reshaped the Chinese economy in its own image when Deng Xiaoping mimicked its free economy, Israel could become a force for economic liberation in the Middle East, reaching out to Palestinians and other Arabs with the attractions of commercial opportunity. After all, it has long been Israeli enterprise that has attracted Arabs to Palestine.
Netanyahu has long believed that the peace process as we know it is irrelevant, focused on a handful of issues that only serve to breed anger and perpetuate conflict. Meanwhile, true peace — and the promise of a decent life — actually beckons those Palestinians and Israelis who are willing, and now increasingly able, to invest in creation over destruction.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Next to the Dan Hotel in Tel Aviv is the glittering Raphael Resto-Bistro, featuring culinary specialties from Morocco and Japan. My host for the evening, Shaul Olmert, oldest son of then-prime minister Ehud Olmert, takes me to a table in the middle facing a panoramic front window.
Named after a novel by the pioneering Zionist Theodor Herzl, Tel Aviv (
Olmert has been a Californian, working in Irvine for MTV Corporation, adapting their TV properties to the digital-game industry. Now he has gone on to become a game-technology entrepreneur himself. As the son of the former prime minister, he saliently represents a new generation of Israelis, perhaps the most entrepreneurial cohort of all, offering new promise for the future of his country, and perhaps a portent of its still possible failure.
The Resto-Bistro chef is the young Olmert’s pal and will ply his guests with suitably exotic fare — “don’t bother about the menu,” he says. “Do you want Israeli wine or Californian?” Then, sampling the best Israeli wines and hors d’oeuvres, Shaul will answer a question on the sources of Israeli entrepreneurship by talking about survival.
He recounts the astonishing trek of his grandparents, Mordechai and Bella, escaping with their parents from the pogroms of Odessa in the Ukraine in 1919 across the Russian steppes all the way to China, where they eked out a living in Harbin in the northeast, learned Mandarin, briefly married others before finally decamping to the wilderness of 1930s’ Palestine. “They had to give up everything, all their possessions, every convenience, to make it happen,” as Shaul puts it. “They were innovators, border crossers, rule breakers, entrepreneurs of survival. They were Zionists above all, but they were citizens of the world. Mordechai’s last words were spoken in Mandarin.”
He pauses. “Did you like those appetizers?”
“Yeah they’re ’licious,” I mumble through a mouthful of hummus, salmon, and wasabi.
In Palestine, the saga of the Olmert’s grandparents became even more tempestuous. It was not simply entrepreneurship or nimble survival tactics. Mordechai joined the guerrilla group Irgun to fight against British limits on Jewish immigration to Palestine and against what he saw as the appeasement of Britain and the Arabs by David Ben-Gurion’s Mapai Party and its military arm, Haganah. Called terrorists at the time and still today, and pursued by Haganah during the “Hunting Season” of 1945, the Irgun under Menachem Begin demonstrated that the British could not pursue their perverted imperial romance with the Arabs without cost. As the Irgun argued, violence was “the new Esperanto” (the once-fashionable “world language” created by the Jewish physician Ludwik Zamenhof).
At a time when Europe’s death camps were in full operation, causing Jewish refugees to flee Europe by the millions, and Arabs under the leadership of the British-appointed Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini were already avid for a new Holocaust, the British were actually cutting back drastically on immigration to Palestine. Appeasing the Arabs who had allied with the Nazis, rather than rewarding Jews who had fought them, the British were proposing to limit the numbers of Jewish immigrants to Palestine to 75,000 over five years.
In the context of the time, the Irgun was fully understandable and may have played a key role in the formation of the new state. Irgun’s most infamous terrorist act, the 1946 bombing of the British Army Headquarters at the King David Hotel, was preceded by three phone calls warning the occupants to evacuate. With the state on the way in 1948, Begin gave up all resistance. Mordechai Olmert, who had first come to Palestine at 22 in 1933, and his wife, Bella, lived to see the troubled c?sarian birth of Israel. In the end, their son Ehud would grow up to become mayor of Jerusalem and then prime minister.
“In Israel,” explains young Shaul, “you keep coming up with ways that will allow you to survive and allow you to grow. This is why Israelis are so innovative. We have to be entrepreneurs, to survive.”
“But it’s not just survival,” Olmert continues. “The second reason for Israeli innovation is… Look around you.” He waves his arms toward other tables full of denim and suits and faces evocative of a similar scene in San Jose. “You see people that look like Russians, like British, like Iraqis, Ethiopians, different cultures, thrown here together at the same time, with the need to survive. Within three months in the States, you’re an American. You feel like an American. But in Israel it’s different. There are so many cultures, and no one culture defined Israel before that, so each one of us adopted some of the culture of the other. This leads to tolerance of other cultures and a talent for dealing with them.”
After stints of education in new media at Stuttgart and NYU, and employment in London, Los Angeles, Paris, and New York, and even some surfing in Huntington Beach, California, Olmert began thinking globally. He smiles: “When I was in the States, my friends at MTV used to say: ‘You go deal with the French people at Vivendi. We really don’t get those guys. Those guys are impossible. You go to Paris and work it out.’ As an Israeli you are a citizen of the world. You live your life adjusting who you are talking to and who you work with.”
Now, as a serial entrepreneur of video-game companies, Shaul claims the world’s first system for “streaming applications over the net,” the world’s first OS-neutral video-game player runtime engine, and the world’s first set of in-game utilities to enhance the realism of the experience of massively parallel online multiplayer games such as World of Warcraft (“Look, Mom — no browser!”). The claims are arguable. But here the great challenge of survival is to reach the next level of the game — whether it’s “hyperspace” or a NASDAQ IPO.
“Nothing excites Israelis so much as the idea that something is impossible. Goes back to the fact that the whole being of this state of Israel is risky. The entire state is a new venture.” As Fox-pundit Dan Senor and Saul Singer of the Jerusalem Post wrote in their best selling book, Israel is the Start-Up Nation.
Olmert goes on: “If you want to send a space ship to Mars… next Thursday… you will get Israeli engineers to work on that project, and the spaceship will go out to Mars next Thursday… but it might not come back.
“If you want the spaceship to go to Mars every Thursday and come back you want American engineers. It will take longer but it will go to Mars every Thursday and it will come back.
“The Americans are good at systems and planning,” he observed. “I wish the Israelis were better at planning. But they’re not. But they are good at innovating.”
Shaul is sure that Israel’s test of survival, daily undergone, is the secret of Israeli enterprise. “When you’re concerned about your survival,
As he says this he imagines that he has been doing it, thinking out there beyond the “pale of settlement,” beyond the flapping tongues and flags of tradition. But for all his talk of innovation and survival, Shaul is an utterly conventional follower of the Israeli Left.
He is uncertain how his wealth contributes to the world or to Israel. “Wealth is finite,” he says. “If one side gets too much, the other side will suffer.” As his colleague Itzik Ben-Bassat explains his game technology to me, Shaul looks off into the darker recesses of the restaurant with a look of anxiety, the features of his father imprinted on his handsome young countenance, but as if haunted by a harrowing memory or a portentous future lurking in the darkness. It seems as if all is not well with the rebel youth and his virtual games, as if from the kitchens of the seaside bistro may burst forth at any moment a Palestinian mob of busboys and waiters demanding a redistribution of the wealth, or an Arab capital in Tel Aviv, or as if his father might suddenly loom up out of the shadows and reproach the son for his globalist views and hedonist games. Shaul wants to move ahead with his company and his life. He is impatient with the perils and moral entanglements of his country. Playing it safe, he retains his apartment in New York and will send his children to summer camp in upstate New York. Like so many, he wants “Peace
