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Dispatch From Israel

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By Herbert SteinPosted Friday, March 20, 1998, at 3:30 AM ET

I think the last time I saw a sandstorm was in Beau Geste about 70 years ago. A real one blew in Tuesday night. I could hear the wind whistling during the night but only realized what was going on when I got up in the morning and looked out. The air was so thick and dark I could barely make out the Hilton Hotel, a huge building, two blocks from me. Traffic was at a standstill. I could not see the Mediterranean, only a few hundred yards from my hotel. I had left the window open a little in one room of my suite, and every surface was covered with dense, damp dust.
Apparently, such storms occur about every four years, but this one was worse than usual. The barometric pressure in Tel Aviv was the lowest in 35 years. Whether the sand came from the Sahara, the Sinai, or the Negev deserts was uncertain.
The sandstorm was followed by two days of rain that has not ended as I am writing. So much rain in a short period is also unusual here. But the Israelis do not complain about it. Every day's prayer contains a prayer for winter dew and rain between Dec. 5 and Passover, which will be April 10 this year. In fact, the major punishment that the Bible threatens for failure to love God is that he will withhold the rain. So the rain at this season is a reminder that I am in the biblical land. (In the park across from my hotel, a man with a long white beard is building a wooden boat.)
I don't think the Bible mentions snow. There was a lot of snow in Jerusalem this week. Naturally, the local residents complained that there wasn't enough snow-removal equipment. Reminded me of home.

* * * * * *

At home, when we read about violence in the West Bank, we tend to think of the whole country in turmoil. There was a good deal of violence last week, and it continues, on a diminished scale, this week. But everything is calm in Tel Aviv. Of course, this city is some distance from the scenes of the current violence, but some of the worst terrorist acts occurred here in the past. My Israeli friends here say they are not worried. They have much confidence in the police, in the intelligence services, and in the army. They believe that if there were any danger there would be signs of official alert, and there are none.
The recent violence looks accidental or spontaneous. Israeli soldiers shot three Palestinians who they thought were threatening them, riots by Palestinians followed, and there were some clashes between Jewish settlers and Palestinians. Planned action by the leading terrorist organization, Hamas, does not seem to have been involved.
In fact, there seems to be a lull in terrorism. One explanation offered to me is that Hamas has got what it wants. It has escaped, for a time, what was--for it--the "danger" of peaceful settlement and coexistence between Jews and Palestinians that would have left Hamas superfluous. The rapprochement between Israel and the Arab countries has been set back. European attitudes toward Israel are seen as increasingly negative. Hamas may feel that things are moving in its direction, and it should not disturb them by acts of terrorism.
(I am reminded of visiting the prison in what was then Leningrad, where Lenin's brother had been incarcerated for throwing a bomb at someone. Lenin consoled his mother with these kind words: "Such acts of individual terrorism are rarely successful." He knew that to succeed in the terrorism business you have to be at the wholesale end, not the retail.)
There were 56 murders in Tel Aviv last year. I don't remember the exact figures, but the number of murders per capita must have been much higher in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area than in Tel Aviv. I suppose, despite the struggles between Jews and Palestinians, per capita violence is probably higher in the United States than in Israel. Of course, there are different moral implications, but I am not going to try to define them.

* * * * * *

For people to move between the academic life and the business life, or to combine the two, is more common here than in the United States. In the United States some academics--I think mainly of economists--work in businesses as technical experts, essentially practicing in business what they taught at the university. Here, some economists become managers and CEOs, using administrative skills beyond what they taught in the classroom. Economists of my acquaintance have become, variously, the head of a very large bank, the head of a large conglomerate with diversified manufacturing subsidiaries, and the head of a large construction company. I cannot think of their counterparts in the United States.
One explanation may be that in Israel for a long time most big businesses were not really private. They were controlled by the government or by the national labor union, the Histadrut. The governing bodies, such as Cabinet ministries, that chose the heads of these businesses did not have a business "culture." They chose people known to them as having good judgment, integrity, managerial skills, or whatever they were looking for from the universe of people known to them, whether they were "business people" or not. And that certainly included some academics.
There may be another factor involved. A big business in a small country like Israel has to be an international business. And the Israeli economists all have a lot of international experience. As I walk down the halls of the economics department of Tel Aviv University, I find that half the offices belong to professors who are away at Harvard, MIT, Stanford, etc., while their offices are temporarily occupied by visitors from those places.

* * * * * *

The rain has stopped, maybe for an hour, maybe until October.

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By Herbert SteinPosted Friday, March 20, 1998, at 3:30 AM ET
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Herbert Stein, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under Presidents Nixon and Ford. He is a member of the board of contributors at the Wall Street Journal.
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