Gidi Grinstein makes a living finding blind spots. But he isn’t an ophthalmologist.
When the French employed the latest in 1919 trench technology to fight a war in 1939, that was a blind spot.
When Kodak failed to notice the ascendancy of digital photography and nearly went out of business, that, too, was a blind spot.
And, closest to Grinstein’s line of work, when Yitzhak Rabin regularly brought a battalion of bodyguards to meet with Palestinians but only three when addressing Israeli critics, that was a serious blind spot.
“In Israel, the margins of error are very narrow. It is exceptionally important for us to stay relevant,” said Grinstein, the 36-year-old co-founder of Re’ut (“vision”), an Israeli think-tank that works exclusively for the Israeli government free of charge (www.reut-institute.org).
“If, say, Sweden is irrelevant for a year or two, it’s hard to imagine anything will happen to their national security. In Israel we would inevitably experience a very serious setback. That is why [Re’ut] is here. … We specialize in identifying blind spots and communicating these to the government.”
Grinstein will appear at a number of private Bay Area events leading up to a public speech at Los Altos Hills’ Congregation Beth Am on Sunday, Feb. 25.
He learned his lessons about the difficulties members of the Israeli government have in making informed decisions the hard way — by serving in government. Grinstein was the man responsible for coordinating the Israeli delegation that negotiated with the PLO at Camp David.
“In this capacity, I saw the government of Israel was consistently falling short when it came to thinking strategically about long-term implications of its decisions and actions,” he said.
And if you think this isn’t still plaguing Israel today, he notes, you obviously slept through that war in Lebanon over the summer.
The problem isn’t that too few informed people have the prime minister’s ear, it’s that too many do — and they don’t talk to each other. As a result, a morass of different views bombard Israel’s leader, with each coming from a person looking at the world solely through his or her own narrow scope. It doesn’t take long for a prime minister in charge of vitally important security decisions to begin to feel like a man filling out a betting slip at a bar and being showered with conflicting nuggets of advice from nearby patrons.
Meanwhile, the prime minister has only three people in his bureau directly responsible for national security issues.
“I used to be one of those people,” says Grinstein, who co-founded Re’ut with Los Altos resident Noa Eliasaf-Shoham. “So I know how weak this structure is.”
If Grinstein could wave a magic wand and change the composition of Israeli politics — and he’s doing this more slowly and methodically without the aid of sorcery — one of the first things he’d do is create a far larger and better-resourced national security council, and “force all government agencies to go through it; today a lot of people have direct access to the prime minister, which is bad.”
But Israel’s governmental structure isn’t just bad for critical wartime decisions. Grinstein also argues that it effectively keeps Israel poorer than it ought to be.
Re’ut research claims nations underachieving on socio-economic performance usually feature “electoral systems which generate short and unstable tenures, fragmented legislatures and a fragmented executive.”
Sound familiar?
“No other country among developed nations has a political system as weak as Israel’s,” he said. “In other words, we have the weakest system of government among developed nations.”
Hammering home his point, he notes that the World Economic Forum ranks Israel in the top five in terms of technology and education, and its business sector clocks in at No. 8. But its government? No. 29.
Israel’s status quo works well for “those who have disproportionate power in a political system that is so fragmented — ultra-religious groups, labor unions, all of those parties that represent a single-issue constituency.”
If the large parties of Labor, Likud and Kadima unite to enact stabilizing measures, Grinstein believes Israel can mend its government. If, as in the past, Ehud Olmert and Kadima attempt to “own the reforms” then it will fail. Again.
The mismanagement of the Lebanon war nearly sparked major reform, he said. “Changes like this occur when there’s a serious crisis. Look at France: The Fourth Republic was an absolute failure. It took the crisis in Algeria compounded with an internal crisis in France to [bring about] the Fifth Republic [in 1959], which is one of the most powerful democracies in Europe.”
The window of opportunity provided by Lebanon “may have been closed. But it is only a matter of time before another crisis. And people understand the root cause of all these setbacks is a failing government structure.”
Gidi Grinstein will speak 7:30 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 25 at Congregation Beth Am, 26790 Arastradero Road., Los Altos Hills. For more information call Sara Bronstein at (650) 619-3513.