An Interpol European Regional Conference brought 110 senior law enforcement officers from 49 countries to Tel Aviv, while a homeland security conference drew 37 mayors from two dozen worldwide cities to sites throughout Israel last week.

“Israel has been forced to overcome difficult circumstances, including war and terror, in order to survive,” said Alfred Vanderpuije, mayor of the Ghana capital of Accra, following a visit to Elbit Systems, a defense electronics company based in Haifa. “And this has put the Israelis in a unique situation to develop security technologies.”

In the decade following the terror attacks of 9-11, Israeli security exports rose from about $2 billion a year to more than $7 billion, according to data supplied by SIBAT, Israel’s Defense Export and Defense Cooperation Agency. Part of the rise was attributed to the growing international demand for more effective homeland security systems.

At Elbit and other security firms such as Magal Security Systems and Elta Group, a subsidiary of Israel Aerospace Industries, Vanderpuije and the other mayors saw presentations on defense technologies.

Originally developed for the Israel Defense Forces to fight wars and terror, many of the systems are being modified for civilian use, such as securing large cities.

Called the “digital army project,” Elbit’s technology connects all military forces to a single communication network that enables the free transferral of audio and video information.

“From the individual soldier to entire divisions on the land, in the air and on the sea, all our forces are interconnected,” said Dalia Rosen, Elbit’s vice president of corporate communications.

“In the past few years we have begun adopting the tools we have developed and applied on the battlefield for use in a civilian context to create what we call ‘safe cities.’ ”

The basic tools that are used to fight terrorism can be used to fight crime and help officials react more efficiently to natural disasters, said Amnon Sofrim, who heads Elta’s homeland security projects.

“Instead of endless patrols, we can use strategically placed cameras or electronic devices connected to a situation room to detect the beginning of a robbery or a fire,” said Sofrim, former chief of the IDF’s intelligence corps. “And this allows us to use a limited amount of security forces or firefighters only where they are really needed.”

There were signs that the meetings between mayors and Israeli security experts might lead to business ties.

“I was very impressed with what I saw and am even thinking about bringing some of these ideas back to Ghana,” Vanderpuije said.

While private Israeli firms were showing the mayors homeland security technologies, a similar show-and-tell was taking place in Tel Aviv at Interpol’s 41st regional conference, the first time Israel has hosted such a conference since it joined the international police organization in October 1949.

Among the Israeli innovations on display were the “skunk,” a liquid with a putrid odor, and the “screamer,” a hand-held device the size of a bullhorn that emits a sound so loud that it can paralyze.

Israeli police developed both as non-lethal means of crowd control in the wake of the October 2000 riots that left 12 Arab Israelis dead.

The Or Commission, an Israeli panel of inquiry set up after the riots, criticized the police for being unprepared and possibly using excessive force to disperse the mobs.

“The skunk and the screamer are more ethical than your average police baton since they don’t cause long-term injuries,”  said Cmdr. Oded Shemla, who heads research and development for the police technology division. “They also happen to be more effective.”

An interactive simulator capable of constructing realistic scenarios, from soccer game riots and violent demonstrations to kidnappings and sniper attacks, also was on display.

“What is unique about our technology is that it is developed by policemen for policemen,” said Shemla, who previously was a police helicopter unit pilot.

Interpol officials were not authorized to comment on Israel’s innovations vis-a-vis other member countries.

Shemla said, however, that senior police officers from Europe were particularly impressed that the Israeli technologies presented at the conference already were in use and had proven to be effective in real-life situations.

“We were not showing them an abstract concept,” he said. “We were showing them things that actually work in the field.”

Jake Rosen, who chairs the American Council for World Jewry that organized and sponsored the international mayors’ conference, said there is room for more security export growth.

“One of the goals of this year’s conference is to break down prejudices [toward Israel] and overcome feelings of hesitation about doing business here,” Rosen said. “We have to be proactive in allowing access to Israeli know-how and in countering anti-Israel sentiment.”

Rosen said that political leaders such as Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who has claimed that Israel plans to “terminate” the Palestinian people, are “obstacles to openness” when it comes to economic ties with Israel.

However, Rosen noted that Venezuela should be seen as monolithic. Antonio Ledezma, who beat a pro-Chavez candidate to become mayor of Caracas, attended the conference.

Otto Perez Leal, the mayor of Mixco, Guatemala, and son of Guatemalan President Otto Perez Molina, said his municipality already was implementing security cameras and other technologies developed in Israel.

“Our army and police use this equipment to integrate our forces and improve our ability to respond to natural disasters and other challenges,” Leal said.

“It’s not just about training people and it’s not just about technology. It’s about combining them both. And that is something that we are learning from you.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, left, and Kadima Party chairman Shaul Mofaz at a joint news conference in the Knesset announcing that Kadima has joined the coalition government. May 8, 2012. (Miriam Alster/Flash90/JTA)

JERUSALEM (JTA) – Israelis went to sleep Monday night expecting early elections in September for the 19th Knesset. They woke up to the news that elections would take place as planned in October 2013.

A behind-the-scenes deal clinched overnight between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and opposition leader Shaul Mofaz created Israel’s broadest coalition government ever.

According to the surprise agreement finalized early Tuesday morning, right before a plenum vote to disperse the Knesset ahead of early elections, Mofaz’s Kadima Party will join Netanyahu’s government coalition, boosting its numbers from 66 of the 120 Knesset members to an unprecedented 94.

Mofaz agreed not to attempt to topple the government until the official end of its term. In exchange he will be appointed vice premier. Mofaz also will participate in the meetings of the select ministerial security Cabinet.

The Kadima chief, who had vowed on his Facebook page that he would never join Netanyahu’s “bad” government and publicly called Netanyahu a “liar,” may have had a change of heart in part after seeing polls that predicted his party was headed for a major crash in early elections.

Kadima, which managed to garner a plurality of votes in the last elections with 28 Knesset seats, had fallen to fewer than half that number, according to recent polls.

Netanyahu, who in recent months has said repeatedly in public statements that he preferred not to initiate early elections, may have been tempted by the chance to bring back former Likud politicians such as Ronnie Bar-On, Tzahi Hanegbi and Meir Sheetrit, who defected with Ariel Sharon in 2005 to form Kadima.

” ‘Repatriating’ these MKs so to speak would serve two purposes,” said Amotz Asa-El, a Hartman Institute fellow. “It would strengthen the Likud. But it would also dilute the influence of more right-wing elements in the Likud aligned with Moshe Feiglin.”

The formation of a national unity government may also have positive diplomatic ramifications with regard to Iran’s nuclear program.

“A stable government strengthens Israel’s deterrence capabilities vis-a-vis Iran and improves its ability to put pressure on the U.N. Security Council and on Germany not to compromise too much with Tehran,” wrote Ron Ben Yisai, Ynet’s military affairs commentator. “The deal also improves the government’s ability to carry out surprise moves, which also strengthens deterrence.”

Netanyahu and Mofaz said during a news conference Tuesday before the signing of the coalition agreement that there were four central issues that would be advanced by the national unity government: legislation that will obligate haredi Orthodox yeshiva students to perform military or national service; amendments to the electoral process; passage of a two-year fiscal budget; and advancing “responsible” peace negotiations with the Palestinians.

Kadima’s Knesset members will lead a committee tasked with drafting legislation aimed at replacing the Tal Law, which permits haredi yeshiva students to defer military service indefinitely in order to pursue religious studies unhindered.

The Supreme Court ruled in February that the Tal Law contradicted the principle of equality by giving the haredim preferential treatment and therefore was illegal. The court set Aug. 1 as the deadline to replace the Tal Law with alternative legislation.

Netanyahu noted during the news conference that disputes among key members of his coalition — the haredi Shas and United Torah Judaism parties and the stridently secular Yisrael Beiteinu — were a main factor in his original decision to call early elections. But with Kadima as a coalition partner, Shas and United Torah Judaism will be unable to topple the government over the Tal Law.

Incorporating Kadima also will enable the government to enact electoral system reform aimed at fostering political stability. Attempts to pass such reforms have failed due to the fervent opposition of smaller parties that represent specific populations such as the religious and haredim. These parties stand to lose from measures such as raising the election threshold from the present level of 2 percent or instituting regional elections for some of the Knesset seats.

Governments comprised of many diverse factions often are plagued with chronic divisions and instability. In many cases, a single party can threaten to bring down a narrow coalition government, giving it inordinate leveraging power.

Kadima’s support also may make it easier for the government to fend off demands by smaller parties that could hurt fiscal discipline during the passage of a two-year fiscal budget for 2013-14.

But the timing of parliamentary discussions on the budget will coincide with the expected rerun of last summer’s socioeconomic protests.

“With the world economy going into a slowdown, our government will have to make painful fiscal cuts and it will have to accomplish this at a time when the Israeli version of Occupy Wall Street is going on,” said Aviv Bushinsky, a former spokesman and chief of staff under Netanyahu. “Kadima might even be compelled to join the populists in calling for more spending.”

Settlement policy might be another point of disagreement between Kadima and Likud. Israel’s Supreme Court ruled Monday that the government had to go ahead with the demolition of 30 homes that were built on Palestinian-owned land in the Beit El settlement’s Ulpana neighborhood.

Although Netanyahu has been noncommittal, right-wing politicians in his coalition, including several Likud MKs, want to legalize retroactively neighborhoods and outposts like Ulpana.

Netanyahu could be torn between his obligation to Kadima MKs who oppose such legislative initiatives and his more right-wing coalition partners.

The peace process may lead to some points of contention, but opponents have refrained from placing the blame on Netanyahu’s government for the lack of progress in negotiations.

Molok Shamshiri, an Iranian-Israeli restaurant cook, left Iran in 1964. (Ben Lynfield)

TEL AVIV (JTA) — Avi Nobel lived in Tehran and is sure the Iranian people want peace.

“There are a lot of poor people there and what they want is food and to work, not a nuclear bomb,” says Nobel, a spice seller here whose goods include some imported from Iran through third countries.

Still, he believes that Iran’s nuclear program must be stopped — by an Israeli airstrike, if necessary.

“It will have to be done because if [President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad has a bomb, there is no doubt he will use it,” Nobel says.

Nobel and others interviewed in this mini-enclave of Persian restaurants and spice shops in south Tel Aviv have a more nuanced — and cautious — view of a possible war with Iran than do many other Israelis.

Not only do they have tangible, often positive, memories of Iran and Iranians, but they also count relatives among the 25,000 Jews still living in Iran who, some fear, could face reprisals if there is an Israeli strike.

Molok Shamshiri, an Iranian-Israeli restaurant cook, says “It is hard for me to understand how things went so wrong. But I am sure the Iranian people are still the same people. Neither do the Iranian people want war. I know them.”

Shamshiri, whose sister still lives in Iran, left the country in 1964 but frequently made visits back home, sending her children to learn about their ancestral land. The visits ended with the 1979 Iranian Revolution.

She recalls the relations she had with Muslims in Iran as being “so good, it is hard to describe.”

“My Muslim neighbor would come make tea for me every Sabbath because she knew I could not light the fire” on the Sabbath, says Shamshiri, an Orthodox woman who covers her hair for modesty. “The Muslims would help us with parties, celebrations, weddings. They would help with everything and not for money. They would always ask if we needed anything.”

Her face lights up when she is asked where she lived.

“Isfahan, a city that has everything good in this world,” says Shamshiri, who takes pride in her ghormeh sabzi, a traditional herbal soup. “The four seasons there are like clockwork. In the spring you have the sunshine, the chirping of the birds and the flowers. It’s a calm city, a paradise.”

Yosef Melamed, who sells spices, apricots and dried mangos, describes Farsi as “a language rooted in poetry, poetry that speaks to the soul.”

Although it’s been 47 years since he left Tehran for Israel, he remains avidly interested in his native land and watches  three Iranian satellite television channels.

The decision as to whether to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities is beyond him, Melamed says, but he holds out hope it may be possible to reach an accommodation with the Iranian government.

“You have to take a religious approach in talking to them, not a political one,” he says. “The contacts need not be conducted by rabbis, but they should be done by believing Jews.”

Albert Moradian’s eyes tear up as he describes his feelings for Iran. “To sum up in one word, I feel longing,” says Moradian, who owns a clothing store.

“I am Iranian in my behavior, my accent and the demands I make of my children to respect everyone,” Moradian says as he turns up a CD of Iranian classical music singer Mohammed Shajarian.

Moradian, who had been a lieutenant in the Iranian army, left after the ’79 revolution, fearing reprisals against officers who served under Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi.

“Of course I have good memories. I think the Iranian people are a special people, not of wars, but of music, poetry and soul,” says Moradian, who says he visits Iran “through the Internet” and dreams of the day when he can take his children there.

“Unfortunately, the media here conveys a picture as if Iran is only Ahmadinejad. The media is mobilized and I don’t believe any report from it,” he says.

Moradian opposes an Israeli strike on nuclear installations and believes that the Iranian people eventually will overthrow the regime.

Some among the 250,000 Iranian Israelis fear an Israeli strike will cause the Iranian regime to retaliate against the Jewish community, one of the world’s oldest.

“This is an unstable and unpredictable regime that can behave differently from day to day,” says Kamal Penhasi, the editor of Israel’s Farsi language newspaper, Shahyad. “I can envision them using criminals to attack Jews while denying the regime is involved.”

But Meir Javedanfar, an Iranian-born specialist on Iran at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, near Tel Aviv, doubts there would be a backlash against Iranian Jews.

“The Iranian regime always tries to portray itself as anti-Israel and not anti-Jewish,” he says. “Hurting its own Jewish population would undermine that and be very counterproductive.”

Javedanfar also says that despite the regime’s demonization of Israel since 1979, the Iranian people’s views of Israelis are “far more positive than any other country in the Middle East.” An Israeli strike could affect those views, he says.

Prominent Israelis of Iranian descent include Shaul Mofaz, who last month took the reins of Kadima, the country’s largest opposition party. Mofaz recently has taken a more dovish stance than Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, urging that Israel allow Washington to take the lead in handling Iranian nuclear ambitions.

At the restaurant, Shamshiri says she does not believe there will be a war.

“I hope we find a peaceful solution. The Muslims and we have all grown up on the same food,” she says. “At the end of the day, we know each other well.”

With four months remaining before the election, incumbent Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appears to have no real challengers. Numerous opinion polls show the Likud Party, which Netanyahu heads, gaining strength to pick up 30 or 31 of the 120 Knesset seats. Likud currently has 27 seats.

This might explain the prime minister’s eagerness to cash in on his popularity in early elections, despite the relative stability of his government coalition. Elections had been slated for October 2013.

Polls show that Labor, headed by former journalist Shelly Yachimovitch, is a distant second with 15 to 18 Knesset seats.

At its nadir in January 2011, after Ehud Barak broke away from the party with four other Labor Knesset members, Labor registered single-digit support. Labor currently holds nine seats.

Although the newest survey results reflect Yachimovitch’s success in turning around Labor, there has not been a return to the historic two-party Likud-Labor dominance.

“What we are seeing is a strong Likud and a center-left that is splintered,” said Asher Cohen of Bar-Ilan University’s department of political science.

Kadima, which garnered a plurality of votes in the last elections with 28 Knesset seats, has fallen to fewer than half that number, according to recent polls.

Many voters who had supported Kadima have veered to Labor and the new center-left Yesh Atid (There Is a Future) party headed by media personality Yair Lapid. Recent polls give the new party a dozen Knesset seats.

Netanyahu most likely will lead Israel’s largest party, but he may face another challenge: the shrinking of the right-wing bloc.

A new political party headed by Aryeh Deri, the dovish former head of the haredi Orthodox Sephardic Shas Party, is expected to take away votes from Shas.

“If Deri hurts Shas, which is already weaker than it was in the last elections, there is a possibility that the right-wing bloc of parties will lose its clear majority,” Cohen said.

With center-left parties in his coalition, Netanyahu might find it more difficult to avoid disputes over peace negotiations with the Palestinians or about socioeconomic policy.

Still, while it is unclear whether Netanyahu will have an easy time forming a stable government, there is little doubt at this stage that he will be the one chosen — for the third time — to lead the State of Israel.

“The only chance for an upset is if Bibi gets too confident and makes a stupid mistake,” said Aviv Bushinsky, a former spokesman and chief of staff under Netanayahu. “For instance, in the 1999 elections while meeting and greeting, he made comments that were interpreted as extreme right-wing.”

Netanyahu has since learned his lessons, Bushinsky said, noting that “Everything is calculated.”

Netanyahu’s opponents might attempt to attack him for his policies vis-a-vis a military strike on Iran’s nuclear program.

Prominent figures such as Meir Dagan, the former head of the Mossad, and Yuval Diskin, former chief of the Shin Bet security agency, have provided fodder for such an assault. Both have publicly questioned Netanyahu’s decision-making abilities and warned against the dangerous ramifications of an Israeli attack.

Cohen, however, says that criticizing Netanyahu for being overly hawkish on Iran might backfire since the Israeli public might perceive it as an attempt to belittle the Iranian threat.

Ephraim Kam, deputy director of the Institute for National Security Studies, argues that the Iranian threat “has nothing to do with politics.” A decision to attack Iran is a purely military issue, he said.

“Therefore, the ability to turn Iran into a campaign issue is highly limited,” Kam said, while acknowledging that the exact timing of such an attack might depend on external matters such as the Israeli and U.S. elections.

Nor is the Palestinian question shaping up to be a central issue in the campaign. Opponents have refrained from placing the blame on Netanyahu’s government for the lack of progress in peace negotiations.

Lapid’s There Is a Future party platform mentions working toward a peace treaty that will create two states for two nations while protecting large settlement blocs. But in a speech at Tel Aviv University in March, Lapid said that the Palestinians were responsible for the failure to reach a breakthrough, not Netanyahu’s government.

Meanwhile, Labor’s Yachimovitch, who like Lapid lacks military experience, has toned down criticism of the government’s role in the stalled peace process and is focusing primarily on socioeconomic issues.

“The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a nonstarter,” Cohen said. “Numerous polls have shown that a majority of Israelis are pessimistic about peace and believe the Palestinians, not the Likud, are responsible.”

In contrast, socioeconomic policy is likely to be a salient issue in the elections. Leaders of last summer’s grass-roots movements that brought a record number of Israelis onto the streets to protest the cost of living are vowing a repeat performance this summer.

It is unclear, however, whether political parties will succeed in harnessing this electoral potential.

“Last summer I saw Lapid, Yachimovitch and [former Kadima head Tzipi] Livni try to take a leadership role in the demonstrations,” Bushinsky said. “But any attempt to politicize the protests was seen as insincere.”

And with the Israeli economy still robust — GDP growth is high and unemployment rates are low at a time when both Europe and the United States are battling tough economic times — it will be difficult for any of Netanyanu’s opponents to attack him in this arena.

Nor will Netanyahu’s opponents be able to attack on another hot topic: military service for the haredi Orthodox. The Supreme Court ruled in February that the Tal Law, which permits haredi yeshiva students to defer military service indefinitely in order to pursue religious studies, gave the haredi preferential treatment and therefore was illegal.

Disputes that broke out among key members of Netanyahu’s coalition helped precipitate early elections.

Netanyahu, aware of the broad opposition to haredim avoiding the draft, refused to cave in to haredi demands. Instead he has supported the gradual drafting of more yeshiva students.

“Other parties might try to appeal to crude populism and demand the immediate drafting of all haredim,” Cohen said. “But Netanyahu’s gradual approach is more realistic and people will understand this.”

Both Israeli election years also were American presidential election years, as 2012 is.

In 1988, the Dukakis-Bush race had no discernible effect on a race that saw Yitzhak Shamir edge Shimon Peres for Israel’s premiership.

Four years later, however, Shamir’s contentious relationship with President George H. W. Bush is believed to have helped cost the Israeli prime minister the election.

So far, 2012 is looking more like ’88 than ’92, according to Aaron David Miller, a former longtime State Department Middle East negotiator who worked for the Bush administration.

“An Israeli prime minister is judged first and foremost by whether he can avoid catastrophic political decisions, then on the capacity to give Israelis a sense of security, then on the capacity to manage the U.S.-Israeli relationship,” said Miller, now a public policy fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu suggested this week that he would call elections as early as August, although his term isn’t up until the fall of 2013. His formal announcement was held up by the death of his father, Benzion.

Netanyahu, despite having a relationship with President Obama that at times has been difficult, scores well on all three criteria, Miller said. Nothing catastrophic occurred under his watch, he is credited for rallying international support for Iran’s isolation and the issue that has dogged his relationship with Obama — peace talks with the Palestinians — is all but moribund.

“I don’t see Israelis out in the streets protesting the prime minister’s policies on the peace process,” Miller said.

The conditions of a nascent peace process were seen as being in place in 1992. Arab countries that for decades had gone out of their way to snub Israel were ready to meet with Israel’s leaders in Madrid, however stilted the encounters. Israelis saw Shamir as balking at advancing talks in any meaningful way.

“Shamir was perceived to have misplayed his hand even though you could argue that Jim Baker and Bush were more hostile than Obama,” Miller said, referring to the U.S. secretary of state and president at the time.

Another factor distinguishing this year from 1992 is that Shamir faced a formidable opponent, Yitzhak Rabin, who had a history of strong relationships with American leaders, said Peter Medding, a professor of political science at the Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

“Rabin was starting from a much better position,” Medding said.

Netanyahu, by contrast, faces not one but an array of possible opposition leaders, including newly elected Kadima Party leader Shaul Mofaz, Shelly Yachimovich of the Labor and TV personality Yair Lapid. None has the heft of the late Rabin, who by ’92 already had served as prime minister and military chief of staff. And he also was a war hero.

In the absence of a viable peace process and with Obama unpopular among Israeli voters, Medding said, tensions with Obama “may make more voters vote for Netanyahu.”

In Israel as in the United States, voters are likelier to focus on domestic issues than on Iran, the peace process and foreign policy, he said. Netanyahu may face a resurgence of the social protest movement that erupted last summer, and he must address conflicts over military conscription of haredi Orthodox men within his own governing coalition.

The one possible disruptor — as it happens, for both American and Israeli elections — would be a heightening of tensions with Iran. Netanyahu has hinted that Israel may strike Iran’s suspected nuclear weapons program this year, whereas Obama wants Israel to allow diplomacy and sanctions play out.

“If, say, the Israeli Air Force is on the tarmac and they’re careening for takeoff and Obama is seen as pulling them back, maybe” the Obama-Netanyahu relationship would come into play in the election, Medding said. “But I don’t see that happening.”

Miller agreed. Speaking of the chances of a military attack on Iran, he said, “Unless the Iranians give someone a pretext for doing it, it’s not going to happen.”

IDF Chief of Staff Benny Gantz walks by Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (R) and Defence Minister Ehud Barak at an arrival ceremony of captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit at the Tel Nof air force base. october 18, 2011. Schalit was moved into Egypt from captivity in Gaza in a prisoner swap deal including hundreds of Palestinian prisoners to be freed in return for Shalit. Gilad Shalit has been held in captivity by Hamas militants since June 2006. (Yossi Zeliger/FLASH90)

WASHINGTON (JTA) — Has Israel’s game of chicken with Iran jumped the shark?

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak in recent months have been more explicit than ever about the likelihood of an Israeli strike on Iran to keep it from obtaining nuclear weapons capability.

A number of current and former top military officials are now suggesting that the duo has gone too far, turning what was meant to be a calculated bluff into a commitment to a strike that could accelerate Iran’s nuclear program and engulf the region in war.

Are Barak and Netanyahu merely posturing, or are they really intent on waging war?

Last week, Barak marked Israeli Independence Day with a speech dismissing the likelihood that Iran will succumb to diplomatic pressure to end its suspected nuclear weapons program. He said that while the likely success of an Israeli military strike was not “marvelous,” it was preferable to allowing Iran to press forward.

A week earlier, Netanyahu had made a searing Holocaust Remembrance Day speech in which he likened Iran to Nazi Germany and stressed his commitment to Israel’s self-defense.

Such posturing is not novel: Israel, like other parties to longstanding conflicts, for years has used brinksmanship to ward off actual warfare. Statements from its military ending with the threat “we will know how to respond” are routine.

The target of such pronouncements is not only Iran but also the international community, said Steve Rosen, a former foreign policy director for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee who maintains close ties with some of Netanyahu’s top advisers. Western leaders are likelier to act to isolate Iran when they are faced with the real prospect of Israel going it alone, he said.

“It’s no secret that American and European interest starts with Israel doing something,” Rosen said.

Eitan Barak, a Hebrew University expert on international relations (and no relation to the defense minister), described the tactic as one of brinksmanship.

“There is a possibility that Barak is saying in a closed forum, ‘The military option is not on the table, but let’s say it in public in order to keep this position of brinksmanship,’ ” the professor said.

The problem might be that the “closed forum” now encompasses only Barak and Netanyahu, he said.

“If this is a diplomatic game, the game should be stopped when you discuss this with people like the Mossad and the Shabak,” Eitan Barak said, using the Israeli acronym for the Shin Bet internal security service. “But it could be that Netanyahu and Barak decided it’s such an important issue, they should make themselves really warlike even in the Cabinet, so that there will be no doubt in eyes of foreigners and diplomats that they are ready to launch a military attack.”

On April 27, the day after Barak spoke, Yuval Diskin, the former head of the Shin Bet, said he believed that Barak and Netanyahu are serious in contemplating an attack on Iran — and that they are driving Israel into a strike that likely would have severe consequences.

“They create a sense that if the State of Israel does not act there will be a nuclear Iran,” Diskin said. “That part of the sentence, let’s say there’s an element of truth to it — but the second part of the sentence, they tell the public, the ‘idiot’ public, if Israel acts there won’t be an Iranian nuclear bomb. And that’s the part of the sentence that is wrong. After an Israeli attack on Iran, there may well be a dramatic acceleration of the Iranian nuclear program.”

Diskin, speaking to a town hall-type meeting in Kfar Saba, the central Israeli town where he lives, continued: “I do not have confidence in the current leadership of the State of Israel that could bring us into a war with Iran or into a regional war.”

Diskin’s attack was the bluntest so far on Barak and Netanyahu, but he is not alone.

Meir Dagan, the former chief of the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence service, last year delivered similar warnings, and the current military chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz, last week said he believed the Iranian leadership was rational and that the country did not pose an existential threat to Israel.

Rosen noted that many of the critics now speaking were either disgruntled or may entertain political ambitions.

“A lot of them feel snubbed,” he said. “There’s a cadre of security professionals who feel that their views were not adequately taken into account.”

Dagan wanted to stay on as Mossad chief and Diskin had ambitions of replacing him. Ehud Olmert, a former prime minister who over the weekend joined the chorus criticizing Netanyahu, is a longtime rival of Netanyahu’s who is facing a corruption trial in Israel that could bury his comeback prospects.

David Makovsky, a top analyst at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said it was not unusual for the military establishment to exercise greater caution than the political establishment, noting such tensions surfaced in 1981, before Israel took out the Osirak nuclear reactor in Iraq.

“This will be decided by the political echelon, and the security establishment will weigh in, but they won’t necessarily be decisive,” Makovsky said.

None of the officials criticizing Barak and Netanyahu has broken with the Israeli consensus that an Iranian bomb is something to be prevented and not accommodated or “contained.”

The issue concerning the Israeli defense establishment, according to a number of Israeli experts, is whether Barak and Netanyahu have lost site of the utility of threats to strike Iran — to rally the international community toward stopping Iran from acquiring the bomb.

“The threat of an attack remains a tactical measure which has achieved results,” said Shlomo Aronson, a political scientist who was the Schusterman visiting professor of Israel studies at the University of Arizona from 2007 to 2009. “It should not be pursued in practical terms.”

Aronson said that until now, the tactic has helped focus the international community, led by the Obama administration, on isolating Iran through sanctions and diplomatic pressure.

The concern now permeating the Israeli defense establishment is that Barak and Netanyahu are no longer bluffing, said Avraham Sela, a research fellow of the Harry S. Truman Institute for the Advancement of Peace who served as an intelligence officer under Barak when he was military chief of staff in the 1990s.

He noted that in the ‘70s his former commander and Netanyahu were both members of the General Commando Squad, and had preserved from that training the tendency to play one’s cards close to one’s vest.

Barak “remains that commando officer, which means I don’t know to what extent he is calculating and to what extent he is willing to take the risk for such an operation — in the best case a temporary achievement that will maybe give Israel some time and which could eventually instigate Iran even more to get this weapon, even if they haven’t until now sought it,” Sela said.

Sela noted that during his term as chief of staff, during the 1991 Gulf War, Barak had to credibly threaten to strike Iraqi targets in order to get the U.S.-led alliance to take out Iraqi batteries launching missiles. The George H. W. Bush administration feared that an Israeli strike would shatter the coalition of western and Arab states it had cobbled together.

Barak said recently that Israel would suffer no more than 500 deaths in the event of a war following a preemptive strike on Iran.

Gabriel Sheffer, a professor of political science at the Hebrew University who also served under Barak in the military, said the prediction was greeted with much skepticism and derision by the Israeli media and defense establishment.

“It is pretty sure that the people who will be killed, that the number will be much greater,” he said. “I think that this was part of his attempt to persuade everybody Israel should attack Iran.”

Makovksy said Barak and Netanyahu must convey seriousness of intent in order to have the West pay attention.

“Israel is the only country being threatened with its existence, so it has to take it seriously because they’re not a superpower and their window for action closes early,” he said. “They want to get America’s attention, but it doesn’t mean they’re necessarily trigger-happy.”

A general view shows the illegal Ulpana outpost, adjacent to the Beit El Jewish settlement near the Palestinian West Bank city of Ramallah, on April 23, 2012. The Israeli government appeared divided following a ruling by the Supreme Court of Justice to demolish Ulpana before the end of the month as it was set up without government permission on Palestinian land. (Noam Moskowitz/ Flash90)

BEIT EL, West Bank (JTA) — Alex Traiman stands under a tarp in his spacious backyard as his 10-year-old, Tmima, turns cartwheels on the lawn.

“This is our home,” Traiman says, pointing to his single-floor apartment filled with books and children’s toys.

“We did not come here to trample on anyone’s rights — we came here to raise our children with values and ethics and to settle the land of Israel.”

Through the haze on an unusually cold day in late April, the barren Judean Hills and, farther to the west, the modern office towers of the Palestinian city of Ramallah provide the background for his emotion-filled statements. Traiman, a documentary filmmaker, came to Israel from New York with his family eight years ago, moving to the settlement of Beit El.

His apartment is in the Ulpana neighborhood among a block of terraced rows of 14 identical three-story buildings, each with six apartments. Last year, the Israeli High Court of Justice ruled that five of the buildings, including the Traimans’, were to be demolished by May 1 because a Palestinian resident of a nearby village owns the land.

The state had specifically told the court that it would obey that ruling. But on April 27, the State Attorney’s Office notified the court that the government is reneging on the decision pending a review of its policies regarding West Bank structures built on contested and privately owned land.

All sides acknowledge that the resolution in Ulpana, however it turns out, will have significant implications for the entire settlement enterprise.

“With all that is happening — nuclear threats from Iran, instability in Egypt, war in Syria, unrest throughout the world — how have these five buildings, housing 30 dedicated, law-abiding families, become such a flashpoint?” Traiman wants to know.

The Ulpana neighborhood grew from a promise that Benjamin Netanyahu made in December 1996, during his first term as prime minister. Attending the funeral of Eta Tzur and her son, Ephraim, murdered in an ambush shooting not far from their Beit El home, Netanyahu stood by the fresh graves in the small communal cemetery and promised the thousands of mourners that in the Tzurs’ memory, a new neighborhood would be built that “would never, ever be evacuated.”

Eta Tzur’s widower, Yoel, a real estate developer working with Amana, the settlement movement’s construction and housing company, told JTA that he developed the plans for the area and personally investigated the legality of the land purchase.

“As a developer and investor, of course I wouldn’t build here if the land hadn’t been legally purchased,” he said. “Even though this land was promised to us by God, we purchased the land at its full-market value.”

Tzur said he cannot reveal the name or other details of the seller because, according to Palestinian law, any Arab who sells land to a Jew will be put to death.

Construction began in the late 1990s with the establishment of two religious high schools for girls. (In Hebrew, a religious high school for girls is known as an ulpana, thus providing the neighborhood with its name.) Construction on the apartment houses began in 2003-04, and the first residents moved into their apartments in early 2009.

Palestinian residents of the nearby village of Dura al-Kara have claimed from the beginning, however, that the land had never been legally sold, and Israeli courts issued their first stop-work order in September 1999. Since then, numerous stop-work and subsequent demolition orders have been issued.

Despite the rulings, a 2005 report prepared by attorney Talia Sasson for then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon reveals that the Construction and Housing Ministry provided more than $1 million in funding for the neighborhood’s construction. Moreover, settlers who bought apartments in the buildings each received government incentive grants of some $20,000 and Israeli banks issued them mortgages underwritten by the state.

By August 2008, residents of Dura al-Kara, assisted by the Israeli human rights organization Yesh Din, petitioned the Supreme Court asking that the construction be stopped and the buildings not be populated. During the hearings, the state specifically told the court that the Amana company had known that the ostensible Palestinian “seller” did not have the legal right to sell the land.

The state offered to demolish the buildings and, in the last hearing in October 2011, the court issued its final ruling stating that the buildings must be demolished by May 1, 2012.

A day before that October hearing, Amana filed suit in the Jerusalem District Court demanding that the property ownership issues be clarified. However, in issuing its ruling, the Supreme Court stated that based on the state’s evidence, the buildings should be demolished regardless of the decisions in the District Court.

Beit El Mayor Moshe Rosenbaum insists that the Supreme Court ruling is unjust.

“This is merely a land dispute, and it should be settled just like any land dispute,” he said. “And since we have acted in good faith, the buildings should never be demolished. At most, maybe we should compensate the real owners, if it turns out that a fraud was committed.”

But Shlomy Zacharia, one of a team of lawyers representing the Palestinians, insists that the settlers’ claims that the issue “is merely a land dispute” are disingenuous.

“They have known all along — even the state has told them — that the land is not theirs,” he said. “They are acting out of ideological motivations, and ideological motivations must never serve as a justification for acts that are clearly illegal.”

As May 1 approached, the impending demolitions threatened to topple Netanyahu’s coalition. With the scent of elections already wafting in the air, Cabinet ministers and rank-and-file Knesset members from Netanyahu’s Likud Party began staking out increasingly right-wing positions.

The Cabinet held a series of sessions regarding the removal of buildings in the West Bank built on private Palestinian land and set up a committee, headed by retired Justice Edmund Levy, to investigate the matter in depth. In late April, the government decided to authorize three outposts in the West Bank retroactively, drawing harsh criticism from the international community as well as the opposition in Israel.

In his April 27 letter to the court, the state attorney wrote that “the government is pursuing a new policy, by which decisions regarding structures built on land whose ownership is contested will be made on case-by-case merit … after giving due consideration to the broad social implications the implementation of these policies may have on future construction.”

Zacharia says the government “is undoing the rule of law.”

“It is reneging on its own promises and defying the ruling of the Supreme Court,” he told JTA. “Furthermore, it is ignoring the rights of private ownership, which are not only a cornerstone of democracy but are especially necessary in a situation like this because the Palestinians do not have the political clout to influence the government’s decisions.”

Not surprisingly, settlers welcomed the government’s move.

“We are Jewish patriots, and we have come here to live in the spirit of God’s promise to Jacob, that this will be our land,” Rosenbaum said. “We are also law-abiding citizens, and we are convinced that the government will find a way to prevent the demolitions, to prevent such a terrible moral and legal injustice.”

The situation remains unclear. As of Tuesday, the Supreme Court had not yet responded to the state’s letter of April 27.

In a separate case involving two other illegal buildings in Beit El, the state asked for a 90-day extension to reconsider its options; the court granted a 60-day extension.

A military source, speaking with JTA on condition of anonymity, said the military is concerned that extremists among the settlers may “interpret the government’s actions and rejection of court-ordered demolitions as a green light for violent resistance. They may also step up the ‘price tag’ attacks,” the source said, referring to attacks by settlers against Palestinian property.

Thousands of structures that the government has promised the courts it will demolish are scattered throughout the West Bank, including the settlements of Givat Assaf, slated for demolition by July 1, and Amona, which is to be demolished by the end of the year.

In February 2006, the attempt by security forces to take over nine homes in Amona led to clashes in which more than 200 were hurt, including 80 members of the security forces.

“This is not merely a matter of legalities, or justice or private property or even rule of law,” said Danny Dayan, chairman of the Yesha Council of Settlements. “Above all, it’s a matter of whether we should or should not have Jewish homes in Judea and Samaria.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with his father, Benzion, at a memorial day for Yoni Netanyahu at Mount Herzl military cemetary in Jerusalem, June 26, 2007. (Michael Fattal/Flash90)

NEW YORK (JTA) — Benzion Netanyahu — historian, one-time political activist and father of Israel’s prime minister — died Monday in Jerusalem at 102. An accomplished scholar and the patriarch of one of Israel’s most important political families, he also played a surprising and little-known role in American political history.

Netanyahu was born in Poland in 1910 to a family deeply immersed in the world of religious Zionism. His father, Rabbi Nathan Mileikowsky, a popular Zionist preacher, brought the family to British-ruled Palestine in 1920. He Hebraicized the family name to Netanyahu.

In the wake of the Palestinian Arab riots of 1929, Netanyahu was attracted to the militant wing of the Zionist movement, Revisionist Zionism, headed by Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky. His literary talents were recognized early on, and he served as editor in chief of the Revisionist newspaper HaYarden in the 1930s.

In 1940, Jabotinsky sent several of his leading disciples, including Netanyahu and future Knesset member Hillel Kook (better known as Peter Bergson), to the United States to seek funds and public support for the rescue of Europe’s Jews and creation of a Jewish state in Palestine.

“It was a brand new world for us,” Netanyahu told me in one of my interviews with him. “I had never been to America. But I had to learn quickly — there was no time. The world of European Jewry was going up in flames.”

Netanyahu became executive director of the U.S. wing of the Revisionist Zionist movement and editor of its magazine, Zionews. His essays were notable for their passion, political insights and high level of fluency in a language he only recently had mastered. One 1944 editorial criticized mainstream Jewish leaders as “too cautious, too appeasing, and too ready to swallow the meaningless statements of sympathy that [are] issued from high places.”

Bergson and Netanyahu employed tactics that were not commonly used by the American Jewish community at the time, including placing full-page advertisements in The New York Times and other newspapers. Some of the ads challenged the Roosevelt administration’s stance on refugees. Others took aim at the British government’s White Paper policy of closing Palestine to Jewish immigration. One that Netanyahu authored was headlined “The White Paper Must Be Smashed, if Millions of Jews are to be Saved!”

Netanyahu divided his time between Revisionist headquarters in New York City and Capitol Hill, where he sought to mobilize congressional backing for the Zionist cause. At the time, mainstream Jewish leaders such as Rabbi Stephen S. Wise were strong supporters of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and stayed away from the Republicans. Netanyahu, by contrast, actively cultivated ties to prominent Republicans such as former President Herbert Hoover, as well as dissident Democrats such as Sen. Elbert Thomas of Utah, a Mormon.

In 1944, Netanyahu sought to have the Republican Party endorse Jewish rescue and statehood.

In the months leading up to that year’s Republican national convention, the Revisionists undertook what they called “a systematic campaign of enlightenment” about Palestine among GOP leaders such as Hoover, Sen. Robert Taft, who chaired the convention’s resolutions committee, and Rep. Clare Booth Luce, wife of the publisher of Time and Life magazines.

The GOP adopted an unprecedented plank demanding “refuge for millions of distressed Jewish men, women, and children driven from their homes by tyranny” and the establishment of a “free and democratic” Jewish state. The Republicans’ move compelled the Democrats to compete for Jewish support and treat the Jewish vote as if it were up for grabs. The Democratic National Convention, which was held the following month in Chicago, for the first time endorsed “unrestricted Jewish immigration and colonization” of Palestine and the establishment of “a free and democratic Jewish commonwealth.”

These events helped ensure that support for Zionism and later Israel would become a permanent part of American political culture. Every subsequent Republican and Democratic convention has adopted a similar plank. To do less became politically inconceivable.

In recent years, pundits have speculated on the extent to which Benzion Netanyahu may have influenced his son’s actions as prime minister. While it is difficult to draw a direct connection between father and son on specific policy matters, there is a parallel in their efforts to cultivate support for Israel on both sides of the political aisle.

While working as a political activist in the 1940s, Benzion Netanyahu also managed to complete a doctorate in medieval Jewish history at Dropsie College in Philadelphia. He later taught Jewish history at Dropsie, and then at the University of Denver and Cornell University. Netanyahu’s magisterial study, “The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain,” widely considered a groundbreaking work in his field, was published in 1995. He spent time in both Israel and the United States over the years, returning to Israel permanently in 1976, the same year his son Yoni was killed while leading the Entebbe rescue operation.

Notoriously reluctant to grant interviews, Netanyahu generally succeeded in eluding the spotlight. He only recently agreed to cooperate in the first documentary on his life and legacy, by Israeli filmmaker Moshe Levinson, which coincidentally is scheduled to premiere this week in Jerusalem.

(Rafael Medoff is founding director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies in Washington. His latest book, co-authored with Sonja Schoepf Wentling, is “Herbert Hoover and the Jews: The Origins of the ‘Jewish Vote’ and Bipartisan Support for Israel.”)

Arab and Israeli students holding hands at the Max Rayne Hand in Hand School for Bilingual Education in Jerusalem. (Kobi Gideon/Flash90/JTA)

JERUSALEM (JTA) — The two seventh-grade girls walk together down the hall, their heads touching as they talk excitedly. Dana’s dark auburn hair is pulled back in a ponytail. Waard’s head is covered by a hijab, the traditional Arab headscarf, held with a fashionable pin.

Dana is Jewish and lives in the German Colony, a few miles away. Waard is Muslim and lives in the nearby neighborhood of Beit Tzaffafa. Best friends since the first grade, they tell JTA that they were talking about Wednesday’s upcoming school ceremony to mark Yom Hazikaron and Yom Ha’atzmaut, Memorial Day for Israel’s Fallen Soldiers and Israeli Independence Day.

Selected to read a poem by an Israeli poet, Dana is busy with rehearsals. Waard will not attend the ceremony, but instead will meet with the other Arab students to talk about the day’s meaning for them.

Afterward, all the students, Arabs and Jews, together with their Arab and Jewish teachers, will join to discuss the significance of the day for them.

“It’ll be Wednesday for both of us, but it doesn’t mean the same thing to us,” Dana explains. “One of my great-grandparents died in the War of Independence. And he was fighting people that Waard’s great-grandparents probably knew. Maybe he killed some of them. And on Independence Day, I’ll be happy because there’s a Jewish state.”

“And I’ll be sad because of the Nakba,” Waard says, using the Arabic word for “catastrophe” to refer to the military loss and displacement that resulted from Israel’s War of Independence in 1948.

“We’re really OK with this,” Dana says. “We’re friends and it’s chill.”

“You don’t have to think the same to be friends,” Waard adds.

Dana and Waard are students at the Max Rayne Bilingual School in Jerusalem, a K-12 public school with some 530 students, part of the Hand in Hand nonprofit educational organization.

Hand in Hand sponsors two more bilingual schools, one in the Wadi Ara valley in central Israel and one in the Galilee in the north. (Two additional bilingual schools in the country are not part of the Hand in Hand network.)

Founded in 1998, the schools are funded by private contributions and grants from several international foundations, as well as standard public education allocations from the Education Ministry.

Throughout Israel, few opportunities exist for meaningful interaction between Jews and Arabs; schools are almost completely segregated. Bilingual schools, such as this one, seek to foster coexistence through cross-cultural learning.

“Teaching two languages, nationalities and cultures, together with contradicting historical narratives, requires deep commitment and a sense of mission to meet the challenges,” says Max Rayne principal Nadia Kinani, an Arab Israeli from Nazareth who now lives in Jerusalem.

The mission is especially challenging in the weeks that follow the Passover holiday. That’s when Israel marks, in rapid succession, Holocaust Memorial Day, the Memorial Day for Fallen Soldiers and Independence Day. In recent years, Arab Israelis have been marking the Nakba on May 15.

“Pedagogically and ideologically, this is a difficult time,” Kinani says. “But in truth, we prepare for these days all year in everything we do — with our vision of equality and understanding, by teaching our children to ask questions, with our pedagogical methods, and by emphasizing that we can deal with differences in a respectful, nonjudgmental and nonviolent way.”

On Holocaust Memorial Day, the entire school attends the same ceremony and stands at solemn attention as the sirens wail throughout the country to mark the day.

“In Arab schools, children learn about the Holocaust as history, but they do not understand what it meant and means for the Jewish people,” Kinani explains. “We believe that all students, Arab and Jewish, should learn about the Holocaust. In an age-appropriate way, different for every grade, we teach them about racism, about genocide, about our moral responsibilities as human beings.”

Suha, an Arab-Israeli lawyer and mother of a sixth-grader, who preferred to give only her first name, sees the impact that joint programming can have. As a child, she says, “I was resentful of how the Jews seemed to always justify everything they do because of the Holocaust. Because my son goes to school here, I understand much more now. I don’t always agree with the politics, but I understand and deeply respect the pain.”

Memorial Day and Independence Day, however, are more difficult to teach and to observe.

“These days are filled with symbols that have very different meanings for the two groups: victor and the vanquished, the Jews who won the war and the Arabs who lost the war,” Kinani says. “There is an emphasis on flying the flag and singing the national anthem, ‘Hatikvah,’ and this is problematic for Arabs because it excludes them and does not relate to their experiences.”

This is why, she explains, the Hand in Hand schools have devised the separate and then communal ceremonies that Dana and Waard describe. “We are not avoiding the differences. We are teaching our students to acknowledge and respect them,” Kinani says.

Esther Sivan, the director of a nongovernmental organization promoting the rights of the disabled and the mother of two girls in elementary school, says she makes every effort to attend the ceremonies with her daughters.

“We recognize our differences and we recognize what we share. That is very honest and very powerful.”

Officially, the Education Ministry-supervised school does not observe the Nakba. The Nakba Law, passed last year, stipulates that the Finance Ministry may withhold or reduce budgets from government-funded bodies that observe the day.

Israeli Arab parents, however, often take the initiative, organizing an afterschool Nakba program, Kinani says.

Many Israeli Jewish parents also attend, says Ron, whose child is in fifth grade and who also did want to give his full name.

“Going to a Nakba observance doesn’t make me less of a Jew, an Israeli or a Zionist,” he says. “My grandparents were Holocaust survivors. I love this country and I have fought in its wars and, sadly, my son will also probably have to go to the army when he finishes high school. But none of that prevents me from trying to understand a different point of view.”

Sivan says that initially she was concerned that the bilingual, bicultural education would in some way weaken her daughters’ Jewish and Israeli identity.

“But in fact, the opposite has happened,” she observes. “Because they have to learn and understand someone else’s culture, they also have to learn and understand their own culture better.”

Mahmoud, the father of a ninth-grader, says that when he was a child in an Arab village in the North, “We were forced to celebrate Israel’s Independence Day, to fly the Israeli flag and even to learn about the different units of the army. But my son is learning about his own culture and history, and that will make him a better Israeli.”

Kinani concludes, “Some people accuse us of living in a bubble. But I think that the rest of the world is in a bubble and we are living reality, because reality is that Jews and Arabs cannot avoid our differences and we cannot continue to avoid each other.”

“This school looks like a prison,” one of my fellow travelers whispers.

Many of the children are huddled in coats; schools in this neighborhood do not have heat, and the unexpected rain and cool air chill the room.

Overcrowded classrooms, minimal instruction hours in core subjects and a shortage of qualified teachers have taken a toll on the country’s education system. These children must study in an NGO-funded afterschool program to gain the basic academic foundation they need to break the cycle of poverty.

This scene took place last month not in a Third World country but in Israel — a country that leads the world in patents per capita, is known for its technology startups and boasts 10 Nobel laureates, but also leads in some other frightening statistics.

On the most recent PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) exam, Israeli students ranked 25th out of students from 25 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries in academic achievements. Israel’s weakest students scored last among the weakest students from the participating OECD countries; its strongest students were 24th out of 25.

Israeli children are products of an education system that has been in decline for decades. Studies by many leading organizations, including Israel’s own Taub Center, reveal the link between a country’s educational achievement and its economic stability. As Israel’s education levels have decreased, wages have declined and the quality of life has dropped.

Israel likely will have to wrestle with the ramifications of having at least one generation of undereducated children who are ill suited to compete in today’s world. If trends continues, wages will continue to fall, and more people will be underemployed or unemployed and increasingly reliant on the government for subsistence. What kind of picture does that paint for Israel’s future?

To be sure, education is just one of Israel’s pressing societal issues. Last summer, Israelis demanded access to more affordable housing, medical care and other basic necessities. In addition to the need for social infrastructure, outside pressures are also very real. Just last month, approximately 200,000 children in southern Israel could not even attend school because of missile attacks from Gaza.

The answers to Israel’s education woes are not simple, but here are a few steps Israel could consider to move in the right direction:

* Put more emphasis and resources on the core subjects critical for participation in a global economy. I have been hearing demands recently for increased emphasis on Jewish studies or Zionist history in the public school curriculum; I won’t comment on the importance of these subjects. I will say that Israeli children must excel in math, science and literacy to succeed in a global workforce. Those core subjects need to get the attention first.

* Improve training, support and pay for teachers. Israeli teachers are woefully underpaid when compared to their OECD peers. They also receive less training and professional development. Give Israeli teachers the tools, training and mentoring they need to improve classroom outcomes.

* Raise the standards for becoming a teacher. If the government gives more, it should get more in return. Most Israeli teachers graduate from one of many three-year teacher colleges; the range of requirements and quality varies greatly among the schools. Teachers are not required to have a four-year university degree, let alone a master’s or other advanced degree. Require the academic excellence of the teachers we want from the children.

* Reach the children who have been “left behind.” Systemic change takes time. Meanwhile, a whole generation of children remains ill equipped to handle the complexities of today’s workforce. Get them the programs they need to catch up and to maximize their academic achievement. It may feel like a band-aid approach, but we can’t let communities bleed to death.

These are just four steps. There are many others to consider and the challenge can seem overwhelming. However, as the sense of urgency surrounding this crisis continues to grow, I am confident that a partnership of government, NGOs and philanthropists can create the long-term solution that will enable Israel to not just survive but thrive.

(Karen Berman is the executive director of the Youth Renewal Fund, a New York-based organization that provides supplemental education to disadvantaged Israeli children. The views expressed here are her own.)