Even if you think that Israel has the right and a decent reason to blockade Gaza, it’s pretty clear that dropping heavily armed commandos at night onto the decks of Turkish [!] ships loaded with peace activists and humanitarian assistance was stupendously dumb–especially since there was evidently no contingency plan in case of resistance.

This is an opportune moment to note that Israel’s government is quite capable of self-destructive and foolish policy. That would be self-evident in most countries, but the State of Israel has a pervasive reputation for competence. Anti-Semites and committed Zionists agree on that, if nothing else. Stereotypes of Jews as smart people feed into it, as do all those military victories from the War of Independence to the Raid on Entebbe.

But Israel has a Jewish population of only about 5.6 million, just a bit more than the population of the Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Marietta, GA metropolitan statistical area. With that population, they have to run all the institutions of a modern nation, from a stock market to a nuclear weapons program, from a parliament to a navy. There is no reason to think they have the brainpower to do it all well under pressure.

The myth of Israeli super-competence causes anti-Semites to overestimate Israel’s deliberate impact on world politics. If anything important happens, Mossad must have caused it, because those Israelis are diabolically brilliant. Meanwhile, the myth causes some Israelis and would-be friends of Israel to put far too much stock in military or technological strategies. In theory, a country could run a blockade (whether they should or not) and avoid humanitarian disasters, p.r. fiascoes, effective smuggling, and other failures. In reality, success would take an enormous amount of talent in the civilian government and the Defense Forces. I simply don’t think Israel has what it takes, and that limitation should strongly influence their strategic thinking.

Yesterday, I helped to lead a kind of seminar for Tufts faculty at TELI, the Tufts Environmental Literacy Institute. We assigned chapter 9 of Mark Sagoff’s Price, Principle, and the Environment, which is entitled “The View from Quincy Library or Civic Engagement in Environmental Problem Solving.” Mark Sagoff tells a great story about a group of citizens–environmentalists, loggers, and others–in a small California forest town who met in the library because people are not allowed to shout there, worked out a management plan for the surrounding National Forest, got it passed as an act of Congress, and were criticized by the national environmental groups (see a collection of documents, here). The legislation was never implemented because of litigation.

We divided the Tufts faculty into two groups to debate–literally–the pros and cons of civic environmentalism as represented by Quincy Library. The debate focused mostly on scale, and whether it is better to set policy at the local or national level. Expertise also came up, because experts tend to work at the national level and laypeople dominate at the local level. Each side cited this difference in its own favor.

I see some other important issues in the Quincy Library Case. Above all, the national policy debate involves corporations and nonprofit groups, each of which has a fiduciary obligation to seek certain kinds of outcomes. Because they have opposing goals, they are drawn to litigation or constant lobbying over legislative amendments. They are better off with unresolved issues than with compromises, because they can keep on fighting as long as there is no resolution. And they use science strategically, commissioning and highlighting scientific findings that benefit their cause.

In contrast, people came together in Quincy Library as citizens with a problem–the forest was liable to go up in flames any day. Although they differed in values and interests, their differences did not define them. After all, they had overlapping as well as contrasting interests. Thus they had incentives to deliberate, i.e., to discuss values and goals, including aesthetic and moral ones as well as the purely means/ends reasoning that science can handle. They reached consensus. That was not inevitable, but they had a motive to try, which is not the case in the national debate.

I could take the critical side in the debate. I would note that the Quincy Library plan was only acceptable because national environmental laws had stymied loggers and forced them to the negotiating table. I might assert the right of American citizens who live elsewhere to influence their National Forest in California. And I might observe that certain issues–such as climate change–are of overwhelming importance and need to be settled by adversarial politics, command-and-control regulation, and science. Yet I think we are unlikely to see good policies at the national and international level until people can do their own civic work to defend the local environment, as they tried to do in Quincy.

Our views of our fellow citizens tend to oscillate. If we’re upset about something, we pessimistically assume that most people are stuck on the other side, or else we optimistically want to change their opinions with skillful “communications” and new “messages.” We quickly shift from hope to despair depending on the latest polls or election results.

The reality is surely more complex. People differ a great deal in how much they know and care about any given issue. And most people go through a slow but significant process of learning whenever a new issue arises on the agenda. Their average opinions shift in response to evidence and argument–but not overnight. For instance, if they believe false critiques of the recent health care act, they will not change their minds because of one news program or advertisement. But they will learn the truth over time.

The Public Agenda Foundation has been watching this process develop on the topic of energy and has developed a theory called the public’s “Energy Learning Curve.™”. Public Agenda finds that people currently favor the easy policies (like tax benefits for individuals who conserve energy, supported by 81%), but they oppose more painful and effective policies (like gas taxes to fund renewable energy: 52% against). That’s the current snapshot, but Public Agenda notes, “there are reasons to wonder how well this consensus would stand up under pressure. Our research shows the public does not know critical facts about the problem.” For instance, “52 percent thought that by reducing smog, the United States has come ‘a long way’ in addressing global warming.”

Looking more closely, Public Agenda finds the public divided into four groups, “the Anxious (40 percent), the Greens (24 percent), the Disengaged (19 percent) and the Climate Change Doubters (17 percent).” So what we have is not a public opinion on energy and climate change. There are many opinions, some grounded in fact and some in prejudice, some passionately held and some that are off-the-cuff responses to the pollster. These opinions will change; in which direction remains to be seen.

Two belated notes about the Kentucky Senate primary from someone who studies youth voting. First, Rand Paul did well among young Republican voters. They were his strongest constituency, backing him by 61%-19%. His second-strongest constituency was the generation of retirement age; he barely won the adults between age 35 and 64.

According to Hubert Humphrey, “It was once said that the moral test of Government is how that Government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped.” It would seem that the first two groups have a special fondness for libertarians or paleoconservatives who would cut funding for the services that they receive. But of course, the sample of Republican primary voters in Kentucky doesn’t represent the state’s population, let alone the nation’s. This result simply illustrates that there are pools of libertarian and other non-mainstream young voters (e.g., strong environmentalists) who matter when the total number of votes is low.

Second, I happen to know the guy whom Paul defeated, Trey Grayson, because he has been a strong leader for civic education and youth civic engagement. He focused on that topic in graduate school and then worked hard on it as Kentucky’s Secretary of State. I think Democrats are better off with Paul on the ballot in November, although it’s a risky business. For proponents of youth engagement, Grayson would have made a great Senator. Ironically, young people from his own party helped deny him that opportunity.

1. A steep and crooked alley, armspan’s width, cobbled; a tiny car squeezed between walls of stone or stucco that are studded with iron grilles, draping flowerpots, drying towels, and sleeping cats.

2. A soccer field reached by a pedestrian bridge that spans four lanes of traffic; giant billboards at the roundabout; terraces of apartment blocks rising on the hills opposite with anarchist graffiti on their lower walls and satellite dishes on their roofs.

3. Long, cool corridors, subdued indirect lighting, brushed steel and blond wood; panini, quiche, and bagels at the cafe; quadrilingual instructions on the assorted recycling bins.

I know there are many more Europes; these are the three that stick in my mind on my first day back in the US.