Rest In Peace, Daniel Doron
I am saddened to report the death of my friend — and a good friend of liberty — Daniel Doron. He was founder and director of the Israel Centre for Social and Economic Progress (ICSEP), which promoted market solutions to economic and organizational problems in the country. Though Israeli politicians were generally consumed by anti-competitive socialist policies, his close contacts with Israeli politicians on all sides enabled him the the Centre to achieve a number of successful market reforms.
For much of his lifetime, Israel’s politicians were consumed by the conduct of wars and intifadas. He himself, born in 1929, served in Air Force Intelligence in the 1948 Arab-Israeli conflicts. But rather than allow such hostilities to extinguish liberty, Daniel kept on championing freedom and the benefits it would bring, even in difficult times. As he cheerfully told me during the first Intifada: “Our government may be in a state of conflict, but we can still do something to make the buses run on time.”
He recognised that mutual prosperity was the best way to promote peace and urged market reforms on the Palestinian leaders as much as the Israeli ones. He write a number of prominent articles in The Wall Street Journal and other international papers explaining the importance of peace in spreading prosperity, and the importance of prosperity and interdependence on maintaining peace. In this he was informed by his time at the University of Chicago's Committee on Social Thought and the ideas of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, who were teachers there, and with whom he continued a lasting friendship and collaboration — particularly Friedman. All three were members of the Mont Pèlerin Society, an international forum of liberal economists and social scientists, from which he garnered more pro-freedom ideas, and intellectual and moral support.
He served in various offices on the fringes of Israeli politics, advising on economic policy and entrepreneurship, and promoting pro-freedom politicians. He also had a boundless feeling for art, literature and culture: he prided himself on having seen every one of Shakespeare’s plays — even travelling specially to London to catch a rare performance of King John — and among other things, he arranged a number of exhibitions for the artist Shalom Moskovitz (whose works are on display in national museums and galleries in Paris, New York, Amsterdam, Stockholm and elsewhere). He also translated Catcher in the Rye and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man into Hebrew.
Cheerful, gregarious, larger than life, and never backward in coming forward, Daniel Doron will be remembered internationally as an active, energetic, enterprising and effective promoter of social and economic freedom.