MONTREAL — Don’t expect to see Israeli political economist Bernard Avishai invited to address a future gathering of Orthodox rabbis or Shas party supporters.

As the Montreal-born consulting editor at the Harvard Business Review made abundantly clear at a recent talk at the Jewish Public Library and argues forcefully in his most recent book, The Hebrew Republic: How a Secular Democracy and Global Enterprise Will Bring About Israel Peace at Last, true peace and prosperity for Israel will come only with the Jewish state’s becoming a “Hebrew republic.”

That would include Israel transforming itself into a truly secular and democratic “Hebrew-speaking civil society,” where the Hebrew language is the common bond for all citizens, where connections between religion and state are severed, and where Israeli entrepreneurs lead the country into the integrated global economy modelled after the European Union.

To make sure all of its citizens are treated equally, the Law of Return would also have to be replaced with legislation in which every immigrant – Jewish or not – undergoes the same process to earn full citizenship, such as five years of residency and learning Hebrew.

If all this sounds revolutionary to some of us, Avishai himself doesn’t think so, since he said it’s what is to be expected in any nation that calls itself democratic.

Born Bernard Shaicovitch, Avishai, 59, attended United Talmud Torahs and Camp Massad and is adamant that there is no alternative to a democratic solution for peace.

The policies remaining in place since Israel’s founding “make absolutely no sense in 2008,” Avishai said, “because it makes nonsense out of the idea of Israeli nationality, nonsense of what ‘Israel-ness’ means.”

As things stand now, he said, Israel is actually two states. The first is already a “Hebrew-speaking civil society,” but the second is a “state-within-a-state,” where Israeli Arabs do not share with other citizens the obvious rights they are entitled to – such as the right to purchase land – and where Jerusalem is becoming a “Judean reality” dominated by Orthodox Jews and the settlement ethos.

“In Jerusalem today, more than 50 per cent of first-graders are in haredi schools,” Avishai said, “with another 15 per cent in ‘national Orthodox schools’ and 30 per cent in Arab schools.”

He said that while entrenched Israeli institutions such as the Law of Return, religious control of marriage and divorce, and ensuring Jewish land ownership might have been acceptable 60 years ago when the state was founded, there is simply no place for them now.

His “progressive” friends, who are among Israel’s elite professional class, “know Israeli Arabs are growing and becoming more alienated,” Avishai said, but the reality is that these same friends would “not fight the Judeans” – meaning Orthodox Jews – for the sake of Israel’s Arab citizens.

He said that most Israelis and Palestinians have come to a consensus on peace process issues like Jerusalem, Palestinian refugees and boundaries, but it’s inside Israel that the real danger lies, with marginalized, alienated and resentful citizens who will never accept a state where they are not fully treated as equals.

A friend of Avishai’s told him: “The Arabs of Israel don’t want us here. It’s not going to end with a Palestinian state. The problem is not a Palestinian state. It is the Israeli Arabs.”

Ironically, Avishai noted, statistics show that 45 per cent of Israeli Arabs actually “feel closer” to Israeli Jews than they do to Palestinian Arabs, and that 78 per cent of Israeli Arabs would rather live in Israel than in a Palestinian state.

On the other hand, they risk becoming more and more radicalized, and some are turning “jihadist” because of their sense of being increasingly shunned within Israel. “Those who are turned aside become the most radical,” Avishai said.

It will take one or two generations, he said, for Israel to come “up to code” in evolving into the state he envisions, which would be fully integrated politically and in the world economy, using the European Union as a model, and where Arab and Jew come to truly trust one another

“I’m not proposing anything original,” he said. “The peace movement we need has to be led by its business-class elite, with an integrated relationship with its neighbours and Europe.”

Under Avishai’s model, however, would Israel continue to be a “Jewish state,” in the sense of having a Jewish majority?

“If I live in a Hebrew culture and want to be any Jew I want to be, what’s the problem? The problem is not whether a Hebrew-speaking civil society should exist. It already does.”

The question, he said, is whether a “Hebrew state” also needs to be a Jewish state under the control of the religious. “You don’t need a state to be Orthodox. You need a state where you have the right to be Orthodox.”

Avishai’s appearance was sponsored by the Norman Berman Memorial Lecture Fund in collaboration with Canadian Friends of Peace Now.