JERUSALEM

WHATEVER may be going on in the cultural and intellectual life of other countries in the Middle East, here in Israel--in the midst of a bloody and protracted war, with its civilian population under constant threat of deadly terrorist attack, in the wake of the collapse of Ariel Sharon's national unity government and the calling of new elections, and as a severely ailing economy takes its daily toll--they have just held a remarkably well-attended conference on The Federalist.

Why The Federalist--Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay's authoritative exposition of the principles of the American Constitution--in Israel? And why just now?

The immediate occasion for the conference was the publication of the first Hebrew translation of The Federalist. Both conference and translation are initiatives of the Shalem Center (disclosure: this magazine's editor sits on the center's board). Founded in Jerusalem eight years ago by a small group of enterprising intellectuals led by Yoram Hazony and Dan Polisar, late '80s Princeton graduates and then-recent immigrants to Israel, Shalem has in a short time grown into a respected and influential institution. It publishes a magazine in Hebrew (Techelet) and English (Azure) on Jewish politics and thought; it supports senior scholars from Israel and abroad (including Michael Oren, author of the New York Times bestseller Six Days of War); it takes strong stands on divisive public policy issues (such as the battle over the tendentious accounts some Israeli textbooks offer of the alleged injustice at the heart of the Zionist enterprise); and, last but not least, it is engaged in translating classics of political thought into Hebrew. The Federalist is only the latest on a list that includes Friedrich von Hayek's The Road to Serfdom and Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France.

Shalem, plainly, is a think tank with a point of view, and its success has redounded to the benefit of liberal democracy in Israel. For by the late 1990s when Shalem began to make its presence felt, Israel had gone more than 50 years (stretching back before the creation of the state) without a conservative party that drew sustenance from and argued for ideas. Which means that for more than 50 years, the Left in Israel had faced no serious challenge on the plane of ideas. And as most any classic of liberal thought will tell you (but many left-liberals in Israel seem to have forgotten), a dominant party deprived of a worthy opposition to prod and provoke it inevitably grows self-righteous, sluggish, and stale.

The appearance of The Federalist in Hebrew also comes at a time when debate about whether Israel needs a written constitution, and if so what kind, has begun to spread beyond the small circle of Israeli academics who had long championed the idea. Many on both the right and the left in Israel share the sense that the political system is in a state of disrepair, too vulnerable to the demands of the ultra-orthodox and to manipulation by tiny fringe parties, haphazard in its protection of individual rights, and unclear about the role of the Supreme Court and the status of judicial review. Given this emerging consensus, it was wise of the Shalem Center to seek out the left-liberal faculties of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv University to co-host the Federalist conference. And it was wise of the universities to agree to the project.