Rishon Rishon

Something strange about Israel

There’s something strange about Israel. Okay, there are a lot of strange things about Israel, but I want to talk about one thing that I sometimes see mentioned, but I’ve never seen analyzed.

By most accounts Israel is the third-largest high-tech center in the world. What’s so strange about that? After all, someplace has to be the third largest high-tech center! Well, I grew up in the second-largest high-tech center in the world – Boston, Massachusetts, and I worked there in high-tech for two and a half years before moving to Israel. Something like 90% of the people there working in high-tech are from outside of the Boston area (many from outside the US) who came to Boston specifically to work in high-tech. The rest (like me) were children of people who came to Boston for the same reason.

I’m sure that the same is true for Silicon Valley, and for the lesser high-tech centers in the US. But, though many people come to Israel from abroad, none of them come specifically to work in high-tech. (The majority are fleeing oppression in countries like Russia, Ethiopia, France…) The distance from Jerusalem to Haifa, which contains most of Israel’s population, is approximately the same as the distance from San Jose to San Francisco, its population is slightly less – about 5 million – about the same as Massachusetts.

How can it be that the people who happened to be here created the world’s third-largest high-tech center – larger than any tech center in Europe, for example, which can draw on a continent-size population of over 300 million people? Joseph Morgenstern suggests a few possible answers:

The answer is rooted in part in the tradition of intellectual curiosity and analysis, which is an aspect of Jewish culture. It is a tradition that emphasizes education and that has produced, out of all numerical proportion, outstanding scientists and inventors. This age-old reverence for education has found expression in the development of a good Israeli public school system and excellent universities and institutes of science and technology.

If that doesn’t satisfy you then there’s this:

Even more likely, the technological accomplishments may be a result of the innate stubbornness, resilience, and creative drive of a polyglot people. Because of the multi-national mix of the population, many of the researchers have brought with them a variety of experiences and points of view acquired in different parts of the world. All are joined together by the determination to create a country which will become strong in spite of a lack of natural resources and of hostility on the part of most of its neighbors. This need for national security has led to the development of new defense technologies.

Or how about this:

Ambition for a better quality of life and higher standards of living has led to the creation of an export-driven economy. And most Israelis are aware that the ability to sell and succeed in the international marketplace is dependent on their products being more innovative and better priced than those of the country's competitors.

I don’t believe any of it. Or rather, I’m willing to believe all of it, but I don’t think it explains the facts. Even taken together, it’s hard to explain why Israel has more high-tech activity than countries like England, France and Germany – countries that each have more than ten times Israel’s population, and higher per-capita GNP. Look at these statistics from my last post:

In absolute terms, Israel has the largest number of startup companies than any other country in the world, except the US

Israel is ranked #2 in the world for VC funds right behind the US.

I think that Israeli culture is somehow particularly well suited to high-tech. How so? I hope to talk about in my next post.

Posted by David Boxenhorn at June 10, 2004 12:54 AM