Israel

I am currently visiting Israel, trying to help address the serious problems the country is facing.

Not everything that bothers us, that we don’t like or even hate, is a problem. Some are just facts. For instance, when I was a teenager, it bothered me a lot that I was short. It bothered me until I realized that there was nothing I could do about it. My problem was my weight. That was something I could do something about.

In Israel, I have come across solutions that are not doable, not controllable: that all eight million Jews should return to the Diaspora and leave Israel (a radical Palestinian solution), or that all the millions of Palestinians should immigrate to Europe (an Israeli radical solution). None of these solutions are doable or controllable. The Palestinian and Jewish presence is not the problem; those are facts.

To consider something a problem you cannot control is like banging your head against a wall. It won’t move. So why waste energy on it? Redefine the problem to make it controllable. For example, instead of saying, “I hate what is going on in this country; it needs to change,” redefine the problem: what do I need to change to make it livable?

To decide if something is controllable, we might need to involve more than one party. To start with, we need the party with authority to be involved in deciding what the solution should be. In Israel, that party is not entirely clear, because of its huge dependence on the United States for support. But even that is not enough to make a problem solvable. We also need to identify whose objections need to be removed so the solution can be implemented. In the Palestinian problem, Iran cannot be ignored. Without its cooperation or removal from power, no problem-solving solution is going to be implemented.

Different parties have different interests. In the business world, authority lies with management, which aims to maximize profits. Often, they earn profit sharing, or if they’re not on profit sharing, they will be fired if the profits are not as desired. Those whose cooperation is needed to implement decisions are usually the employees, whose interests are different. They care about the quality of working conditions and fringe benefits. Their interests conflict with the profit interests of management.

In the Middle East, Biden has a strong interest in being reelected, Israel in having peace, and Iran in dominating the Muslim world. The Palestinian problem cannot be solved until those critical parties get aligned or a party gets out of the decision-making and implementation circle.

Now, the question: who should solve the problem, whose problem is it? Often, we request the person or entity that caused the problem to solve it. Israel is being accused of causing the problem by establishing the state of Israel. Or is it the Arab countries that attacked Israel and caused a war that resulted in millions of Palestinian refugees? Or perhaps we should expect the United Nations, the party responsible for solving problems, to solve it. So, who should be responsible for solving the problem? It is the person or entity that can solve the problem.

The UN is not able to solve it because it has no teeth and no real power. The Arab countries can, but they have refused to deal with the problem for over seventy years. Egypt transferred the power to rule the Gaza Strip to the Israelis; it did not want to deal with the Palestinian problem and still does not. Neither did Jordan, which, like the Christian Lebanese, killed thousands of Palestinians. The Palestinians themselves cannot solve their problem because they are ruled by a fanatic party, Hamas, that wants to solve the problem in a way that is not controllable: to chase eight million Jews out of Israel or kill them all. It cannot be done. Billions of dollars were given to the Gaza Strip authorities to build their economy. Instead of building the Dubai of the Mediterranean, which they could have, they spent those billions on building a maze of 350 miles of tunnels, an underground city, to fight Israel.

So, who can solve the Palestinian problem? Only the Israelis can, but so far, Israel has not taken responsibility to do so. This explains why it has been a problem for over seventy years and will be for another hundred more until the Israeli mindset changes.

The next thing to do before we can solve the problem is to define what the problem is. Israel is struggling with the question of having a Jewish democratic state. People have different interpretations and expectations of democracy and of what it means to be Jewish.

And it is not enough to decide what it is. We also need to decide what it is not, which means there must be boundaries; we know what something is when we know what it is not.

This clarification usually needs to be done with a complementary team. Some people know what they want, but it is other people who usually know what they don’t want.

A complementary team can define the problem better than a single individual can because a single individual cannot excel in defining what something is and what it is not at the same time. At least not as well. In the case of Israel, to solve the problem and decide what a democratic Jewish state is, the Israeli Arabs, the Orthodox Jews, and the secular Jews need to get together to decide what it is. So far, they have not done so.

Israel is in a deep crisis. The country needs a new vision. The old vision of establishing a state for the Jewish people was accomplished (albeit the state is in danger and its survival is in question). The country has lost its path: it has no solution to the Palestinian problem and has not dealt with its internal conflict of being democratic and Jewish at the same time. I am deeply worried.