Adaptation to gentile rule enabled Jews to preserve their nationhood without a land for a long while. But with the advent of populist democracies, politically powerless Jews became so tempting a target that disaster was inevitable. Although Zionism “tried to develop a ‘new Jew’,”Harvard Prof. Ruth Weiss argued last week (in the second annual Bernstein Memorial Lecture), there were still left in Israel vestiges of the ‘old Jew’ ” who was habitually politically accommodating ”. It prevents Israel, she believes, from trying “to convince its neighbors and the world that it expects their accommodation to the needs of the Jews.”

Capitalism created, undoubtedly, the most momentous advances in human welfare in the last millennium. In less than three centuries, it has extended and enriched human life to a greater extent than in the former ten millennia. Liberating masses of people from slaving for mere survival, it has provided many with unimagined wealth and with the potential to do both good and evil on an unprecedented scale.

Like all spontaneous human creations, capitalism was a protracted, complex incremental, perhaps unique, process. It was propelled after 1750 by gains in knowledge, especially in technology. Yet, while both were necessary prerequisites, they were not sufficient by themselves. China, Greece and the Islamic world all excelled in them, yet failed to create sustained economic growth.

The publication last week of two documents: one, the State Attorney’s Office protocol suggesting a cover-up by its top members; the second, a remarkable interview with Hebrew University law professor Ruth Gavison, raises many questions about the legal system’s ethos and role. Gavison, a distinguished jurist, criticizes the legal establishment for acting as a closed guild, and for trying to impose a Western, secularist, liberal ethos on a pluralistic society. But actually, the legal establishment, especially the Justice Ministry, is thoroughly illiberal.

Like successive marriages, the blind faith of Israelis that “clean, new” leadership will set all wrongs right represents the triumph of hope over experience. Again and again, our statist distributive system corrupts politics and brings out the worst, even in the best. Rampant statism has ground the Soviet empire to dust, and caused us disaster after disaster. Yet, after each catastrophe, we search amidst the rubble for a new white hope, clinging to the illusion that given the “right” leadership, Israel can revive itself without paying the painful cost of true reform.