The Two Middle Easts
From apocalyptic threats by the Iranian regime’s President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to introspective and semi-neurotic analyses from Jewish supporters of Israel, you would think that Israel’s very existence is truly in danger.
It is absolutely the case that Iran’s nuclear efforts coupled with its on-the-record threats to erase Israel of the map of the world need to be taken seriously and that the world - and Israel - must rise to the challenge posed by the Iranian Ayatollahs’ vision of absolute and violent Islamic revolution.
It is also absolutely the case that the window of opportunity for a two-state-agreement gets smaller by the day, and that not seizing it when it’s available will be a tragedy for both the Palestinian and Israeli people because it will enslave them to eternal warfare and limit their potential.
But read Tom Friedman’s article, People Vs. Dinosaurs, to get a feel for why Israel is not just not "disappearing" as Ahmadinejad claims, but why it is going to continue to thrive and grow. Some excerpts:
[I]n the first quarter of 2008, the top four economies after America in attracting venture capital for start-ups were: Europe $1.53 billion, China $719 million, Israel $572 million and India $99 million, according to Dow Jones VentureSource. Israel, with 7 million people, attracted almost as much as China, with 1.3 billion.
Boaz Golany, who heads engineering at the Technion, Israel’s M.I.T., told me: “In the last eight months, we have had delegations from I.B.M., General Motors, Procter & Gamble and Wal-Mart visiting our campus. They are all looking to develop R & D centers in Israel.”
Ahmadinejad professes not to care about such things. He was — to put it in American baseball terms — born on third base and thinks he hit a triple. Because oil prices have gone up to nearly $140 a barrel, he feels relaxed predicting that Israel will disappear, while Iran maintains a welfare state — with more than 10 percent unemployment.
Iran has invented nothing of importance since the Islamic Revolution, which is a shame. Historically, Iranians have been a dynamic and inventive people — one only need look at the richness of Persian civilization to see that. But the Islamic regime there today does not trust its people and will not empower them as individuals.
…Iran’s economic and military clout today is largely dependent on extracting oil from the ground. Israel’s economic and military power today is entirely dependent on extracting intelligence from its people. Israel’s economic power is endlessly renewable. Iran’s is a dwindling resource based on fossil fuels made from dead dinosaurs.
Then peruse some of the newspaper editorials and op-ed pieces in Lebanon, Syria and Iran and you will get an idea of the obscurant and sad repression against the human spirit that bad governance is provoking.
From Al-Watan (which you can translate with Google Translator if you don’t read Arabic): Khaled al-Ghanami writes about Hassan Nasrallah’s speech where he endorsed the Wileyat e-Faqih for Lebanon, borrowing from Iran’s religious "rule of the just jurist" system. Rather than rejecting militant fatalism as anathema to democracy or freedom, the "progressive" writer’s prescription is for Hezbollah to
"[point] the arms of the resistance against the enemy [Israel? the US?] in the hope that the Lebanese people will forget the rash moment in which the resistance turned its rifle and fired at the heart of Beirut."
Does this writer, and the Lebanese and Arab people, not realize the cancer that militias are in and of themselves? Today they turn against who you don’t mind. Tomorrow they’ll turn against you and it’s too late. But I guess by now Hezbollah is so powerful that Lebanese writers dare not cross it, the Lebanese army dare not confront it, and those who recognize its cancerous quality feel helpless to contain it or disarm it.
Or how about Issam Dari who writes for Teshreen (Syria), always in denial about the dirt that a closed-off society filled around "resistance" brings, calls it a cause for celebration that efforts to open the Middle East to democracy are doomed.
"With great humility we say that the resistance method, at the political, military, and intellectual levels, has prevented the implementation of this project in the region, and all the sacrifices offered by the Arab people from Iraq to Lebanon to occupied Palestine, played the most prominent role in the victory over the promoters of the New Middle East."
The streets of the Arab world, too-long-stagnant to lack of freedom or democracy, seem to be giving wings to a perverse form of populism that combines Messianic Shiia revolution with an almost-Stalinist-tone of redressing the plight of the oppressed. It does not portend well for the Other Middle East.
Now back to Friedman:
New York Times, June 8, 2008
People vs. Dinosaurs
Tefen Industrial Park, Israel
Question: What do America’s premier investor, Warren Buffett, and Iran’s toxic president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, have in common? Answer: They’ve both made a bet about Israel’s future.
Ahmadinejad declared on Monday that Israel “has reached its final phase and will soon be wiped out from the geographic scene.”
By coincidence, I heard the Iranian leader’s statement on Israel Radio just as I was leaving the headquarters of Iscar, Israel’s famous precision tool company, headquartered in the Western Galilee, near the Lebanon border. Iscar is known for many things, most of all for being the first enterprise that Buffett bought overseas for his holding company, Berkshire Hathaway.
Buffett paid $4 billion for 80 percent of Iscar and the deal just happened to close a few days before Hezbollah, a key part of Iran’s holding company, attacked Israel in July 2006, triggering a monthlong war. I asked Iscar’s chairman, Eitan Wertheimer, what was Buffett’s reaction when he found out that he had just paid $4 billion for an Israeli company and a few days later Hezbollah rockets were landing outside its parking lot.
Buffett just brushed it off with a wave, recalled Wertheimer: “He said, ‘I’m not interested in the next quarter. I’m interested in the next 20 years.’ ” Wertheimer repaid that confidence by telling half his employees to stay home during the war and using the other half to keep the factory from not missing a day of work and setting a production record for the month. It helps when many of your “employees” are robots that move around the buildings, beeping humans out of the way.
So who would you put your money on? Buffett or Ahmadinejad? I’d short Ahmadinejad and go long Warren Buffett.
Why? From outside, Israel looks as if it’s in turmoil, largely because the entire political leadership seems to be under investigation. But Israel is a weak state with a strong civil society. The economy is exploding from the bottom up. Israel’s currency, the shekel, has appreciated nearly 30 percent against the dollar since the start of 2007.
The reason? Israel is a country that is hard-wired to compete in a flat world. It has a population drawn from 100 different countries, speaking 100 different languages, with a business culture that strongly encourages individual imagination and adaptation and where being a nonconformist is the norm. While you were sleeping, Israel has gone from oranges to software, or as they say around here, from Jaffa to Java.
The day I visited the Iscar campus, one of its theaters was filled with industrialists from the Czech Republic, who were getting a lecture — in Czech — from Iscar experts. The Czechs came all the way to the Israel-Lebanon border region to learn about the latest innovations in precision tool-making. Wertheimer is famous for staying close to his customers and the latest technologies. “If you sleep on the floor,” he likes to say, “you never have to worry about falling out of bed.”
That kind of hunger explains why, in the first quarter of 2008, the top four economies after America in attracting venture capital for start-ups were: Europe $1.53 billion, China $719 million, Israel $572 million and India $99 million, according to Dow Jones VentureSource. Israel, with 7 million people, attracted almost as much as China, with 1.3 billion.
Boaz Golany, who heads engineering at the Technion, Israel’s M.I.T., told me: “In the last eight months, we have had delegations from I.B.M., General Motors, Procter & Gamble and Wal-Mart visiting our campus. They are all looking to develop R & D centers in Israel.”
Ahmadinejad professes not to care about such things. He was — to put it in American baseball terms — born on third base and thinks he hit a triple. Because oil prices have gone up to nearly $140 a barrel, he feels relaxed predicting that Israel will disappear, while Iran maintains a welfare state — with more than 10 percent unemployment.
Iran has invented nothing of importance since the Islamic Revolution, which is a shame. Historically, Iranians have been a dynamic and inventive people — one only need look at the richness of Persian civilization to see that. But the Islamic regime there today does not trust its people and will not empower them as individuals.
Of course, oil wealth can buy all the software and nuclear technology you want, or can’t develop yourself. This is not an argument that we shouldn’t worry about Iran. Ahmadinejad should, though.
Iran’s economic and military clout today is largely dependent on extracting oil from the ground. Israel’s economic and military power today is entirely dependent on extracting intelligence from its people. Israel’s economic power is endlessly renewable. Iran’s is a dwindling resource based on fossil fuels made from dead dinosaurs.
So who will be here in 20 years? I’m with Buffett: I’ll bet on the people who bet on their people — not the people who bet on dead dinosaurs.
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