In a New York Times op-ed today, Charles Fishman argues that we should use the current severe drought to improve how we manage and distribute water, potentially achieving vast efficiencies. When I was in Israel recently, my group visited a startup company called TaKaDu that analyzes data already collected by water utilities and allows them to identify leaks, leading to impressive savings. We were taken to TaKaDu to investigate the problematic thesis that Israel is “Startup Nation.”* But my topic today is not Israeli entrepreneurship and Middle Eastern geopolitics–it’s the use of data to save water. TaKaDu made a strong case that immense amounts of water are wasted due to the failure to analyze available information. (Energy is also wasted in moving water that subsequently leaks.) We should do something about that. But to me as a political theorist, two aspects of their presentation seemed a bit troubling:

1. TaKaDu has a patent for their general approach of analyzing data on water and providing the information to their clients via a “user interface.” In other words, the US government has given them a monopoly on this whole approach. Their founder and CEO, Amer Peleg, was disarmingly candid in his response to my question about their patent, basically saying that it may be too broad for the public interest, but he got what US law allows him. Peleg said that no one else may use mathematical algorithms to analyze water utility data. A competitor would have to try something totally different, such as applying quantum mechanics to water. I don’t know if Peleg’s interpretation of the patent is correct, but if so, this seems like bad US public policy. TaKaDu will save money and water, but not as much as a field of competing firms would save.

2. Peleg said that big water authorities were the best clients of TaKaDu, whereas the myriad small water boards typical of the US were poorly positioned to take advantage of data. They have too little data and not enough money to invest in efficiencies. This is interesting because my hero, the late Elinor Ostrom, achieved her original insights about the value of decentralization and amateur leadership by studying water boards. She showed that a vast number of hyper-local, amateur-led, partially overlapping water authorities in Southern California did a better job of protecting a fragile aquifer than any corporation or bureaucracy could. Her model of an adaptive ecosystem of volunteers looks very different from Peleg’s ideal of big data applied to big problems. It’s possible that the two models could be combined, but that would require careful thought and due respect for the decentralized or “polycentric” traditions of local government.

*Mitt Romney invoked “Startup Nation” as an explanation of Israel’s economic lead over the Arab countries. But when we visited an extremely impressive Palestinian firm inside the West Bank–one that bends over backwards not to seem “political”–we learned that their whole future depends on a long-delayed decision by Israel to allow an access road to their site. Obviously, inequalities in power and resources are relevant here.

(Tel Aviv) After talking last night with the editor of the very liberal Israeli newspaper, Ha’aretz (Aluf Benn), I’m thinking that the most interesting question is which of these two views most accurately represents the Israeli government:

1. We (the state of Israel) offered to remove almost all the Jewish settlements as part of a reasonable peace deal that Yasser Arafat rejected. We would do the same again. We have continued to build settlements, but we are willing to remove them for peace. We have been building them because the domestic politics of stopping them is too difficult in the absence of a peace offer, and also because we have a right to a Plan B. Plan A is peace through a treaty, but Plan B is putting settlements on the high ground so that we can strengthen our defense against rockets.
2. Previous Israeli Prime Ministers offered to remove most of the settlements, but (thank God) the Palestinians didn’t take that deal. Right now, we are deliberately trying to build as many as we can so that we can change the facts on the ground in Israel’s favor. If we ever agree to exchange land for peace, we will cede much less land than we would have offered in 2000. At most, for every two new settlements, we’ll renounce one, and that will be a better deal.

I’m not saying that 1 is OK, but 2 is decidedly worse. Now, states do not actually have opinions, plans, or goals; people do. It is most likely that the individual decision-makers in Israel–who range from voters to the Prime Minister–hold a mix of these two opinions, along with others. In that sense, there is no real truth about the Israeli position–unless the government decides to sign a deal.

I’ve written political commentary all week. Heading home on Sunday (and before taking a week off from blogging), I’ll sign off with a few random observations about the West Bank and Israel as I have experienced them.

• The Israeli Defense Forces conscript all Jewish 18-year-olds except the ultra-Orthodox. So there are units of very young adults in uniform all over the place, especially in Jerusalem. The Israeli army is famously informal, not exactly spit-and-polish. You see teenage female soldiers with pony tails and earrings, and skinny guys who look about 16 lounging around on duty. I have never seen such un-threatening military units in my life. On the other hand, several people have told me that the border police and regular police are aggressive and disliked.
• Israelis are genuinely afraid about a whole range of what they call “existential threats” (from an Iranian bomb to social disintegration), but Tel Aviv is a real estate boom town, and lots of Jews who hold US passports and advanced degrees are choosing to live here instead of LA or Boston. In that sense, the market’s prognosis is optimistic and secure.
• I don’t want to sound like Tom Friedman, but clearly there is another profound division in this region, beside the Arab/Jewish divide: the 21st century versus anti-modernists. Rawabi, the planned Palestinian city in the West Bank, has more in common with Tel Aviv, which is Miami-Beach-on-the-Mediterranean, than either city has with Muslim or Orthodox Jewish religious communities around Jerusalem. We’ve met Palestinian and Israeli entrepreneurs who are, to my eyes and ears, indistinguishable. I’m sure that if you forced them to discuss who’s been responsible for the conflict between Israel and the Arab world since 1900, they would disagree. But what they share is a relative lack of interest in such matters, along with a common fascination with high tech. That doesn’t mean that Shimon Peres’ vision of a “New Middle East” (Saudi tourists on the Tel Aviv beaches) is realistic, but both communities have their modernists.
• Notwithstanding the millions of times you have been told that Israel is small, crossing back and forth across the security wall and the Palestinian zone of control drives home how tiny the distances are and how complex is the political landscape. Major Palestinian and Israeli populations are not just nearby on the map; they are in plain sight and hailing distance of each other.
• Little children here, whether Arab or Jewish, Israeli or Palestinian, religious or secular, are notably cute, and I really hope they can all live safely together some day.

Today, we talked to senior officials of the Palestinian authority in the Palestinian Authority’s capital of Ramallah. We also visited a brand-new, planned Palestinian city called Ramabi. And before we entered the West Bank, we toured the Israeli separation wall with the colonel who had planned it.

If you’re a pessimist about Palestine, its future is Ofra. If you’re an optimist, its future is Ramabi. If you’re a realist, its future is Ramallah. I will explain …

Ofra is the Israeli settlement we visited yesterday. One of the first settlements, it dates from the 1970s and still has a feel of that era. For one thing, it’s a dusty place that looks as if it’s held together with duct tape and staples. You are greeted by a large photo of one of the community’s members who was killed in Lebanon in 1982, and his big mustache, grin, and tan make him look like someone out of “Easy Rider.” (The landscape looks exactly like Arizona, by the way: high desert.) But the prevailing ideology reminded me of Mississippi circa 1950. We were told that the Arabs who live all around were originally grateful to the Israeli settlers for bringing them medical care and other modern conveniences, but then outside agitators turned them into terrorists. Whatever you think about it, Ofra is all about the past: the past of David and Solomon, and the past of 1947 and 1967.

Within sight of Ofra, Ramallah is bustling, dynamic, and large (maybe 25,000 to Ofra’s 3,200 people). Most of the city seems to be a construction site right now. Signs advertise a mix of international brands (Dominos, Hyundai), local bargains, and trademark violations like “Star Bucks” coffee shops. I am not a good judge of income and development, but it looked to me like an upper-middle-income city, by global standards. Public services look a little weak (unpaved roads, for example), but the apartments and stores look modern and comfortable. The people on the streets are diverse, some religious and others secular. I can’t read the signs in Arabic, but to go by images, Disney is a more pervasive force than either Islam or nationalism.

The Palestinian Authority’s officials were smart and knowledgeable. They made many valid points. But their argument was all about past grievances with Israel, and their only answer when someone asked how they could obtain peace was to hope that the Americans or liberal Israelis would recognize the injustice of their side and back down. Their goal was to persuade us to sympathize with them as victims.

Meanwhile, Palestinian businesspeople are building Ramabi on a vast scale on barren hills north of Ramallah. It will cost $1 billion to erect and will provide jobs and homes in an environmentally friendly, postmodern, urban, planned community. The company is corporate, on the global model, with nice logos, smoothly produced PowerPoints, gifts for visitors, and financial lingo. The staff emphasize their cooperation with Israeli companies and the substantial number of Jewish investors, who are taking a risk on building in a politically volatile region because they believe that Ramabi is the best thing that could happen to Israel. (I agree, by the way.) The leaders of Ramabi have legitimate grievances with Israel–they can’t get a permit to build a convenient access road to the nascent city, and when checkpoints are closed, their trucks can’t get through. Politics is inescapable, and in fact, the main reason for the city is Palestinian patriotism. Bashar Masri, a major international business person who happens to be Palestinian, wants to invest in his home country to strengthen it. But the company tries to be minimally divisive. Their politics is explicitly win/win, not zero-sum, Above all, they are thinking about the future, not the past.

In Ramallah, I asked about the combination that Israeli negotiator Tal Becker had recommended: Israelis should acknowledge Palestinian suffering and take some responsibility for it (implying also that many Arabs lived in what is now Israel), and Palestinians should acknowledge that the Jewish people have historic roots in Palestine. I noted that recognizing Jewish origins in Palestine does not commit one to endorse Zionism; it is just a matter of accepting a historical truth and recognizing the sincerity of the Zionists’ motives.

Dr. Abdallah Abdallah is Deputy Commissioner of FATAH’s International Relations committee and Chair of the Political Committee of the Palestinian Authority. He gave a long answer to my question; I wish I had transcribed it. I believe he basically wandered among four different themes: (1) just because you lived somewhere in the past doesn’t mean you should own that place now–do the Native Americans have a right to America? (2) The ancient Jews lived in parts of the Holy Land, but not in most of it. (3) The Jewish people may or may not have lived in Palestine in ancient times. Some Jewish historians doubt the reality of the diaspora, and he doesn’t have opinions about ancient history. And (4) the Jews conquered Palestine from the Arabs in ancient times, coming up from Egypt, which makes them one of many “waves” of conquerors, just like the Romans.

Now, Dr. Abdallah may actually believe that the Jews originated in Palestine. Earlier, in an entirely different context, he had noted that all three Abrahamic faiths originated here, which sounds like an acknowledgement that Judaism started in ancient Israel. But what struck me was a refusal to state publicly something that Israeli liberals desperately want to hear, an explicit acknowledgement of ancient Jewish history. Arguably, what he says shouldn’t matter. I doubt it matters much to right-wing Israelis, who don’t care what Arabs think. But if it does matter, it’s for this reason: to doubt the reality of the Jewish historical narrative is to read Zionists as sinister conspirators, European colonialists who invented a wild excuse for seizing Arab land. And as long as you believe that, you have no reason to make a sincere deal with Israelis today.

(Jerusalem) Since I last posted, we have met with an Arab member of the Knesset, Ahmad Tibi, in the Knesset building. One of the founders of the settler movement, Israel Harel, showed us around his controversial West Bank settlement of Ofra (within sight of the settler outpost that is being evacuated today). We’ve also talked with Vice Commander Bentzi Gruber, who led a brigade into Gaza in the last Israeli operation there; Tal Becker, chief of the Israeli team in the Annapolis negotiations; and Yossi Klein Halevi, journalist and scholar. Tomorrow, we’re going to Ramallah, where we’ll hear more from the Palestinian leadership.

After experiencing all these personalities and perspectives–and so much pain, pride, sorrow, and fear–I’ll just mention one theme that recurred in at least four of the conversations: Arab moral recognition for Israel. Tal Becker said that Israel needs to acknowledge Palestinian suffering much more than it has, and Palestinians must recognize that Jews were a nation in Israel in ancient times (even if they contest the legitimacy of the modern state).

By the way, I am withholding judgment on whether Palestinians deny the Jews’ historic connection to the region. In 2000, the Palestinian negotiating team told Bill Clinton there was no evidence that Jews had lived in Israel in ancient times, but I am not sure whether that remains their position or how widely it is shared. What I do know is that we have met Israelis who hold at least four views on the topic:

1. Palestinian recognition of the Jews’ historical role in Israel (and hence the sincerity of Israelis’ claims to the land) is a precondition for any kind of serious peace negotiation. I told Halevi I understood why he wanted this recognition–as a moral and emotional matter–but I didn’t see what it had to do with his security. He replied that open recognition of the validity of the Jewish position would reduce the danger to Israel in the whole Arab world.
2. Palestinian recognition of the historical link should be part of a deal, combined with Israeli recognition of Palestinian sovereignty over their territory. This pair of statements is not a precondition for negotiations but should be part of the outcome. I think this was Tal Becker’s view. [Later: I should partly correct that. I think Becker would like the Israeli side to start acknowledging Palestinian suffering now, because it is the right thing to do. He just doesn’t think that Palestinian acknowledgement of Israeli historicity should be a precondition for negotiation.]
3. Palestinians’ views about Israel’s status really aren’t important. A deal is all that’s needed, and a deal should be accepted if it protects Israel’s security. I think Commander Gruber took that position.
4. Palestinians do not have a legitimate claim to sovereignty, so recognizing their nationhood certainly should not be traded for Palestinian recognition of the Jewish people’s connection to the land, which is manifest and absolute. I am reading between the lines in thinking that would be Israel Harel’s view.

I am not sure about the strategic implications of these options, but it’s true that the Palestinians have suffered and been humiliated, and it’s true that the Jews lived in the Holy Land in ancient times and now experience their presence as a “return.” Acknowledging the truth is generally good for the speaker; it’s a matter of integrity, in the root sense of wholeness or oneness. In general, one ought to speak truth regardless of whether truth is spoken in return.