was the beginning of what came out of the book. Bob was also in the same tax project a little later on.

I am also glad there are many friends and partners here in the audience including JDC staff and board members and chairman of the board Jonathan [Corker] and there are many other people that I know around I see here. I really thank you all for coming, and more than that for being so helpful and enabling what we are doing. So this is what I wanted to say in the beginning.

Now to the book. The book in general as was already mentioned, is a picture of a very complex society which suffers from rather deep divisions. We deal in the book with four major divisions that are relevant for this matter of pluralism in Israel.

The first is, and foremost is the place between Jews and Arabs. This will get proper attention in the discussion. Within the Jewish population, the majority, one may observe at least several groups or several division lines between natives and immigrants, one group. [Haskinazim and Safadim]. [Haskinazim] means people that came originally from European and American countries. And the [Safadim] came mostly from the Middle East or North Africa.

Another split exists between religious and secular. Whereas this is not an ethnic matter, you will see later that it is very relevant for what we are talking about, pluralism and coalition in the society.

Actually when you look at the Israel population, there are roughly six million citizens. There are about a little more than a million Arabs, close to a million Jews who came from Russia over the last decade, about two million, more than two million Safadim and a little less than two million Haskinazim, and to that we have to add that each of the last two groups is divided very strongly between those who are religious and non-religious, with societal, political and other implications for society and for the topic of the book that we are dealing with.

But despite this complex picture, the bottom line of the book is that Israel represents a vital pluralistic society under detrimental conditions, the first of which is of course that there was a vulnerable starting point. The state came out of an independence war, a very severe one. The second, we are talking about a highly diversified population with four or five major ethnic groups with no dominant center, and this is something new that deserves some attention. And the third is, of course, one cannot ignore an ongoing national security threat with waves of terror and all-out war.

The net evaluation that was mentioned about that it is a vital pluralistic society, is not just under these three constraints that I've just mentioned. I want to make it clear that even without this, it can be considered as a success, and in order to do so let me demonstrate it by posing the following hypothetical scenario.

It is given that Israel started with 800,000 people in the beginning. Okay, for the scenario let us assume that they are all Jewish, to make it simple.

Second, Israel has grown with immigrants three times its original size. Again, for the scenario's sake, let us assume that all are from the same country of origin, which will make it more simple.

The third one is that with a few exceptions both natives and immigrants are very poor, lacking even basic means of a modern society.

So under these circumstances, again you can see a net [poverty] picture. Yet this sort of positive net balance hides very negative, very prominent negative side.

The one that is very prominent among others in dealing with this quite extensively in the book is that there is a large and growing economic and social gap which correlates with ethnic divide. I emphasize the correlation between the two is very important in this respect because it is bad that they (unintelligible) anyway, as far as they are, I mean as big as they are, as wide as they are. But it more so when you take into account that there is a tendency to overlap between the ethnic dividing lines and the being up and down in the social scale.

The second problem that we observed is the weakening of major central institutions, especially threats on the supreme court which plays a major role, has been playing a major role over time in maintaining an enlightened democratic society. And recently we see also for political reasons some interference with a higher education which Israel was quite proud about it all along.

The third problem that we observed is there is a deterioration of the government's ability to implement vigorous economic and social policy and this is because there is a shaky coalition which all forces pull to all directions and I cannot imagine that these days we can expect something that is like what we [experienced] in 1985. If some of you are knowledgeable about the (unintelligible) inflation it's about 500 percent per year, and we got out of it due to a strict stabilization program which called for wage freeze and other things like that which needed, of course, a large and some consensus between the labor union and others. I don't see that we have a possibility to do something like that currently.

So this is problematic as it is, but in addition to this looking at the challenges ahead we are concerned with the weakening of major mechanisms that we'll use to hold this society together as we outlined in the book. We mention there at least four major mechanisms. One was the language, the language, the Hebrew that became standard in the country. Second is universal national service, military service. Third is an absorption policy. And fourth is the welfare and education system which tries at least at reducing these gaps that I mentioned before.

So I do not want to go too much into the details of it, but we have to be aware that in recent times it has changed quite a lot and all the four of them, the language has become less so universal because of immigration from Russia when there was a significant number of them, a million people coming here within a short period of time that can do and manage without using this language. Universal national service in the military has deteriorated very much. I mean the (unintelligible) of it is much less than was in the past. The absorption policy, we have a problem with foreign workers which although they are not defined in Israel as part of what we call immigration, but there are people who come in and live in the country, and as long as much of it becomes a larger group then we face a larger challenge in this respect. And the last is the welfare and education system. Mainly the educational system which very hardly was taking care of at the beginning, right from the beginning. To be a unifying system is breaking down more and more and stripping down to subgroups and sub-subgroups, and this we consider again as a major challenge that we've got to face.

So we can say it was successful, we consider it successful. There is no promise that this is going to be continued. There is a hope and we hope that it will.

Thank you.

(Applause)

MR. DIONNE: I'm now going to call on Bob Litan. Those of you who know him know that it appears at least to me that while the rest of us are sleeping, Bob is writing new books. Bob can sort of move sort of rapidly from explaining the intricacies of the Microsoft antitrust case to the sociology of Israel, so I suspect he's already working on books on the colonization of outer space, the economics of soap operas, the sociology of football. There's no subject Bob has not and cannot write about.

Bob, welcome and thank you.

MR. ROBERT E. LITAN: Thank you.

Look, this was all made possible by the internet, because I basically wrote this book over a couple of years with Yaakov and the internet makes it possible to write about all these things.

I just want to say a couple of things about Israel and then segue into the United States. The main message of the Israel part of the book as Yaakov said, is that Israel has been remarkably successful in holding a society together which is highly diverse, but that it faces a whole host of new challenges and it's going to have to do even more in the future. And we have some very controversial suggestions in the book about what Israel should do, especially dealing with the religious and the secular divide.

A couple of people on the panel have read earlier drafts of the book, and I invite them to discuss some of these more controversial elements. Because frankly, they may not be politically feasible, but they may be no more infeasible than solving the Palestinian-Israeli dispute. But the fact is that the issues confronting the secular and the religious divide, as just one example, are very very tough and eventually they're going to have to be dealt with if Israel wants to stay together. That's my personal view, and I think we have some of that in the book.

Now what about the United States and other societies? What relevance does the Israeli experience have for us?

Well, as it turns out by total coincidence there's an article today in the Washington Post—

MR. DIONNE: Which he planted.

MR. LITAN: It wasn't planted, E.J. It's on page A-5, and it's this little article at the bottom saying "foreign-born Americans' number on the rise". And Doris knows all about this because she had to monitor how many of these people are let in.

It turns out that 20 percent of Americans either are immigrants or their parents were immigrants. That number is lower than 100 years ago, it's a number that's been steadily going up and in the future will continue to go up. And it's well known that our society is well on its way toward being a highly diverse society.

So the question is how do you hold an increasingly diverse society together? And we look to Israel in this book as sort of one model. Admittedly it may be an extreme model because there are very unique circumstances Israel has. It obviously faces an enemy or a series of enemies. It's got a population within Israel, the Arabs, that may not share and often do not share the aspirations of the majority of the country. So that Israel in some sense obviously is unique, but nonetheless the institutions that Yaakov talked about?the military, a common language, social welfare institutions, and an immigrant absorption policy?all of these devices have been used in Israel rather successfully to keep the society together. So therefore, we have some speculations in our concluding chapter about what the United States could and should do if it wanted to follow some of the lessons from Israel.

Now you could take one view, by the way, that there is no need for America to do any more. Amitai, for example, has written very persuasively that there has been evidence of increased racial tolerance in the United States over the last decade. There's more intermarriage in the United States and that acts as sort of a glue. And then just as we were finishing this book along comes September 11th and we've had this resurgence of national pride and national unity that is actually for all of us in this audience we know rather remarkable.

But one question to ask is—can this last? Can this euphoria of national unity last in the face of an assault of greater adversity? And I think you can answer this question by saying it may or may not last, but maybe you'd want to have a social insurance policy, take some steps to make sure that we're still sticking together, so to speak, if this euphoria does wear off. So here are a couple of suggestions and then I will quit.

One idea. If you look to Israel, they've got a common language. Could we in the United States do more to promote the use of English? We answer yes. We suggest there ought to be more monetary incentives and help for immigrants to learn English— especially parents of immigrants because as we all know, kids adapt very easily but it's their parents often who are not well plugged into the mainstream.

There's probably more we can do for English. We can follow the California example which is very controversial which got rid of bilingual education in K-12. Well, if you believe that language is important as a device of social glue, you'll applaud what they're doing in California, even though it's controversial.

Something else that I think would be a positive step. We have a very unfair policy in this country of treating graduates of high schools who are immigrants, who came in, let's say their parents came in illegally, we charge them foreign tuition, the tuition that we would charge any foreign student. And this has the effect of in effect punishing these kids who were raised in our educational system, and it makes it very, very difficult for them to blend into society. We suggest that policy be changed, and even if you're a kid who belongs to an immigrant family who may have come here illegally, we suggest, and of course the kids now are naturals, we suggest that the kids pay in-state tuition.

Second. What about universal service? We wrote the initial draft of this book of course in the absence of September 11th happening and we argued that on the strength of the Israeli experience we ought to seriously consider compulsory service in the United States. Compulsory. And when I say service, I do not necessarily mean military service, but that people would have a choice between civilian or military service. We recommend the same thing for Israel, by the way. We suggest that one way to solve the [Heradim] problem, the very Orthodox Jews, many of whom do not serve in the military, one way to solve the problem in Israel is to offer the [Heradim] the alternative of doing civilian service in Israel.

Well in the United States can you imagine a model where we have universal service but have a choice? And the main argument for doing this, frankly, is to promote social cohesion.

Kids increasingly do not have interaction with, there's not a lot of white/black interaction in a lot of our schools. Not a lot of interaction between immigrants and natives. We have a society that is increasingly fracturing. Can we view universal service as a way at least of having one year in students' lives where they are basically forced to live and work with other children from other backgrounds as a way to build a foundation for their future so that we have some element of commonality that we do not now have?

Now what's interesting is that September 11th, since September 11th, we now have the Bush Administration calling for an expanded form of voluntary service. We have Senator McCane, Senator Bayh and other senators who have talked about this, and I think this personally is a step in the right direction. But if you buy into the social cohesion justification for service, you really say that that's not enough. That we ought to consider compulsory service. I know it's controversial. We talk about the arguments in the book against it. But nonetheless it's an interesting example or interesting lesson to draw from the Israeli experience.

The final point I will raise, there is something in Israel that provides a caution light or a yellow light for those of us in the United States who are considering faith-based initiatives.

My personal view before I started working on this book was that I was reasonably welcoming towards faith-based initiatives, primarily on efficiency grounds. On the theory that maybe it's true that church-based groups can be more effective in delivering social services. Then I got started doing research with Yaakov and started learning about the Israeli experience, and you see in Israel that you've got basically social service organizations built around either Muslim organizations or highly religious Jewish organizations that while they may be delivering services to people and being very effective, they're contributing to a fracturing society in Israel. So the only lesson that I would draw and that we both draw from Israel is that maybe America before it travels too far down the road to mixing church and state on the faith-based initiative front, that we look to Israel and we say to ourselves maybe we shouldn't go too far down that road. If you're worried about maintaining social cohesion in the future.

Thank you.

MR. DIONNE: Thank you very much.

Yaakov wanted to—

MR. KOP: I forgot to, I intended to welcome especially my dear friends (unintelligible).

(Applause)

MR. DIONNE: Thank you.

As you can tell, Bob is not afraid of stirring controversy. I think there's an idea there to offend almost every wing—

MR. LITAN: Absolutely.

MR. DIONNE: —in American policy. (Laughter)

We were talking about compulsory service and the problem that say 18 year olds might resent it if middle aged people imposed service on them. So then we thought well maybe this is?I don't want to stick Bob with this idea because it would kill the whole concept. Maybe senior citizens should also be required to do service as a condition for receiving Social Security. Then the whole idea would surely blow up entirely. But it's an interesting problem.

We have another [polymap] with us who keeps Bob's hours, writes as many books as Bob does. He's an expert on both philosophy and public policy. Amitai, it's very good to have you with us.

MR. AMITAI ETZIONI: Thank you, E.J.

I would like to start by congratulating the authors and Brookings on issuing this book. It has numerous merits. First of all, it gets us away from thinking only about the horrible news of bloodshed and killing and gets us to see that there are other issues which need attention.

It's also raised a lot of issues. My strongest serious recommendation is that we make special effort to have it translated to Japanese, French, Danish, German, and whatever language they speak in Australia and New Zealand. (Laughter) As I proceed I'll show why this book speaks even more to issues they face than we face, but it speaks to all of us.

Before, a sensitive point. I just want to talk about one kind of technical point for those of you interested in measurement. One of the great merits of the book is that it avoids the fallacy of looking for perfection. Israel is especially attractive to people who like to project their best dreams on some other countries. It's always easier to think everybody in Israel should pray and everybody should be loving and there should be no racial differences. The kind of things we like to have at home but find it difficult to really impose them on each other. We project them. It used to be I think Yugoslavia at one point used to be our idealist country. Cuba had its turn and the Soviet Union, of course. The book avoids that pitfall by not looking for perfection but measuring things as compared to something else.

So instead of talking about 100 percent intermarriage, it points out there is higher intermarriage than it used to be, higher intermarriage than in many other countries. It gives you a much more realistic way of thinking about these things as distinct from comparing it to our fondest dreams.

Just to push this point quickly and move on, I am not a great expert on these light bulbs, but I understood that they are terribly wasteful. Most of the energy that goes into them is wasted. It doesn't create light. It creates heat. So if you're (unintelligible) with the perfection model, they're all horrible. They're all 80 percent heat or more is wasted. So if you start it where you're going to condemn them all. But a more sensible approach is to ask which one is more efficient than the others. So I think the book methodologically is very sound by taking the second approach.

Now as to the model which we can (unintelligible), the book tries to derive from Israel and apply to other countries, (unintelligible) pluralism. I have a particular interest in it and I'd like to explain quickly why as I move to close.

As some of you may tell from my accent but not from my name, I'm not Italian. I wish I would be, but I just wasn't qualified. I was born in Germany, a Jewish kid, and chased out by the Nazis and ended up by fighting in Israel, the Israel War of Independence, then moving to the United States. So I have a special sensitivity to fascists and antisemitism and a general hatred of foreigners.

Over the last years, every time I go to Europe I see a startling wave of hate of immigrants. It's really 55 percent of Europeans on a survey will tell to a pollster they never met that they hate immigrants and would like them to be sent home, and these are only the ones that will openly talk about it.

A German leader just called me a few weeks ago, why do we have to be a country of 80 million? Let's ship all these people home and be 60 million. And so on and so on. Finally, the Danes [turned righteous and really] got my attention. I associate the Danes with the ultimate, loving, pastoral country. So I thought something should be done about it.

We go then to the question the book writes so well. What is the image of a pluralistic society? People talk about it as a melting pot which is I think a little old fashioned idea, of course. Everything has to be measured down and actually advice written about the United States is a [pastry] mover. They move in all colors and that's not exactly what we I think aspire to today. Some people talk about jazz in which there are a mixture of all kind of discordant voices. I'm not sure that will do it.

Anyhow, the image I think we should be using is one, and not (unintelligible) a Canadian, is a mosaic. A mosaic has different pieces, different size, shape and color which makes it more beautiful than if they all would be white and the same size, but also the framework and the glue which holds the pieces together.

So my term for that is the diversity in unity. So we sought out certain things we all have to share and other things in which diversity is welcome. Exactly what Europeans find it difficult to consider because for instance the Germans say quite openly, they're a christian nation. They are not an immigrant nation. We don't want Muslim prayers, etc.

So this discussion, what belongs into the shared framework and what not only should tolerate but are richer for it when it's diversified. I think that's the underlying issue which the book [does] extremely well and we have to bring to other countries.

So specifically it should run to each just one sentence. About the shared military compulsory service. I love when economists talk about ideas without putting a price tag on it. That's usually what sociologists do. So I figure (unintelligible), I'm sure Paul is going to explain it in more detail. My figure is about $50 billion a year, for (unintelligible). I think the economy (unintelligible) for 30 seconds as another way of spending $50 billion.

Also our experience at AmeriCorps is that sadly that you take people from different backgrounds and throw them on the other side of the mountain, it doesn't necessarily integrate. It takes a lot to get people to integrate. So I would prefer the voluntary service.

I also must quickly add from my stint in Israel, they used to fly the high school kids to the Negev to see how tomatoes grow and they can take barrels and cut them in half and put a net on it and put water into it and the tomatoes grow in the desert. It's a wonderful sight to behold. But the kids had nothing to do there so they just spent the whole day look at those barrels and go home. And they were very frustrated and alienated.

To take millions of people into service requires a huge infrastructure to give them something to do and we are not quite there yet.

The language, I couldn't agree more. And by the way, I think this is basically a settled issue in the United States that English is the first language. The problem with immigrants is they are dying to learn English. There is just not enough opportunity. So the idea of giving more opportunity to teach English I think is very much part of the shared framework. I don't think it's terribly controversial.

Education is an impressive question. The Europeans are now going in the direction of having separate schools for Muslim children and actually in many places separate schools for Jewish children. That does not fit the diversity within unity model because it means segregation, social and education segregation.

In the Israeli model it's really tied, with the exception of the [Shira] to have everybody get the same basic education. and then allow some diversity within it, more or less religious training. Israel a good model, and the problem we had with the (unintelligible) where we allowed them an exception is probably not the way to go.

Intermarriage, again, extremely high in the United States. Most people know the third generation of Asian Americans and Latino Americans, intermarriage is 45 percent. So soon we will be all like Tiger Woods. We'll have, you know, who comes to dinner today? Everybody can imagine. Marriage is the most intimate connection, obviously. It's much higher than studying together or serving together or working together, and there can be no better sign how much a society is integrated when you have that high levels of intermarriage.

I could go on and on, but slightly more optimistic, maybe it just is my nature or maybe being away from Israel too long. But I think it is exactly the right questions. These are the perfect list of the institutions and we have to look at, we have to examine do they promote unity sufficiently, is there too much diversity? And the question has to be applied not just to the United States but to other countries as long as we don't aspire to mushing everything together and eliminating all differences. Recognize that which we can all share and the areas in which diversity is enriching us from music to cuisine to prayer.

So thank you very much.

MR. DIONNE: Thank you.

Amitai just showed he is expert on matters I never knew he was an expert on. Light bulbs, tomatoes, jazz. Thank you very much.

Paul Glastris is the Editor of the Washington Monthly which is a magazine which has had a greater commitment to the idea of service than almost any publication in the country, and has written a lot over the years about this issue of social cohesion. Paul, it's very good of you to join us.

MR. PAUL GLASTRIS: Thank you. Thank you very much.

I too want to join my friend Amitai in commending the book. What I read of it is penetrating and very balanced and audacious and I look forward to finishing it.

MR. DIONNE: He's honest, too. (Laughter)

MR. GLASTRIS: I thank you all for inviting me. I feel a little bit out of my depth in that I have zero expertise on Israel, only what I read in the papers. And we read today in the New York Times a wonderful fun story about conscripts from the Israeli military finishing their service and whooping it up on the beaches of Goa in India. They certainly looked like they needed a rest, but they didn't also seem like they were the worse for the wear, perhaps better for it. And I like to think that the same could be true in America were we to have universal service.

I think the argument that Bob makes for universal service as one of social cohesion was absolutely true prior to September 11th and was reason enough for universal service. Since September 11th we have a whole new level of argument for national service and that is we desperately need it. There was lots of talk in the early days after the events of September 11th of phones ringing off the hook in military recruitment offices. But as it happens, there's been very little net increase in military recruitment, so clearly we're going to need more and better men and women in uniform, and alas the quality of many of our recruits since the end of the Cold War has diminished and it's a difficult thing to talk about, but it's alas, from all I can gather, true.

In addition we now have a massive homeland security responsibility in addition to 28,000 new federal workers, many of them in uniform patrolling airports. We're going to need more customs agents, more INS agents, more FBI agents, more border patrol. We're going to need guards for nuclear power plants and other infrastructure, for sporting events. No one has yet, as far as I know, put a figure on how many men and women we're going to need who will do the somewhat boring work of standing guard duty with alertness but being willing at some point to put their lives at risk. It will certainly be in the tens if not hundreds of thousands and it will have to go on for years.

Now there is just a limited pool of people who will willingly do this work, even for the substantial wages that I hope that we'll pay but fear we won't. If we want quality people to do it and we don't want to rob our police forces and our fire departments etc., then we have to think that we have a manpower and a womanpower crisis coming, and to think we can do this wholly voluntarily, we may want to believe that but we may be kidding ourselves.

Bob mentioned, others have mentioned the idea that in Israel a way to get over the problem of the leaks and holes in universal service was to add an element of choice. To say that for those who simply have objections to military service that there is civilian service.

Actually in Germany that's how they have one of the few countries that has kept universal service, that's what they do. About half of young men, only men in Germany serve, serve in what they call a conscientious objector role. Many of those, by the way, wind up being a form of homeland security. But it's really national service. It's working in hospitals and nursing homes and so forth. The German, so I'm told, healthcare system has really come to depend on the efforts of young people.

So one can imagine in the United States a similar sort of three-tiered compulsory national service program whereby men and women are drafted— not necessarily all. A lottery system that was fair, that did not offer college deferment as the current selective service rules do not allow— would also do. But one can imagine a three-tiered system where you can choose active military service and by that we can imagine a lot of people serving in peacekeeping roles in Kosovo, in Bosnia, very possibly in Afghanistan. We've seen that with a modest amount of training most recruits can serve very well in SP roles.

Or homeland security, toting a rifle in front of a nuclear power plant or wherever. Or civilian service in the form that Americorps normally takes, helping to build low income housing, tutor, mentor and so forth.

Amitai came up with a brilliant suggestion the other day which I would love to see implemented. That is there is this vast pool of especially older immigrants who don't know English but would like to. What better use for national service than to put young people to work teaching immigrants English? It's something that you can actually see the progress of and finish off in the course of a year or two. And come away with it— There's so much in social service work where you don't necessarily feel you're making any progress with families that have multiple problems. But this is one where there's a fixed time and a beautiful sense of progress. And who among us wouldn't enjoy and be proud of such an effort?

Finally on the compulsory versus voluntary point, Americans have a deep sense of fairness, as all people do but especially Americans, and I think one of the things that one comes away with from talking with those who lived through the '50s, the Cold War of the '50s, most of the men served during that period, a period not unlike our own when the sense of imminent, major catastrophe hung in the air, yet there was quiet at home. That people felt the system was fair. And one of the horrors to come out of the Vietnam War was the sense that the draft was not fair. That those who could get out of it did, and those who didn't have the pull didn't.

So the idea I think of compulsory service would appeal to young people today if it were fair. If it were universal. If the young person serving didn't feel like a sucker because the other fellow was advancing his career and having a good time while he was pulling guard duty.

So I guess just to sum up I think the arguments for cohesion, social cohesion are impressive and I think you add to that the vast unmet need we now have post September 11th, and we should in fact be moving to compulsory service.

MR. DIONNE: Thank you very much, Paul.

Martin Indyk has been a student of the Middle East and a diplomat. There are diplomats, as you know, who are very good at relations between states; diplomats who know countries from the inside out and the outside in; and then there are both. He's one of the both. It's very good to have him with us.

MR. MARTIN INDYK: Thank you, E.J.

Actually, I have the opposite problem of Paul in that I know basically nothing about social policy except how to pronounce Amitai's name. (Laughter) But I have the good fortune to know something about Israel, having been Ambassador there twice and having spent a lot of time in the country and studying it and how to resolve its conflict with the Arabs.

From my perspective, I was asked to read and comment on this book about two weeks after I left my post in Israel after the most intense time you could possibly imagine during a year and a half of the Intafada. And I wasn't exactly relishing the idea of spending my summer break reading another book on Israel. But I have to say that I enjoyed it immensely, partly because as Yaakov and Bob have said, it looks at another side of Israel and does so in a very interesting way and I think a very fair and effective way in terms of its discussion and analysis of what the book calls the schisms in Israeli society.

In the process it conjured up this experience I had almost daily in Israel which really underscores I think a main theme of the book which is that Israel in many ways is a kind of laboratory or microcosm for this experiment in pluralism, even though it's very different from our own experience here in the United States.

My daily experience was to go down to the beach at [Thesalia] where the embassy residence is and expound on the beach. At any one time you could experience the Israeli pluralist experiment on display. I would often walk past a Russian chamber ensemble playing there on the promenade. Used to be six, seven, eight years ago when the Russians first came to Israel and the joke used to be that the one that got off the plane without a musical instrument was the pianist. (Laughter) They used to hang out in the street trying to earn some extra money by playing. Now they were just playing for the sheer pleasure of it and the entertainment of their fellow Israelis.

Then you go down onto the beach and start jogging, you come across a platoon of Israeli soldiers, new recruits, and there you would see Ethiopians running, jogging along the beach in formation with Russians and Hevarti Jews from, their parents came from Morocco and so on. There was the perfect example of the kind of integrated role of the Israeli military with its compulsory service.

Then inevitably you would see an incredible array of people who had clearly come from all corners of the globe, and yet engaging in that typical Israeli past time of exercising in a very Israeli way which is you would walk along the beach at a fairly slow pace and exercise your arms and your tongue. (Laughter) This is kind of the national pastime.

But it did underscore the point that I think the book makes well which is that the Israeli experiment Israel is a very successful experiment in absorption and integration and in many ways a very interesting model of pluralism at work.

Having said that, my experience there was one in which the schisms that Bob and Yaakov talk about were very much on display before the Intafada broke out. This was the period in which Israel was looking to making peace with its neighbors. It's economy was booming. And it was going through a period in which there was much less a sense of external threat, and therefore much greater freedom for the differences to express themselves. And they were very much on display in a very worrying way.

The splits between Jews and Arabs, between rich and poor, between secular and religious, were rising in a way that raised real questions about how was the system going to cope with this.

I think the book does a very good job of sounding a warning signal about the way in which the mechanism for absorbing and dealing with these schisms are under challenge now and need to be updated in a way that can deal with it.

Then came the Intafada and all of those schisms were submerged again as people faced a national crisis. Here too the book I think does a very useful service in terms of highlighting the kinds of things we can learn from Israel and the kinds of things that Israel can learn from us.

In this particular case, we now are a nation in crisis like Israel. As Bob has suggested, the issue of social cohesion seems at least to be less important these days than it was before September 11th and that certainly was the case in Israel after the Intafada broke out again in October of 2000.

However, after a year and a half of this intense national crisis in Israel we see that the schisms were only really papered over, and of course they still exist. But the crisis itself is exacerbating these problems. Exacerbating them in the following sense. The crisis was accompanied by an economic recession, as it is in this country. That of course exacerbates the gap between rich and poor. Unemployment now in Israel is I think 12 percent—

MR. KOP: No, 10.

MR. INDYK: Ten percent. Expected to rise to 12 percent?

MR. KOP: No.

MR. INDYK: And the kinds of social problems that are generated by that particularly in development now as the book highlights. It's going to be more of a problem.

Secondly, the government is preoccupied with national security issues and is really unable to focus on dealing with these schisms, and that has I think raised an additional problem.

And of course thirdly there is an exacerbation of the Jewish/Arab schism within Israel that the book also focuses on. And here too, again, we can see the parallels in the way in which the crisis here has the potential to create tension, it has created tensions between sectors of our own society, particularly the Arab-American community, and in a sense the rest of society because of the kinds of things that they are going through as a result of increased security. The kind of things that Israeli-Arabs have experienced for many decades but have become particularly problematic in these circumstances.

So I think the book does a great service at this time in which both countries are going through a national crisis, by highlighting the kinds of problems and the kinds of solutions that are out there that we can learn from Israel's experience.

So I congratulate the authors and I commend the book to you. Thank you.

MR. DIONNE: Thank you very much.

Now we're going to call on Doris Meissner. Imagine how thick a skin you have to have to do the job she stepped out of. Imagine you were invited to become Director of Stockholder Relations at Enron tomorrow morning. (Laughter) I'm only comparing the grief you get, not the agency to Enron.

You are constantly attacked for letting too many illegal immigrants into the country except on days when you are attacked for mistreating illegal or legal immigrants trying to come into the country, and yet as you can see she has prospered and doing quite well after this long experience.

It's very good to have you with us. Thank you.

MS. DORIS MEISSNER: Thank you very much.

This book has been very interesting for me to look at. When Bob called me and asked me to be here and comment on this my first reaction was you must have the wrong number because from the point or view of the immigration field and within the immigration community and among immigration professionals, you just don't talk about Israeli immigration in the same set of discussions as the immigration countries that view themselves to be classic immigration countries do. And those, of course, are the United States, Canada and Australia. And increasingly, those of us who look at these things internationally and cross societally talk about European countries, which of course do not define themselves at all as immigration countries but are being forced as Amitai explained to deal with issues of immigration and they are kicking and screaming every step of the way.

And the reason of course that Israel is not typically part of that mix is because obviously of the reason that people who come to Israel come primarily because of the connection with Jewishness and because they come through the law of return and they are instantly citizens. So it is a very different model.

But what this book does is just flip that on its head and say that all those things of course are true. But set them aside, the fundamental issues that the society has to deal with are very similar and we should be talking about it that way and looking at it that way. And that's very interesting. That's an interesting vantage point because typically the United States as the largest immigration country is looked to to provide lessons and lay out lessons and this goes exactly the opposite way around. What are the lessons that can come to us? So it's refreshing. It's a novel, original way of looking at things which then illuminates some issues in important ways.

The basic approach, of course, that Israel has taken is this very explicit notion of an absorption model and of a conscious effort that is a society-wide effort heavily supported by state resources and articulated policy for absorption. That is entirely different, of course, from the way the United States has handled the issues of immigration once people are here. But there is a similarity to some extent in the way that we handle a part of our immigration and that is the part of our immigration that involves refugees.

We basically bring people to the United States in three groups—as refugees fleeing persecution; as family immigrants, people that have family ties here, that's by far the largest group of immigrants; and then people who are meeting labor market needs who bring particular skills. That's the smallest group.

But where refugees are concerned, although we don't call it an absorption model we actually do have an absorption model in that we do put substantial federal dollars and resources and make an effort to give people transition support until they can take care of themselves. And that's precisely because basically there is no other set of institutions in the society to take care of them. In the case of people who come as family members, they have a family base. And in the case of people who come here to meet labor market needs, they have an employer connection. So it's refugees that need the other kind of help.

It's interesting I think to extrapolate a little bit from that refugee experience what may or may not fit given what you're looking at with Israel.

First of all it is very important, it has turned out to be very important in the refugee model, what the human capital of the people themselves are that come here. The best example of that is the Cuban refugee movement in the 1960s and '70s where you had probably the richest variety of federal assistance to any refugee group that's come to the United States, and that of course was for ideological reasons. But the fact is that an awful lot of support was given to those people to help them integrate. But that was combined with a human capital phenomenon that was extraordinary. And you basically had the middle class and the upper middle class and the entrepreneurial class of Cuba that came here and created south Florida and created Miami as an international capital. Before that it was a poopy vacation outlet.

So this notion of the level of education and the level of skills that people bring with them is very important I think in an absorption model and I didn't see very much of that really talked about in the book and I think it's a factor.

But at the same time the refugee model also tells us that if you don't have that kind of human capital and you give people a fair amount of assistance when they first get here, you can inadvertently create a heavy dependency mentality, and that has happened to us as well. Probably the most vivid example of that is the Lao tribesmen and some of the Cambodians that we brought in the '70s and '80s who had in many cases no education whatsoever, some even not from literate societies where there was even a written language, only a spoken language. And even with an incredible amount of social support and language and job training, etc., because that help was given fundamentally through the social welfare system, that dependency experience at the outset has basically marked the overall progress that people have made.

So there are some real nuances here that are important when you're actually thinking about it from the standpoint of what kind of social policy would you do if not what you funded, and how would you set it up, etc.?

That being said, if you set aside the refugee model and the ways in which we have done absorption that are as similar to Israel as I can think of, the overall bigger issue here that's being talked about of how do you really create what we would call integration, successful integration.

My own hobby horse on this has to do with the citizenship process and strengthening the citizenship process. Because the issue of a commonly accepted set of values once you get past the common language, speaking English, really does for the United States have to do with a fundamental belief in democratic values and in our system of government. And I think that in this country with our history and experience we can do a great deal with that in the citizenship process, in the process of people applying for citizenship and being eligible and qualified for citizenship.

What our citizenship qualifications are are both quantitative and qualitative. The quantitative ones are that you have to be here legally as a lawful permanent resident for five years, and you have to demonstrate that you haven't committed any crimes or violated some other technical requirements.

But then on the qualitative side you have to show that you can speak the language and you have to show a knowledge of civics and history. And it's very generally written into the statute, but it allows for a fairly broad interpretation. And my own sense has always been, particularly with the incredibly increased diversity that is taking place in our immigration today, that we can really focus in on making those requirements meaningful in a way that's very positive for the society. Because overall we love, as Americans, as already established Americans, we love the idea of people wanting to become citizens. That's when immigrants become very positive in our outlook. They are adopting us and they are ready to hold up that flag and that's a terrific, wonderful thing.

But their willingness to do that and their meeting a requirement to do that gives us a subtle but important opportunity as a society to deal with these questions of what are the common shared beliefs. There's an important part of that taking place now. We in the last years have done a great deal to provide the voluntary community, the non-governmental community a real role in that process and I think that can continue to be strengthened. But non-governmental organizations, faith-based, a whole range, can have a big role in helping to prepare immigrants and increasingly play a bigger and bigger role, so that's an area of real potential.

But in addition to that the government, the Immigration Service, is now struggling with a really critical and interesting question. And that is what body of knowledge should we be asking people to know? We've basically had a set of tests in the past that are pretty much, they're rote learning. There's a test of 100 questions which has things like what does the fifth amendment to the constitution say, what is the bill of rights, what are the colors of the flag, when was the constitution ratified, that sort of thing. And you get asked ten questions off a list of 100 so if you know the answers to the 100 you're going to be able to pass the test.

What's happening now is that the test is being rewritten, part of a whole overhaul of the citizenship process, and the question is being asked what do we want those new immigrants to know? What is important for them to be able to demonstrate so that we and they can feel confident that this is a meaningful process. And that's an issue that has had a variety of different answers to it.

Probably the answer where language is concerned is a sixth grade level knowledge, speaking and writing, of the English language. That seems reasonable to me, but that is a controversial question. There are some people, and I think there is a suggestion in this book, that it should be high school competency of language. That's a pretty high bar when you look at immigration [flows] that we have today. But that's a question that's open right now. And maybe the harder question is in terms of civics and knowledge of government, what does that really constitute? What are we going to test for?

There's a big contract that's out, there are wide-ranging numbers of educators that are working on this issue, but it is something that will be settled in the next year or so. It will represent quite a reform. And it's a very interesting response or phenomenon in light of what it is that you're talking about. It is something that is going on here in this country and it is very relevant to today's immigration.

Finally, let me say some things about the term social cohesion. The term social cohesion tends not to be a term that we use at least in the immigration communities discussions of immigration. We use the term integration gingerly because there has been this debate that Dr. Etzioni has referred to about melting pot, mosaic, salad bowl, all of those descriptions. And I myself prefer mosaic as well.

But I am a little worried about pressing the term social cohesion and I can't totally articulate why it worries me, sort of in light of our historical immigration experience. But I guess it worries me because it kind of has a connotation with it of a think-alike, and I don't think that's what this country is about, and I think one of the things that makes us be so successful and has made us be successful as an immigrant nation is that we really have steered away from a notion of thinking alike. We have focused, as I said earlier, on democratic values, on a commitment to a system of public values, and I think we're best sticking with that.

But regardless of what the terminology is, the overall idea of integration, of diversity, of increased pluralism is clearly a huge challenge, a huge continuing challenge for this country into the future, regardless of what our successes have been in the past, and in that way there obviously is very much symmetry with what it is you're talking about in this book. Because we do have historically high levels of immigration as has been demonstrated in the 2000 census, all of the reports. It isn't as high as it was at the turn of the last century but it is historically high.

It is by far the most diversified by nationality and ethnicity immigration that we have ever had in our history and is likely to continue to be so.

And a point that is made in the book glancingly, but it is extremely important, there is no breather in sight.

In the past our immigration has really been in peaks and valleys and we have had long periods of breather. In our lifetime a long period of breather was from the first world war until about the 1970s. That's a very long breather. Which gives the society a real opportunity to incorporate and integrate people. That is probably not going to be the case in the future because of globalization and because of global interdependence and all of those sorts of things.

So that's a responsibility for integrating and being sure that people are moving forward. The whole issue is upward mobility for the first generation and the second generation. I don't worry so much about the parents, frankly, and whatever you can do with language for parents is fine. But integration is really about the children and the next generation. It's about a new hope for the future. And that those children are going to face a better future than what it is that their parents faced and what their parents were willing to sacrifice for in order to ensure that better future. And that does get not so much — I don't think a special policy for immigrants at all, it gets to the core institutions, a critical one being public education, that prepares people for the society that we live in. And that is even more difficult today because we're in an information age, not in an industrial age. Whereas in the past you could basically make it into the middle class with probably less than a high school education because of strong labor unions and because of a strong industrial base that provided and allows for jobs that immigrants could take that would create the kind of income and opportunity for education for the future.

Today that's different. Today that requires at least a high school education, arguably a college education, and much better skills with which to compete. That is the great challenge that we face, and if we're not able to meet it, we see the sign of gaps, a high poverty population among immigrants, and those gaps forming straight along racial and ethnic lines which is a serious schism and a serious social problem that we need to try to avoid. And as many voices as can be heard to contribute to the need for that, the better. This book comes at it from a rather different angle, a terribly interesting angle, and is a voice that is a very important one in that debate. Thank you.

MR. DIONNE: Thank you very much

I know that Bob and Yaakov will have some responsive comments but I'd like to turn to the audience right away. You've been very patient.

I just want to put a thought in the back of your head. I don't want you to respond to this right now. But I was struck with the wonderfully diverse group of responses. Two issues sort of struck me strongly. One is Doris' mention of the law of return. I know you've thought about this and write about this, but in the Israeli case you're dealing still with a national or ethnic model. In the United States we explicitly do not have such a model, therefore how can one draw a lesson?

The second which I'd like in the back of your head is Israel has existed in a kind of state of crisis since its formation. As we learned recently from September 11th, crisis does tend to create cohesion. What does one do after the crisis? But that's for the back of your head, not the front of your head.

Q: My name is Scott Thompson with Executive Intelligence Review. I have a quite diplomatic question on pluralism.

I refer you to the January 27th issue of [Harets] where there was an article by the highly respected military correspondent [Imar Alarmed]. He said that the Israeli defense forces officers were studying Nazi strategy in that terrible war that cost so many of their kin's lives, including SS General [Stube's] report on the reduction of the Warsaw ghetto.

When I spoke to [Rhinan Gissen] who is Prime Minister Sharon's primary spokesman, he told me that this was a legitimate study on how to conduct street-by-street warfare against the Palestinian authority and he said that Israel was a democracy. Is this legitimate pluralism?

Also if anyone would care to receive a copy of Mr. Lyndon Larouche's [J'tu's Gardamerung] in Israel and the reserve officers'—

MR. DIONNE: Okay, we'll take the question —

MR. THOMPSON: —statement that they refused to serve in the occupied territories which—

MR. DIONNE: Okay,—

MR. THOMPSON: —Lieutenant General Novares called rebellion. I would be glad to give that to you.

MR. DIONNE: Does anyone want to deal with the question?

MR. KOP: ?? First of all I would say that we expressed explicitly that we want to talk about problems of the Israeli society within Israel. We are not talking about this subject that you raise.

I think the point that was made about the army person who made this comment, it was quite extensively rejected by everyone in the (unintelligible) society who can find some marginal cases like this that do not deserve a special serious discussion, which is my estimate.

Q: My name is [Baslam Medam]. I'm an Egyptian diplomat.

First of all I'd like to thank you Mr. Kop and Mr. Litan for—

MR. DIONNE: Can you speak up just a little?

MR. MEDAM: I think the book is very interesting. I read it myself. I think it's published at a very sensitive time in which these issues need to be addressed within the Israeli society.

I have a couple of questions. One of them is to follow up with what the moderator has just mentioned. Mr. Litan has just mentioned that in Chapter 4, Bridging the Divide, the main element behind the social page in our common language, education, military service, social service. But I think I would like you to comment on the argument that mentions that the main factor behind social creation is the continuous existence of the Arab-Israeli conflict. And it's mainly a threat that subtlety takes the unity of the nation and diversity of public opinion from other internal issues.

So in your own opinion, to what extent do you see the readiness of Israel's cultural and social infrastructure to absorb peace once it's achieved?

And my other question is to Ambassador Indyk. You have mentioned the issue of Israeli Arabs and the division between Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs. Taking into consideration the high increase in population across on the side of Israeli Arabs which is even higher than the Israeli Jews, how do you see the relationship between Israeli Arabs and a Palestinian state once it exists? And the effect of this relationship on Israel itself in the future.

MR. DIONNE: Thank you for those good questions.

MR. LITAN: Those are excellent questions.

The book makes a sharp distinction, and actually our commenters helped us sharpen the statements, between the Arab/Jewish split and the split among Jews themselves, and they're completely separate issues. Although there are some interrelationships. Because you have obviously people in different segments in Jewish society that have very strong views about the Arab/Jewish combination.

I think the basic thrust of our argument on Arabs and Jews, and I'd be happy to have Yaakov supplement this, is that this of course is a very difficult thing to do, especially in the current environment in the Intafada. Hopefully if that abates and there is some solution at the end, more effort is going to have to be done if Israel wants to live together with Arabs, to absorb the Arab population. That means more spending on Arab infrastructure. It may mean opportunities for Arabs to serve, for example, in civilian capacity because one of the reasons why, and you know this very well, Arabs cannot well absorb into Israeli society if they don't serve in the army, and the army is this big club in Israel that provides job connections. And if you're outside that club, you can't get integrated. This is a very controversial issue, obviously. Obviously a lot of Arabs may not wish to serve in the Israeli army. If there were an alternative vehicle—which by the way some Israelis could serve in too—you'd have more mixing of the two sectors and maybe eventually you would build some more common bridges.

Because frankly, Israel has no choice. It has a million Arab citizens and it's got to find a way to live with them.

MR. KOP: I wish the situation, the approach of Arabs in Israel to (unintelligible) of serving, national service, which I would interpret in this context is not necessarily serving anywhere in the country but serve within the Arab community which can help a lot in improving their way of life and so on.

I wish we will get to the point where everyone will do this on terms of social policy, of well being and so on, and that is aside from national identification problems, because this disturbs a lot of subjects.

There were several times experiments to bring the notion of community service within the Arab sector without even there being the government part of it. It didn't work so far. I do hope it will develop eventually. It has not been necessarily the cause that Bob just mentioned.

On (unintelligible) methods, we talk in the book about the question, the overall question whether peace will make the divisions better to improve the situation with respect to the divisions or not. I must say that it is not clear, not at all clear. In any event we do believe that there is an improvement, once there will be a better chances for upgrading the Arab society both economically and socially, it will definitely serve the goal of what they are talking in (unintelligible).

MR. DIONNE: Martin, do you want to deal with that? A reversal of the usual question, can Israeli society absorb peace? Which is I think the question that was asked.

MR. INDYK: It's going to be difficult. As the experience before the Intafada broke out demonstrated, the system was having difficulty coping with these differences (unintelligible) analyzing (unintelligible). And part of the problem I think was the political system itself which we don't have time to talk about today but it's a really, needs major political reform in and of itself in order to be able to cope better with the schisms.

But given the alternative between having peace and having to deal with the problems that then emerge when the sector of an external threat is no longer there, and having to deal with the problems that arise from having to deal with an external threat, I think the is would much prefer to have to deal with the problem of the schisms. And of course resources would be freed up and energy would be freed up, and the focus of the political establishment would be freed up to deal with those.

So I think in fact that will be exacerbated in a time of peace, but the system itself will be better able to deal with them. And I'm basically optimistic about that because I think the Israeli system has found ways very successfully in dealing with the enormous challenges of absorption over the past five decades.

I just wanted to make a comment on the comment because that's an interesting, and Bob you repeated what is conventional wisdom and basically correct, that Arabs don't serve in the Israeli army. But a very interesting phenomenon of Arab casualties in the Israeli army during this Intafada. The Israelis suddenly are opening their eyes and seeing that in fact Arabs do serve in the Israeli army.

The three Israeli soldiers who were kidnapped by Hezbollah who are probably dead, but being held in Lebanon, one of them is an Israeli Arab. And suddenly Israelis are dealing with the reality that on a regular basis the families are out there keeping the attention of the establishment on them, and one of them is an Israeli Arab family.

MR. LITAN: Are these mostly Druz families?

MR. INDYK: The bedouins.

MR. KOP: It was an Arab not a Druz in this case.

MR. LITAN: But these are people who come in voluntarily.

MR. KOP: Yes.

MR. LITAN: They volunteer.

MR. INDYK: But it just reinforces your point about the army or about service because Israelis are now coming to see Arab citizens in a different light. That they actually not only serve but they die in the defense of the nation.

MR. DIONNE: I'd like to bring in a couple more people but we're sort of coming to the end of our time. Maybe we could have two questions at the same time, and then we could—Why don't we have the three questions and then give Bob and Yaakov a chance to sort of summarize and respond to your questions.

Q: My name is Jim Peisner. I'm a visitor from New York invited by Yaakov.

I liked very much the presentation, all kinds of good things to say. It seems to me that having Israel as a point of comparison of pluralism is certainly a useful point for a primarily American audience to be able to say what prospectus could be given.

The thing which I'm missing a little bit or would invite more comment on is the kind of deeper historical and cultural differences from which people comment. You've illustrated that from the current Israel situation. It sort of goes back to Amitai Etzioni's viewpoint about where you translate it.

But I'm thinking of a couple of things that even as an economist when you talk about universal service versus voluntary, is this the economist's view in the United States, we tend to do things on the margin and not necessarily doing compulsory and universal; whereas Israel comes out of a different tradition of the more state socialism, you do impose things, it's a whole different cultural and historical setting which might permit something that's more universal than the United States cultural setting.

But shifting to a little different example, even something I agree with of more English and the questions of language, even if that promotes social cohesion and public policy here, I wonder whether it also contributes as a kind of self centered, hegemonic isolationist traditions that we have in the United States and reduces the tendency to be more open to global perspectives, other traditions, other languages, and it sort of confirms the mindset.

So my general question is to say I love it. Could there be, I hope it will open up more opportunities to look for historical examples of kinds of the topics you're talking about and also a sensitivity to the cultural differences that might make some of these suggestions appropriate or less appropriate.

Q: (unintelligible) Italia.

It was very interesting the discussion. What I did not see between the U.S. and Israel is the vision of the dream, for people to going. (unintelligible) I think also is that, but the difference is that the U.S. (unintelligible); Israel is not. So in the U.S. is a big separation with the states and religion, and I think is a big impediment for Israel, for integration (unintelligible).

Also the non-existence of (unintelligible) institution, at least, actually was created in 1948, maybe can be compared to, I don't know if you address it in the book, but the extent it really could affect the building up of a consensual pattern of social integration.

I just fear for, as an amateur, (unintelligible) Italian Air Force, I have a commission with Israel. I (unintelligible) that universal service is foreseen as a social—(unintelligible) social blender.

Actually Italy is going to get (unintelligible) in a few years. I do not really think that it really works. Especially in these days. It's a vision of a state that enforce people to be a C, to have the citizenship. I think education and investment in education would be maybe better. That's my experience. Thank you.

MR. DIONNE: Thank you very much. Lastly?

Q: My name is Mary Muller. I work with the Bosnia/Kosovo Support Committee.

I just was going to pick up on what he said about education. I was hearing it as to— I was a former teacher, and in several different countries. And I was curious as to the education system in Israel and if there is an effort to integrate and to teach within that system the values that pluralism can give to a country, the contributions each part of society can given. Also mentors. I know Jewish people, I don't know about Israelis, but they have many mentors. They've been very successful in many different areas and in many different countries. Yet I don't hear very much about Palestinians or Arab successes as much as I do Jewish successes.

Is this taught in the schools so that these children value successful participation in society and feel successful in this way?

MR. DIONNE: Thank you.

First of all, no one has an obligation to have a closing comment. Does anyone want to say anything before I turn it over to our authors?

Why don't we go in reverse order. Why don't you go Bob, and then—

MR. LITAN: Just very quickly because we've reached the end of our time. I'm just going to pick up on just one of the comments about church/state separation, the difference between Israel and the United States. You're absolutely right. One of the more controversial parts of our book which we didn't highlight in our discussions is that Israel can learn something in this regard from the United States. They have a very deep divide between secular and religious students in Israel. It causes a lot of problems in the law of return that E.J. mentioned.

We have a couple of suggestions that I'm sure will make many Israelis angry. One is, the law of return entitles anybody Jewish to come to Israel. Who defines who's Jewish? It's now done through a religious authority.

We suggest that for immigration purposes only, since that is a state function, that that ought to be transferred to the state.

Now the issue of who's Jewish for marriage and all other kinds of purposes, that can be in the religious realm. But since this is a state function, move that to the government. I'm sure that will be very controversial.

It happens to be more controversial in some ways in the United States than it is in Israel because many American Jews are offended by the strict interpretation of who is a Jew that is applied to anybody.

The second thing that is controversial. Areas of civil law—marriage, divorce and so forth— are governed by religious law in Israel. We suggest that people ought to have an option. If they want to opt for a secular law, that it ought to be that way. And that the religious law not necessarily govern everyone.

So I just pick up on that comment because while we're not saying that Israel should go all the way to the United States model, we're saying that there are ways for it to move incrementally and this would help address and ease some of the very bitter controversy you have between secular and religious wings in Israel.

MR. KOP: First of all I want to thank very much for the commenters that we have here. When I was thinking about what I heard, I felt that I have (unintelligible) points to write for myself for the next volume. (Laughter) But I remember what E.J. said, that I thought that maybe Bob has already written the— (Laughter)

MR. LITAN: No.

MR. KOP: I (unintelligible) one question and that is the education system.

First of all, I mentioned a little bit about the change that takes place over the years between a unifying role of the education system which was very important, was taken very seriously by Ben Gurion when he established this, (unintelligible) education and maybe national education. But this has deteriorated over time. And it has deteriorated using the same techniques that the Americans do in order to buy (unintelligible) busing and so on and so forth. You want to have for your children better education, you find a way out to it in moving your address or so and so. In fact it abuse the system (unintelligible). In Israel the way would be to open up schools with special emphasis on art or special emphasis on this and that. It's not to isolate or segregate. It is done because we want to find a better education for our children in this specific form. But this is of course an excuse and I think this (unintelligible) is very very detrimental on the ability of family education resources into needy population is very much taken care of in Israel and we only, and we recommend that this can be even more so as it is done so far.

We mentioned in one of our books that within a matter of one decade the (unintelligible) of Arab children (unintelligible) matriculation system, for those of you who don't know, this is the certificate to higher education, the census went up from 19 percent of the age group to 30 percent within the matter of a decade. It is more than 1.5 times within a decade. It is very very fast. And this was achieved partly by channeling more resources into it.

I think that the basics of it is to agree with you that education is a major (unintelligible), it is not on the extent of other suggestions that we make here, but naturally education is the best way to go about to bring better meeting together, togetherness (unintelligible). The idea of the book, of (unintelligible). And I absolutely agree with Amitai's think of diversity with unity is very important, the two of them together. That's about what education—

MR. DIONNE: Thank you very much.

When Bob finishes his next book in the next few weeks we'll let you all know so you can come back. And the advantage they have is if they want to escape the controversy this book might cause in the United States, they can go to Israel and face the controversy it has caused there. (Laughter)

I just want to say a thoughtful book, it has provoked thoughtful comments of a thoughtful audience. Thank you all very, very much.