Thought experiment

In 1897 the First Zionist Congress in Basel adopted the programme to ‘establish a home for the Jewish people in Eretz Israel secured under public law’. It took only 51 years for this dream to be realised with the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 on the basis of a decision by the United Nations Organisation. And it took less than 50 years for Israel to become a thriving ‘revolutionary state’ (Adelman, 2008), despite a continuing deep conflict with parts of the Arab world and some serious domestic problems (Shavit, 2013).

Zionism and the State of Israel are an extreme case of deliberate efforts to radically change a trajectory of history, which can serve as a test case of the potential and limits of present mainstream policy analysis to help political leaders and other future-affecting decision makers to influence significantly alternative futures.

In this volume many interesting findings on policy analysis in Israel are presented. To add another perspective and to pose a challenge to the global community of policy analysts, in this foreword I claim that Israeli is a success story mainly without the benefit of policy analysis. Israel's success could be attributed, at least in part, to not relying on ‘normal’ policy analysis in some of its most critical choices, which required leaping to higher states of being rather than optimising prevailing ones. This leads to a double lesson from the experience of Israel (and some other newly created countries, such as Singapore): (1) To significantly assist political leaders in shaping crucial aspects of the future for the better, policy analysis must undergo a quantum jump to what I call ‘grand-policy professionalism’; (2) even given such professionalism, many fundamental policy choices depend largely on the quality of political leadership, culture, social negotiation and historic processes rather than on deliberate pondering – with ‘judgement’ (Vickers, [1965] 1995), ‘intuition’ (Duggan, 2013; Klein, 2013) and creativity (Joas,1996; Csikszentmihalyi, [1996] 2013) playing a crucial but not well understood part.

To set the stage let us engage in a thought experiment: assume that in 1897 the emerging Zionist movement had a top-quality policy analysis unit equipped with all knowledge available in 2014 and asked for its opinion on the chances of establishing in the twentieth century a viable Jewish State in the Promised Land, which at that time was a part of the Ottoman Empire.