Another worrying trend for Israel's future:

In July 2007 Prime Minister Ehud Olmert received an official report about the status of higher education in Israel from the Israel Council for Higher Education, headed by former Minister of Finance Avraham (Baige) Shochat.

The council set out to interpret why the universities in Israelhad undergone a "deep structural crisis" during recent years, and to offer solutions. ...

According to Prof. Menahem Yaari, president of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, the report was totally ignored. Yaari has even launched a letter to Prime Minister Olmert, Finance Minister Ronnie Bar-On, and Education Minister Yuli Tamir in which he asks, "What happened to the Shochat Report?" ...

"All of the criteria used to measure the quality of higher education – average age of the academic staff, student/lecturer ratio, research budgets, etc. – point to its obvious decline in Israel," Yaari claims. "Israel's government is sitting on its hands while our higher education is being destroyed." ...

Yaari assimilates this to a growing trend evident in the country, which he terms "an anti-intellectual inclination." In his opinion the country's leaders are quick to cast aside higher education on the pretense that army training is enough to create new blood for the high-tech community, which they see as Israel's leading resource. The trend "is the modern Israeli version of the aversion to intellectualism," he said.

Last month the Economist ran a special report on Israel, painting a gloomy picture of a political system that is totally dysfunctional and unable to make the necessary changes to itself or the country's critical problems. The growing anti-intellectual, pro-militarist attitude doesn't help.