Baha’i temple in Haifa is a successful tourist attraction that has created revenue for Israel. Lebanon forbade the showing of the Walt Disney production
In such a climate, it is natural that young Israelis seek both to get away from an Arab world that has ostracized them and to defy such rejectionism—as if to say, “The more you try to lock me in, the more I will show you I can get out.” For the same reason, it was natural for Israelis to embrace the Internet, software, computer, and telecommunications arenas. In these industries, borders, distances, and shipping costs are practically irrelevant. As Israeli venture capitalist Orna Berry told us, “High-tech telecommunications became a national sport to help us fend against the claustrophobia that is life in a small country surrounded by enemies.”6
This was a matter of necessity, rather than mere preference or convenience.
Because Israel was forced to export to faraway markets, Israeli entrepreneurs developed an aversion to large, readily identifiable manufactured goods with high shipping costs, and an attraction to small, anonymous components and software. This, in turn, positioned Israel perfectly for the global turn toward knowledge- and innovation-based economies, a trend that continues today.
It is hard to estimate how much the Arab boycott and other international embargoes—like France’s military ban—have cost Israel over the past sixty years, in terms of lost markets and the difficulties imposed on the nation’s economic development. Estimates range as high as $100 billion. Yet the opposite is just as difficult to guess: What is the value of the attributes that Israelis have developed as a result of the constant efforts to crush their nation’s development?
Today, Israeli companies are firmly integrated into the economies of China, India, and Latin America. Because, as Orna Berry says, telecommunications became an early priority for Israel, every major telephone company in China relies on Israeli telecom equipment and software. And China’s third-largest social-networking Web site, which services twenty-five million of the country’s young Web surfers, is actually an Israeli start-up called Koolanoo, which means “all of us” in Hebrew. It was founded by an Israeli whose family emigrated from Iraq.
In the ultimate demonstration of nimbleness, the Israeli venture capitalists who invested in Koolanoo when it was a Jewish social-networking site have utterly transformed its identity, moving all of its management to China, where young Israeli and Chinese executives work side by side.
Gil Kerbs, an Israeli alumnus of Unit 8200, also spends a lot of time in China. When he left the IDF, he picked up and moved to Beijing to study Chinese intensively, working one-on-one with a local instructor—for five hours each day for a full year—while also holding a job at a Chinese company, so he could build a business network there. Today he is a venture capitalist in Israel, specializing in the Chinese market. One of his Israeli companies is providing voice-biometric technology to China’s largest retail bank. He told us that Israelis actually have an easier time doing business in China than in Europe. “For one, we were in China before the ‘tourists’ arrived,” he says, referring to those who have only in recent years identified China as an emerging market. “Second, in China there is no legacy of hostility to Jews. So it’s actually a more welcoming environment for us.”7
Israelis are far ahead of their global competitors in penetrating such markets, in part because they had to leapfrog the Middle East and search for new opportunities. The connection between the young Israeli backpackers dispersed around the globe and Israeli technology entrepreneurs’ penetration of foreign markets is clear. By the time they are out of their twenties, not only are most Israelis tested in discovering exotic opportunities abroad, but they aren’t afraid to enter unfamiliar environments and engage with cultures very different from their own. Indeed, military historian Edward Luttwak estimates that many postarmy Israelis have visited over a dozen countries by age thirty-five.8 Israelis thrive in new economies and uncharted territory in part because they have been out in the world, often in pursuit of the Book.
One example of this avid internationalism is Netafim, an Israeli company that has become the largest provider of drip irrigation systems in the world. Founded in 1965, Netafim is a rare example of a company that bridges Israel’s low- tech, agricultural past to the current boom in cleantech.
Netafim was created by Simcha Blass, the architect of one of the largest infrastructure projects undertaken in the early years of the state. Born in Poland, he was active in the Jewish self-defense units organized in Warsaw during World War I. Soon after arriving in Israel in the 1930s, he became chief engineer for Mekorot, the national water company, and planned the pipeline and canal that would bring water from the Jordan River and Sea of Galilee to the arid Negev.
Blass got the idea for drip irrigation from a tree growing in a neighbor’s backyard, seemingly “without water.” The giant tree, it turns out, was being nourished by a slow leak in an underground water pipe. When modern plastics became available in the 1950s, Blass realized that drip irrigation was technically feasible. He patented his invention and made a deal with a cooperative settlement located in the Negev Desert, Kibbutz Hatzerim, to produce the new
