Koolulam: Startup Nation meets Secular Prayer

One place to start this story would be the dark years of the 2^nd Intifada, when Israelis tried to leave their homes as little as possible because visiting supermarkets, riding busses and walking down the street were all life-threatening activities. Jerusalem was perhaps worst-hit of all, and people from the rest of the country stopped coming. Then, as the security forces figured out how to block the suicide murderers, life slowly returned to normal. In Jerusalem a new phenomenon appeared, with thousands, then tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands of regular Israelis traveling there on the hot summer nights of August and September to participate in tours of old neighborhoods, synagogues, then finishing late at night at the large open square in front of the Western Wall, the Kotel. The highpoint of these pilgrimages are the final nights before Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar; in recent years the number of people cramming onto that square easily surpasses a quarter million each night, and their cumulative number exceeds 1.5 million. Once they're there, they sing slichot – medieval texts asking God's forgiveness. All together. Like this.

In early 2017 Or Teicher, a secular Israeli producer, saw that clip and wondered if he could bring together ordinary Israelis, strangers to each other, and get them to sing together with some sort of fervor. So he tried. He collected some talented people around him, they collected 400 people in Tel Aviv, and on April 15^th 2017 they sung together. Here, watch them:

On September 7^th 2017, as the Jewish High Holidays approached, they collected 600 people in Jerusalem. Their technique was getting better, and it was a smashing success:

On December 17^th 2017 they gathered 600 mostly secular Israelis in Tel Aviv and sang about believing, in English. Another roaring success.

There's logistics in there, and organizational ability on multiple levels. There's musical creativity in spades. The cameras turn a crowd into a sea of identifiable and fascinating people with faces. And of course, there's that astonishingly charismatic young man with the dreadlocks who pulls everyone into a seamless many-layered choir in a single hour, even as most of them have never previously sung a single chord with the others. So they upped their ante. On Jan. 1^st 2018, they organized 2,000 people in a gigantic tent in Tel Aviv, and proved the model worked with larger numbers, too.

On February 14^th 2018 they pulled together 3,000 people in Haifa, and sang Matisyahu's One Day in three languages, Arabic English and Hebrew. If you haven't been paying attention, concentrate on the faces, their diversity, and of course, their intensity:
   

Later that week was International Women's Day, so they had an event by and for women only, 2,000 of them. The endlessly energetic Ben Yeffet, not being a woman, wasn't there. They all had a great time.
  

They have no website, if you're wondering, and no swanky marketing operation. They're propelled by the excitement they're generating, as ever broader swathes of Israeli society take notice of this new cultural phenomenon sprouting among us; they announce their next events on a Facebook page.

On April 2^nd 2018 they tried something new, with 7,500 people singing simultaneously in five different cities: Jerusalem, Ashkelon, Dimona, Rishon Lezion, and Kiryat Motzkin. The genius was adding Kiryat Motzkin, a scruffy town no-one has ever even heard of unless they live there; it turns out the locals know how to sing as well as everyone else.

Then they turned deeply serious. For Yom Hashoah in April 2018 they collected dozens of Holocaust survivors and three generations of their descendants, and together they prayed Ofra Haza's song I'm Alive. If you can watch this one without being moved to tears, you're a lost case.

This week (April 16^th 2018) they unveiled their largest event so far: 12,000 people, joined by Israel's President Reuven Rivlin, singing Naomi Shemer's immortal paean to the beauty and wonder of this flawed land we live in. If this isn't a new form of mass devotion, I don't know what might be.
 

Israeli Bullshit

Here's a true story about Israeli bullshit and why it's blogworthy. I've been hearing rumors of it for months, and not long ago its essential facts even appeared in a local newspaper (Hebrew, no online linkable version), at which point I enquired with a fellow I know who is closely enough involved to be able to confirm the news item and embellish on it.

Like all stories you've got to decide where, actually, is the beginning. One place to start might be in the Talmudic assertion that Israel, unlike Egypt, depends on the immediate good will of God since it has no reliable river, and all its water comes from the heavens, a fact which has been true since the Six Days of Creation - until a few years ago, 10 or 15 of them, when the Israelis decided they didn't like being dependant on the whims of the weather for their water. (This was a policy decision, and so far as I know it had nothing to do with theology). The policy-makers of the day may also have been dimly aware of the 1930s research of Walter Laudermilk, a British scientist who wrote about our environment, was deeply impressed by the early efforts of Zionist pioneers to drain marshes and create modern agriculture, but was also of the opinion the maximal population of Mandatory Palestine couldn't rise above 10 million, a number we passed a while ago. One way or the other, the decision was made to reach water independence through two strategic programs. One, to build as many desalination plants as needed, and the second, to purify as much of the potable water and to pot it again.

Both programs have already succeeded, and they're both still progressing. We're well on the way to the point where all of the urban-use water comes from desalination plants and not natural sources; and while I don't have the exact number, much of the sewage water goes through purification plants and is then re-used, tho often not as drinking water but for industry or types of agriculture where this is safe (cotton being an obvious example. You don't eat cotton, you wear it, so the quality of the water used to irrigate it is less important than with watermelons. In both fields - desalination and re-use of water - Israel is the world leader.

The past winter was unusually dry, and yet this summer there's no shortage of water. I cannot begin to tell you how momentous this is, but am reasonably certain that a century from now this summer will be remembered for that, not for the events in Gaza.

As usually happens with technological progress, once you arrive at a new place you see new needs and challenges. No-one understood why an iPad needed improvement until they'd used the iPad 1.

It turns out that water used in cattle farming can't be purified. The bullshit is too potent. So long as no-one was systematically purifying all their water, this may not have been known and certainly wasn't interesting. Once the water is all directed to purification, however, it did become important; once some government agency took it into their mind to regulate the quality of water before its purification, that little fact became a matter of economic life-and-death for the cattle industry.

Enter the Sidon family brothers, one with a PhD in chemistry, one with a background in the feverish world of the hi-tech Startup Nation, and one an engineer, who spotted the opportunity to make gold out of bullshit. Together they invented a contraption which separates reasonably clean water from the rest of the bullshit, so that farmers can meet the requirements of that regulator, and apparently also sell the hard-core part of the bullshit for other purposes.  They have just implemented the first industrial-size model of their contraption, and now expecct to sell it to cattle farmers all over Israel.

It has also crossed their mind that there are cattle farmers in other countries, too. Who said Israeli technological innovation can't be bullshit.

Deciding to Have Enough Water

Here's a fascinating article about how Israel solved its shortage of water. The short answer: lots of smart investments in all the right things. The deeper answer: determination. The leaders of the country and its water systems decided the problem of shortages had to be solved - so they did.

Return of the Nerds

Here are a few links to articles about how Israelis are working to make their country stronger, or to withstand this onslaught or that, and in general things that demonstrate why Israel is not weakening.

The techies are convening. I was at one of these conferences last year, and was tickled to see all the translations into Chinese, and the Indians who got along fine with English. Didn't see may Egyptians, tho, nor even many Europeans. These folks are one of the many reasons why a boycott of Israel, or sanctions against it, won't work.

The lawyers are revving up. No-one in their sane mind thinks there's a pure legal case against Israel and its occupation and its borders. Clearly, most of the people who talk about what's legal and what's not don't know a thing about law, and care far less. The whole thing is and always was a political matter, not a legal one. Still, it's nice to see a group of lawyers play the game from Israel's perspective for once:

8. While the UN has maintained a persistent policy of non-recognition of
Israel's sovereignty over Jerusalem pending a negotiated solution, despite
Israel's historic rights to the city, it is inconceivable that the UN would
now recognize a unilaterally declared Palestinian state, the borders of
which would include eastern Jerusalem. This would represent the
ultimate in hypocrisy, double standards and discrimination, as well as an
utter disregard of the rights of Israel and the Jewish People.

Danny Gordis strikes again: Danny was invited to speak to a J-Street leadership group on their recent trip to Israel. Since he's not a government official, he can meet them without any implications of any sort - so he did. And told them how odd they appear, and how arrogant, and how unfriendly. Looks to me like he washed the floor with them, though I doubt they saw it that way.

The Money printers strike again: I've already linked to this elsewhere, but it's worth pointing out again. The reason the Hamas government in Gaza still uses the Shekel for its currency isn't because of an evil Israeli occupation. It's because they've got no better alternative. (h/t Andre)

The Power of Water

The other day I was talking to a young scientist from China who's completing her PhD at one of the very best American universities, and has just spent a month in Israel. She hails from what she describes as a "middle-or-smallish-sized Chinese town" of about 8 million people, which I admit I'd never heard of. When I asked for her impressions of her first visit to Israel (pop. 7.76 million) she gushed. First, about the geographic and climatic diversity, then over the human diversity, then over the creative energy. (The first of those three isn't of our doing).

The creative energy is constantly seeking new avenues. A couple weeks ago the Economist agreed to stop kvetching over our politics long enough to look at a spot of our economics, and came up with the story of how Israel is trying to corner the international market of water technology. It may or may not work, but if it does it will significantly benefit mankind. To me, the interesting part of the story is how we're trying to repeat a model which proved extremely efficient in the 1990s: the problems that could be solved are there, the eagerness to resolve them are there, then the government steps in with significant funds, but with the intention to jump-start an industry and then get out so as not to interfere with the private innovators and investors and risk-takers. In the 1990s it was the Yozma program which jump-started the high-tech revolution; a few years ago it was a fund for water technology; five years later the government is already moving out and the innovators and entrepreneurs who made it in the 1990s are moving in.

I expect it will take another five years or so to know if this is working. During that time many of the water-tech start-ups will fail, for various reasons. If some succeed, however, especially if any of them succeed spectacularly, Israel really could be the Mecca for anyone worldwide who's got dirty water or lack of water and wishes to improve things. Which means most of the world.

Well, perhaps not a Mecca. Though the Meccans sure could use it. Also, this success or failure will happen regardless of the settlements on the West Bank, and the blockade or not of Gaza. That's a different universe.

Start -Up Nation

Last year Dan Senor and Saul Singer published Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle. It's a great read, and doesn't require more than a few hours of pleasurable effort. The starting point for the book is that Israel is a world-class center of innovation, second only to Silicon Valley. There's more technological innovation happening here than on entire continents elsewhere, and the political and military turmoil of the past decade has never dented this. The authors set out to explain this.

First, they state their case, which turns out to be even more compelling than often recognized, since they look not only at the very long list of successful or wildly successful Israeli start-up companies, but also at the centrality of Israeli innovators to the development efforts of some of the world's largest technology companies - Intel, say, or Microsoft. The also show how it's not only high-technology, it's lots of other things, too, such as drip irrigation - not to mention the once famous and now defunct kibbutz movement, which was magnificent in its time, before the world moved on.

They compare Israel's economy to other economies, by way of attempting to identify what's unique about Israel. Since you ought to read the book I won't go through all its arguments, but the bottom line is that Israelis are anti-hierarchical, even in the army; they have no respect for accepted wisdom and even less for its representatives; they're brazen questioners of everything and everyone; but also they've got motivations to succeed that come from being proud of what they are and what they're doing. The Arab boycott and Charles De Gaulle's abrupt ban on military supplies days before the Six Day War, say the authors, must be given credit for at least part of Israel's prowess, since they shut the easy avenues to success, and forced the Israelis to forge new ones, and then, once they had the culture, to keep on forging them.

They also describe how early Israeli innovation was steered by the government, until that lost steam in the early 1970s; they are honest and clear-eyed about the wasted decades between the early 1970s and the early 1990s.

As I said, it's a fun book, and presents an Israel which is much more interesting - and real - than the one which the world's media obsesses about most days of the year (as does this blog). I do however have one significant quibble.

The technology sector of Israel may well be the economy's main motor, and the cultural characteristics which underpin it are all really there, very much thriving. Not all of Israel participates, however. The army really is a crucially important part of the story - but there are other parts of the army which do the exact opposite of encouraging innovation. Many Israelis really do fit the descriptions presented in the book - but more don't. Or at any rate, many don't: I wouldn't know how to quantify it. There are as many conservative and unimaginative plodders in Israel as anywhere else. Thankfully, they don't hamper the mad scientists and iconoclasts out to turn the world on its head; there are enough of them, however, to make Israel a place of growing inequality and considerable waste.

Finally, two minor comments: some of Israel's homegrown detractors, the folks I regularly dislike on this blog, have the same all-around gumption as their engineer cousins. It really is a cultural thing. Also, as anyone who has ever seriously studied the Talmud will attest, some of this ability comes from there. Spend 2,000 years studying Talmud, and it will be astonishing if you don't obsessively see things from novel perspectives and insanely unlikely vantages. 

World's 3 Largest Desalination Plants All in (Tiny) Israel

Well, actually, only two, right now. The construction of the third, which will be even larger than the two that are already in operation, began today; it will begin producing fresh water from the Mediterranean in 2013.

This is a nice story, but it has deeper layers to it. For years one of the standard stories about Israeli ineptitude, incompetence, inability to see beyond immediate political considerations and make long-term plans, and general stupidity, focused on the lack of water. The Sea of Galilee has been over utilized for decades, seawater has been seeping into coastal wells, sewage seeps into reservoirs - the works.I expect the stories were all true and justified. But then, a number of years ago, someone decided to get their act together, and within about a decade, the situation will have been turned on its head, all for the better. This fits a thesis I offer from time to time, that sooner or later Israelis notice major problems they're faced with, and purposefully set out to deal with them.

The minister who set the rectifying in motion in this case, was - if memory serves - one Avigdor Lieberman.

Reduced Israeli reliance on rainfall and its derivatives will someday make reaching an agreement with the Palestinians easier. So that's good, too. (And the doing of Lieberman?)

Finding Gas Near Israel

Here's an interesting description of various aspects, political and economic, of the discovery of gas fields off the Israeli shore.

Electrifying Traffic

The Economist has given space to Israeli Shai Agassi to explain how he's trying to save the world by cutting exhaust emissions of cars, fast. He says China and Israel are leading the way.

He also stands to make billions of $ if he's right, but more elbow power to him for that, if you ask me. Better innovations that move mankind forward, than hair-shirt measures like halting all air traffic or similar idiocies advocated by the Guardian and its like.

If it's on the Internet it Must be True

The top staff of the IDF division in the northern West Bank are taking Arabic lessons. Lieutenant colonels up to the brigadier. The project is run by a Druze lt.colonel, who's mother tongue is Arabic.

Israel and India are about to sign a "preferred trade agreement". (Hebrew link). Thus a whole new (sub)continent is opened wide for the BDS activists to agitate.

You've probably heard stories about how Israeli troops allow Palestinian patients to die at roadblocks. Well, so far this year 180,000 (!) Palestinians have been treated in Israeli hospitals. Where would you prefer to be a Palestinian: in Syria, Lebanon, or the Occupied West Bank?

Warren Buffet: "Israel possesses a disproportionate quantity of brains and ideas…If you look for oil in the Middle East, skip Israel. However, if you look for brains, stop in Israel."

AKUS reports on an Israeli flotilla setting out to save the poor Irish.

BDS Stories

The efforts of the BDS gang in Quebec seem not to be succeeding. They managed to convene 100 people in Montreal, some of whom must have been the non-local instigators.

Remember the disaster in Haiti? It's still there, getting worse again. The Israelis are also still there, doing their best.

A while back I wrote here about a team of researchers at Haifa University who are making some impressive advances in the war on cancer. Well, apparently they've got some local competition; this story seems to be about a totally different research team. Technion, not Haifa University. Same city, different school. Same war on cancer, though.

Oy Oy Oy: The Shame of Cleantech

This bit of map-plotting must have been exquisitely painful for someone at the Guardian: They've put together a list of the world's 100 most important cleantech companies (the Guardian likes that sort of thing), and guess where Israel is on the list? Well, lets start by noting which continents aren't represented at all: South America, Africa, Australia and Antarctica. Also the entirety of what used to be the Soviet Block. Then, let's look at the top countries which are represented, from top down: USA, UK, Germany.... and Israel. And actually, if you count the two American firms which were set up and are run by Israelis, Israel ties Germany.

Boycotters, where are you when we need you?

$300,000,000,000?

The story swirling around our media is that the discovery of gas under the sea across from Haifa last year (at the Tamar field) is about to be dwarfed by the next findings, at the Leviathan field. The numbers in this item are a bit opaque, at least to me, so we'll need to wait and see, I suppose.

The Tamar finds are apparently large enough to supply all our needs for 15 years. The Leviathan, if you believe the hype, are a game-changer. More ruminations on that when the picture clears.

Israel Joins the OECD

The 31 members of the OECD today voted today to accept Estonia, Israel and Slovenia, which will thus become country members 32, 33 and 34. (The list of the other 31 is here).

The Economist often characterizes the OECD as "a rich-country think tank". While I doubt Israel's accession will make any difference in anyone's immediate day-to-day life, it's a nice club to belong to, and being inside is nicer than being outside.

The Palestinians did their best to prevent Israel being accepted, on the principle that anything that's good for Israel must be very bad. It seems however that the decision reflected actions and their expression in numbers, not ideology, so the Palestinian efforts didn't make any difference. The OECD press release announcing the decision (linked above) notes that "Israel’s scientific and technological policies have produced outstanding outcomes on a world scale."

Things People Talk About

Over Yom Haatzmaut, Independence Day, I spent time talking to people in a number of social events. Here are some of the things I heard:

A friend who runs a company that produces high-class tools for the creation of other tools ("our equipment is the Rolls-Royce of the field: expensive but the best") told me they've been selling to unfriendly countries such as Indonesia, and in recent weeks they've been approached by a potential client in Pakistan. A second friend who was standing with us told of other Israeli companies who sell to the Arab world, mostly via Jordan and often in Jordanian packaging to hide the Israeli provenance. Someone ought to tell the boycott folks.

A North-American journalist who has been reporting on the MidEast for a generation tells me the lack of a peace process enables all sides to live in practical peace; once negotiations start again they'll have to re-start the violence.

A Canadian who lives in Israel these past 30 years remarks, apropos Obama's plans to regulate American banks: Canada has strict bank regulations and sailed through the recent turmoil mostly unharmed. Israel has strict bank regulations, and sailed through likewise unscathed. America has light bank regulations, and look where they are.

The cutting edge in military technology is robots: drones, jeeps, and science fiction spy tools all operated from afar by highly trained soldiers who can't be harmed by the battlefield conditions. Israel is in the forefront of this technology, alongside the US.

Three if not four people separately remarked on the 20th of April as Hitler's birthday. Two of them are children of Holocaust survivors, so that's where that complex comes from; one came from Russia, and one was a thirty-something from North Africa. Jews are a screwed up bunch.

Volcanoes make humans look very small. Everyone agreed on that one.

More R&D

Dell is looking seriously into setting up an R&D center in Israel. Lots of the other Biggies already do, of course. They all get their money's worth, too.

Can ALS be Stopped?

ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease, is a horrible way to die, as Tony Judt has been describing with harrowing detail in the New York Review of Books. Were someone to find a way to stop it, or possibly even to cure it, the world would be a better place.

Some Israeli scientists, entrepreneurs and doctors are trying. Here's hoping.

Cracked Iron Dome

Reuven Pedatzur snipes at the PR folks basking in the success (in tests) of the Iron Dome System. I have no way of knowing who's right, but some of it seems hairsplitting. No-one ever said Iron Dome would stop all incoming Palestinian fire, and everyone knows it's an expensive system built to thwart cheap ones. The ultimate test of reality lies before us, in any case. Still, since I'm on record as thinking Iron Dome is a fine thing, it's only credible that I ought to link to a contrarian.

Sharon's Legacy - and Netanyahu's Previous One

Aluf Benn, in a faintly disapproving column, notes that Sharon succeeded. He separated most of the Palestinians from most of the Israelis, and the Israelis have moved on to other things. Should there ever be a peace treaty to be signed, he expects, most Israelis won't even be watching the ceremony on TV as they'll be watching whatever else is on. He overstates his case, of course, and Tel Aviv is indeed more removed than Jerusalem, but he's mostly correct. Contrary to what our enemies incessantly claim, there is no Israeli project of Greater Israel or annexing the West Bank or subjugating the Palestinians or Apartheid or all that chatter. Under the worst of conceivable conditions, Ariel Sharon took a reality that had been developing for some 20 years and brought it to near completion: the Palestinians are over there, we're over here, and we're going to live our lives.

He also had a very successful finance minister, did Sharon, to whom he gave heaps of political backing so as to make major changes to the structure of the economy; this finance minister, like his boss, took 20-year trends and pushed them forward rapidly and dramatically. His name was Binyamin Netanyahu. David Brooks writes about the explosion of creativity this has enabled:

Israel’s technological success is the fruition of the Zionist dream. The country was not founded so stray settlers could sit among thousands of angry Palestinians in Hebron. It was founded so Jews would have a safe place to come together and create things for the world.

(via Goldblog)

Iron Dome on its Way

The Iron Dome anti-projectile system is ready to be deployed, though the deployment will still take some months.

No other country in the world has such a system, though there will probably be clients for the Israeli one. Will it bring peace and serenity to the Middle East? No. But it's a lot better to have than not to have.

Meanwhile, someone in Gaza has been firing at Israel this morning. Or rather, as usual, they've been firing at trucks waiting to enter Gaza with supplies through the Kerem Shalom crossing:

The Defense Ministry on Thursday closed the Kerem Shalom crossing until further notice. Dozens of aid trucks that were prepared to deliver humanitarian supplies to Gaza were waiting at the crossing Thursday morning, Israel Radio reported.