Strategic planning for the rich and famous

Making up somewhat for yesterday’s insult, The NYT today reported on At 60, Israel Redefines Roles for Itself and for Jews Elsewhere.

The conference seems like an extravagance:

But there is another form of celebration planned, and its sponsors believe it says something about the national character: a three-day conference of some of the best minds from around the world on some of the biggest challenges facing humankind — and especially the Jews — in the coming decades.“The brain enriches the pocket, not the other way around,” Shimon Peres, Israel’s president and the patron of the conference, said in an interview. “We are a small land and a small people, but we can become a daring world laboratory, and that is our desire and plan.”

Nearly 700 guests are expected to take part next week in 35 discussion groups. They include statesmen like Henry A. Kissinger, Vaclav Havel, Tony Blair and Joschka Fischer, but also Sergey Brin of Google, Terry Semel of Yahoo and Rupert Murdoch, along with seven Jewish Nobel laureates and President Bush.

It’s a chance, I suppose, for these people to act important. I have doubts that much will come of this conference outside of some really nice sounding declarations.

Still:

In fact, what are billed as global challenges — terrorism, Iran — seem to be somehow especially Jewish and Israeli ones. The organizers say this is not coincidental or unusual and point as an example to Hitler, who posed an enormous threat to the world but focused particularly on the Jews.“Cataclysms always seem to affect Jews first,” remarked Stuart E. Eizenstat, a senior official in the Clinton and Carter administrations, who wrote an essay that forms a basis for the conference. “Go back to the Black Plague. It was not a Jewish issue, but it had particular impact on Jews because they were blamed for it.”

Not surprisingly the Arab leaders who were invited haven’t accepted yet. In a triumph of absurd hope, the organizers anticipate that a few might be able to tear themselves away from Naqba celebrations to join a discussion on the future of the Jews (that would rather deny.)

However cynical I am about the value of the “strategic planning” likely to emerge from the conference, it reflects an important reality.

Today Israel’s Jewish population of 5.5 million is the world’s largest, just ahead of that of the United States, which is slowly declining through low birth rate and intermarriage.

Israel is, more and more, the center of the Jewish world.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.