The Origins of Israel's Tech Miracle

Dan Senor and Saul Singer, the authors of the new, best-selling Start-Up Nation, have done the impossible: They've written a book that doesn't examine Israel through the prism of its conflict with the Arabs. Instead, they've produced a fascinating and illuminating look at the reasons Israel has become one of the world's prime incubators of technological innovation. This is a story about Israel, of course, but it's a story with universal implications. "Start-Up Nation" is, among other things, an indispensable business book. I wish I had thought to write it. I spoke with Dan Senor by phone last week, and here is an edited version of our discussion.

Jeffrey Goldberg: This book is a reminder that Israel, despite its many problems --  many of them inflicted from the outside, some self-inflicted -- is a remarkable success story, and I'm wondering what sparked your curiosity about Israel's technological achievements.

Dan Senor: Originally the idea was not to do a book -- when I was in my second year of Harvard Business School in 2001, I took a group of thirty students to Israel, three of them were Jewish, twenty-seven were not, and had no connection to Israel. The idea was to look at the economic opportunities in Israel and also study the history and the politics. It was at a pretty depressing time -- there was a good entrepreneurial economy story there, but it was during the Second Intifada. And I took all these students - to their credit, none of them pulled out even though literally the day we were leaving things were blowing up -- and my classmates were all saying to me, "I get it. There's huge economic opportunity here for people who are willing to invest here and do business here." But even more than that, I was struck by the question of how they pulled it off.  It's a very young country, very difficult environment, there are no natural resources, no access to regional capital or regional markets. If you were to paint a picture of the circumstances under which you're not going to have a successful economic developing country, it would be Israel.

JG: One thing about the book that's interesting to me is that it seems that you're trying very hard not to say, 'Well, of course if you put a bunch of Jews in a room, that weird Jewish brain will create something."

DS: We were very self-conscious about that.

JG: Because it's wrong? Because it's stereotypical? Because you don't believe it?

DS: We believe that there are lessons that developing and developed economies can learn from Israel, and that there are prescriptions for the U.S. that can be taken from Israel, and if it is simply about the fact that Jews are smart, well-educated and good at business, it completely undermines the notion that there is anything transferable. We really believe that. We're not naïve; there are certain dynamics that are unique to Israel that cannot be, and should never be, tried elsewhere.

JG: Judaism: Don't try this at home.

DS: Exactly, but we think that's only part of it. There are many elements that absolutely are prescriptive and the moment it becomes about 'Jews are smart,' no one's going to pay attention to the other part. And the other parts are extremely important. For example, we're writing the book, it's September of last year, Lehman blows up, and there's a big debate among economists about productivity gains and how all our economic growth over the last five or ten years was not at all about productivity gains -- it was all about speculative credit, near-zero interest rates -- and we were watching a reversion back to a discussion on the need for basic innovation as the juice for economic growth. And, by the way, the only way you get true innovation into the economy is if it's dominated by small enterprises. And we were struck by this debate, because that's exactly what we were writing about.

JG: One of your arguments is that it's not necessarily Jewish culture that created this, but Israel Defense Force culture, that many of the great entrepreneurs and innovators come out of the Air Force, out of the technical branches of the IDF. And that this is replicable. Is that fair to say?

DS:  One, we believe in an anti-hierarchical tolerance for self-criticism -- not only tolerance, almost encouragement.

JG: By the way, it's a well-known Jewish trait.

DS: Shimon Peres told us that Jews have a tendency throughout our history to be dissatisfied. That's a big theme, so this is obviously a big part of IDF culture. I'm of two minds on how applicable this is to the American military. On the one hand, I feel that the Israeli military is just a more entrepreneurial military than any military I know of or that we've studied. I mean, it's just so much more built around improvisation. The fact that when you're being promoted in the Israeli military, your subordinates have input, or can have input, in those decisions. So it's a very entrepreneurial, start-up military. There are very few bosses.  The only way you can cultivate that culture and ethos is if you have very few bosses, because the moment you have a lot of bosses, you have a lot of people who need to justify their existence, and they justify their existence by giving commands. I saw this on military bases I've worked on and when I've been in government --  the U.S. military is top-heavy, and you have a lot of people standing around giving orders to sort of justify their existence. We do believe, though, that the American military is changing, it is becoming more entrepreneurial -- not nearly as much as the Israelis, and quite frankly it should never be as entrepreneurial as the Israelis because the Americans have to fight different kinds of wars than the Israelis. Israelis fight all their wars in their own neighborhood, it's a different dynamic. You really need Fed-Ex logistics more than you need Fraud Sciences, which is one of the start-ups we profiled.

JG: We know that Israel excels at innovation, but why is there no Nokia in Israel, a huge manufacturer of hi-tech products?

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Hussein Ibish on the Fantasy World of One-Staters

Hussein Ibish, a senior fellow at the American Task Force on Palestine, which is the leading American group advocating for an independent Palestine alongside Israel, has a new book out, "What's Wrong With the One-State Agenda?" which does a comprehensive job of demolishing the arguments made by those who think that Israel should be eliminated and replaced by a single state of Jews and Palestinians. He has performed an important service with this book by noting one overwhelming truth about this debate: Virtually no one in Israel wants a single-state between the river and the sea. It's useful to remember this salient fact when listening to the ostensibly reality-based arguments of the one-staters.

I spoke to Ibish about his arguments last week, shortly after he spoke at the J Street conference. Here is an edited version of our conversation:

Jeffrey Goldberg: What were your impressions of the conference?

Hussein Ibish: It was impressive as a first step. My impression is that there's still quite a bit of message-cohesion and message-formulation to be done. It seemed to me to be an insufficiently coherent group of people. The range of people was so large.

JG: You mean on the Zionist spectrum?

HI:  I mean people ranging from the sort of centrist-center left, all the way to post-Zionists, anti-Zionists, who were there, too. It's not ultimately a group that's going to form, I think, a functional coalition. Right now, they're finding their feet. This is normal, it's inevitable -- but at a certain point, I think they have to clarify what they are, who their constituency is, what they stand for, who they are, who they're not. They've been more successful in creating a space for themselves as a new voice that is compelling, but at other moments it's looked like where they were simply positioning themselves as the alternative to AIPAC. And my sense of things is that, initially, that they would look too much to their rivals. But sooner rather than later, they're going to have to just move on and start to define themselves in a much more coherent and pro-active way, not just in contrast to the traditional Jewish organizations but also to distinguish themselves from people in the Jewish community whose criticism of Israel makes them anathema to the mainstream of the community. They can't go there and I think they've tried not to go there.

JG: You can't be Zionist and non-Zionist at the same time, in other words.

HI: Exactly. I think it's essential for them. For us, it's not important.

JG: Well, isn't it important to have a pro-Israel, pro-two-state organization in Washington that's credibly Jewish?

HI: It is. But I believe that all of the mainstream organizations are moving in that direction. I think begrudgingly, without enthusiasm, I think they're all getting there, because I think ultimately the only organization that I can think of that is absolutely opposed to a two-state agreement are on the far right, the Zionist Organization of America, which is in favor of the occupation without reservations and, on the left, Jewish Voices for Peace, which is a one-state group all the way and without reservation. It seems to me everybody else occupies some space in the middle without being one-staters and without being flag-waving pro-settlers.

Now, the question is, from our point of view, what's really important is that the Jewish community have a range of dynamic organizations that are effective in advocating for peace based on two states, number one. And number two, that we can work with everybody who is in favor of a two-state solution without any other preconditions. I mean, we don't want to get involved in intra-Jewish rivalries. We want to work with everyone who wants peace based on two states. It's as simple as that. We don't have a huge stake in where J Street ultimately positions itself, but I will say this: The more mainstream it can become, the more powerful and important it will be. I think they should be as mainstream as possible, they should avoid the impression they sometimes give that they're perhaps not being sensitive to fears about Israel's security. There's a real appetite for a more robust, more aggressively pro-peace organization in the Jewish community. But from our perspective, the only people we don't want to talk to are the one-staters and the pro-occupation groups.
 
JG: But the one-staters are a very marginal group. I think one of the interesting things you do in your book is show very coolly, calmly, the essential ridiculousness of one-state advocacy based on the simple fact that in order to have a successful one-state plan, you need Israeli Jews to want it, and today, not even one percent of Israeli Jews want it.

HI: You could put all of them in a small auditorium.

JG: I don't think you need an auditorium. Talk about these guys, the Tony Judts --

HI: I don't want to be too hard on Judt. Judt put out this argument and then he immediately admitted that it was utopian, that it wasn't serious and he was just doing a thought experiment. And since then, he basically has more or less withdrawn from the conversation Judt has not been a person who suggests that this is a realistic plan and a serious proposal for the future.

There are two fundamental flaws with pro-Palestinian strategic thinking that focuses on the idea of abandoning two states and going for a single state. The first is the question of feasibility, and it's hard to argue with that. Obviously anyone who is familiar with this sees the difficulty, and I would be the first to say that success is not assured by any means. Even a two-state agreement looks, at the moment, like something of a long shot. The difference between the two-state solution and everything else is that yes, it's a long shot, but it would work. And if we could conceivably get it, if we did get it, it would solve the conflict.

The fundamental argument that the one-staters seem to be making, which is that we can't possibly get Israel to end the occupation and relinquish their control of the 22 percent of Palestine (the West Bank and Gaza) but we will inevitably succeed in getting them to relinquish one hundred percent of the territory under their control. This is a problem of logic. The second thing is that once you've realized this, obviously what you've done is set yourself the task of convincing Jewish Israelis to voluntarily do this.  The idea of coercing the Israelis into this through military force is absurd, and it could only really be done through voluntary persuasion. What the one-staters argue, actually, is that they don't have to do that. What they're going to do, they say, is bring the Israelis to their knees.

JG: South Africa style?

Continue reading "Hussein Ibish on the Fantasy World of One-Staters " »

Yes on Goldblog

Andrew's mad at me because I didn't post this on my blog. Obviously, as I told Mother Jones, I wasn't meaning to imply that Trita Parsi is a paid agent of the Iranian regime, or somesuch. I was implying that he has made himself the AIPAC of Iran in Washington. My bad. On the larger question of whether Trita Parsi functions as a lobbyist for the Iranian regime, based on what I know, I'd have to say yes: He has argued consistently against any sanctions against Iran, and an end to sanctions is obviously what the Iranian regime wants. So he is working on behalf of a stated interest of the Iranian government. Yes, he also criticizes Iran's human rights abuses, but it's been suggested recently that it is possible to lobby for a country while criticizing it at the same time. The reason I'm for sanctions is that they represent one of the only possible ways to stop an Israeli (or American, for that matter) attack on Iran's nuclear facilities. An end to sanctions means either a potentially-catastrophic attack or a nuclear-armed Iran, neither which is acceptable to me, and, I presume, to Andrew.

One more thing -- a thank you to Mother Jones's Nick Baumann for this clarifcation: "I don't think Goldberg's a neocon, and I hope this post doesn't imply that he is." I would like to add, nevertheless, that some of my best friends are neocons.

And one more final thing: To those Goldblog readers who have asked me to respond to Andrew's intemperate attack on Israel today, you'll have to pardon me but I have the flu and  therefore no energy for any of this right now. Suffice it to say that I know Andrew loves Israel, and he's a Zionist, so I don't actually know how to explain this current level of hostility, but one day I'm going to have the two of us invited to speak together at my synagogue (don't worry, Andrew, it's within bike-distance!) so we can hash this out. 

Matt Yglesias is Very Upset

(UPDATE BELOW)

A friend of mine e-mailed me this weekend me to say that I upset Matt Yglesias by nominating him for one of Andrew Sullivan's Yglesias Awards. I had praised Yglesias for recognizing that J Street's conference attracted a certain number of anti-Zionists (or "un-Zionists" in J.J. Goldberg's phrase), and I think Yglesias didn't appreciate such praise by an ultra-Zionist wolf such as myself (and God knows what this post, from Marty Peretz, did to him).

In any case, an answer, of sorts, from Yglesias wasn't long in coming, in the form of this post, attacking me for arguing that Trita Parsi does "leg-work" for the Iranian regime in Washington. I think it's fair to say that Parsi's organization, the National Iranian American Council, functions as a kind of AIPAC for Iran, but this was too much for Yglesias, who calls me shifty and contemptible, etc. etc. All par for the course, including his criticism of me for supporting a war he also initially supported. But then he does something dishonest in his piece, lumping me in with a group of people who support a military strike against Iran:

"Some people, also known as people who know what they're talking about, think an unprovoked US or Israeli preventive military strike on Iran would be a huge gift to the Iranian government and a crushing blow to the opposition. Others, who I hope are liars rather than fools, claim to believe that this is wrong. Parsi is, I know, in the former camp. So it's worth revisiting Jeffrey Goldberg's record as a prognosticator on this sort of question."

Yglesias surely knows that I'm opposed to a military strike on Iran by either the U.S. or Israel for a whole range of reasons. I've been publicly and vocally opposed to a strike for some time. My opposition to military action against Iran can be learned by reading this and this and this, just for starters. I've spoken to Jewish groups inclined to support such an attack and told them why it's a bad idea. I've argued with Israeli cabinet officials about a strike. I suppose that next I could take an ad out on Yglesias's blog trumpeting my opposition to a strike. I'm going to e-mail Yglesias to ask him to acknowledge in his post that I am, in fact, in the Parsi camp(!) when it comes to attacking Iran. It's fine to attack me for things I believe, but this particular bit of criticism by Yglesias is ridiculous.

UPDATE: Yglesias has graciously updated his post to include the previously-mentioned relevant information.

"J Street Should Fight the Left as Well as the Right"

Goldblog reader Howard Deutsch writes:

 AIPAC types are worked up about J Street because while J Street has claimed to be "pro-Israel" and "pro-peace," they have, to an outsider's view, spent a lot of their energy arguing with Israel's American supporters on the right (AIPAC) or Israel's policies during the Kadima government (Cast Lead, where they were to the left of Meretz).  Meanwhile, as Jon Chait noted, plenty of people who clearly don't consider themselves pro-Israel in any way that I would recognize somehow gladly identify with and endorse J Street.

If J Street spent similar amounts of energy countering anti-Israel forces on the left as they did countering pro-Israel forces on the right, there might not be less acrimony (we are talking about political folks here), but I would at least find them to be an organization whose core beliefs and activities matched their self-described characterization.  You shouldn't, e.g., have to push hard for a grudging repudiation of Walt and Mearsheimer - J Street should be doing that as part of their mission to represent a mainstream pro-Israel position.  Even if it means [gasp!] making common cause with AIPAC.

The Taboo That Won't Shut Up, Cont'd

Further proof -- as if further proof is needed -- that it is forbidden to stake out an anti-Israel position in American public life: Jon Stewart featured the other night as guests a pro-Palestinian Palestinian and a pro-Palestinian Jew. I'm sure it's only a matter of time before the Zionists remove him from his job. Just like they did Megan McArdle. 

An Iran "Immune to Rational Self Interest"

An important column from Yossi Klein Halevi:

In the last few years, Israelis have been asking themselves two questions with increasing urgency: Should we attack Iran if all other options fail? And can we inflict sufficient damage to justify the consequences?

As sanctions efforts faltered, most Israelis came to answer the first question affirmatively. A key moment in coalescing that resolve occurred in December 2006, when the Iranian regime sponsored an "International Conference to Review the Global Vision of the Holocaust," a two day meeting of Holocaust deniers. For Israelis, that event ended the debate over whether a nuclear Iran could be deterred by the threat of counter-force. A regime that assembles the world's crackpots to deny the most documented atrocity in history--at the very moment it is trying to fend off sanctions and convince the international community of its sanity--may well be immune to rational self-interest.

Ron Rosenbaum vs. Hannah Arendt

Not much of a contest. I found this last comment extremely relevant:

One can still hear this Arendtian shame about ethnicity these days. So parochial! One can hear the echo of Arendt's fear of being judged as "merely Jewish" in some, not all, of those Jews so eager to dissociate themselves from the parochial concerns of other Jews for Israel. The desire for universalist approval makes them so disdainful of any "ethnic" fellow feeling. After all, to such unfettered spirits, it's so banal.

Have a Frozen Chosen

Serious Eats picked this beer as its favorite American brown ale: (h/t Jay Brodsky)

He'Brew Messiah Bold New York, 5.65% ABV
Don't be put off by the puns on the label--this could really be "the beer you've been waiting for." This nutty-scented, deep ruby-brown beer is everything we liked about the other brown ales without their flaws. Deeply flavored but not heavy, smooth and mellow but not sweet: this beer is balanced, rich, and complex. A hoppy brightness peeks out from under the coffee, cinnamon, and walnut flavors.

Does Time Warner Understand the Role of Journalists?

Earlier this month, at the Atlantic-sponsored Washington Ideas Forum, I interviewed Jeff Bewkes, the chief of Time Warner, about the future of the magazine business, among other things. He is an obviously competent leader, perhaps even a visionary leader -- but a visionary leader of an entertainment company, not necessarily of a journalism company. The news out of our session came when he promised that Time Warner would still be in the magazine business in five years, but I thought our exchange about firing journalists, printed below, was more revealing, not only in light of the recent announcement that Time Inc. is cutting even more jobs, but because it raised a question in my mind about whether Bewkes truly understood that particular responsibilities -- not to shareholders, but to American democracy -- come with being a publisher.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Last year, Time Inc.... laid off 600 people. At what point do you do damage to journalism, and, therefore, to democracy, and at what point do you simply say, "This business doesn't work for us because we can't make the money that we need to please our shareholders."

Jeff Bewkes: No, the challenge for businesses... is to figure out what you need to redesign, including cutting operations and plants and duplicated data centers and human beings that are working in one role that you don't need in the new design of the product, without destroying or hurting the quality of the journalism or the movies. Last year, we also cut 700 people at New Line whom we valued very highly, who were making very successful films, and we had to make more efficient our Warner and New Line film production. The result of it is that we had a tremendous number of New Line hit films this year.

Goldberg: But the societal consequence of laying off people, as hard as that is, from a movie studio is not the same as the societal consequence of laying off professional news-gatherers.

Bewkes: Not all the people being laid off are news-gatherers. If you go out fifty years, the number of people in jobs, in any industry -- whether it's mining, farming, news production and dissemination, movie making -- is going to change. The production method is going to change, the nature of who's in what job will change. We do need to keep evolving it. The important thing is that we keep serving the role of having healthy, independent businesses that can provide quality journalism and quality entertainment.