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http://www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100604/REVIEW/706039978/1008 Israel's silicon army by Spencer Ackerman As it retreats into greater indifference toward global opinion, Israel has come to rely on cynical appeals to American technophiles and evangelical Christians. Spencer Ackerman on Netanyahu’s last allies. (clip) Start-Up Nation by Dan Senor, the former aide to the US Iraq viceroy L Paul Bremer, and Saul Singer is a quintessential light airport read: a page-turner about how a country under external threat makes a virtue out of necessity. What makes Israel a good testing ground for a network of rechargeable electric-car batteries? The fact that its neighbours close their highways to Israeli motorists, and there’s not a lot of Israel to drive on. That spirit of defiance is similar to the one displayed by a Massachusetts man named David Khoury, who moved back to his family’s village in the West Bank to open a microbrewery as a demonstration of faith in the Palestinian economy. But the broader message of Start-Up Nation is more problematic. There’s a cliche-fueled narrative early on about how an uncredentialled Israeli whizkid made millions by selling online-payment giant PayPal a reliable algorithm for figuring out a potential client’s financial solvency. How did Shvat Shaked, who “didn’t have the brashness of an entrepreneur”, outperform titans of industry? “Hunting down terrorists,” he explains. Shaked’s detective skills taught him that the frequency of a person’s online footprints was a sign of reliability: like a terrorist, someone looking to game PayPal isn’t going to leave an extensive Googleable trail. That sort of anecdote forms the stock response to the book’s central question: why is the Israeli economy so dynamic? Their answer: because conditions of constant peril compel critical thinking in the military, and military service sets the tone for Israeli culture. The Israeli investor and “unofficial economic ambassador” Jon Medved presents the excited authors with a graph showing foreign business flowing into Israel during the Second Intifada. Singer and Senor are quick to inform us that he wasn’t suggesting “a correlation between violence in Israel and its attractiveness to investors”, because that would be absurd. What they show instead is that Israel can assert a kind of normality amidst perpetual war – with the help of the world’s premiere capitalists. Senor and Singer present no explicit political agenda, but their presumptions are that the status quo within Israel will continue. The trouble with their book from a business perspective is that there aren’t many countries that live under conditions analogous to Israel. To really embrace Start-Up Nation as a road map for achieving national economic vitality requires a willingness to believe that your society, too, is on the cusp of ever-present perpetual war, since relentless conflict is the only engine Start-Up Nation identifies for Israel’s success. Who would want to live under those conditions? Well, maybe there are people outside of Israel who believe such an unhappy fate confronts their country. Like the guy in the airport bookstore with his BlackBerry clipped to his braided belt. He’s not the most political guy in the world, but he thinks Israel is under attack from the Arabs, and that unlike the Arabs, the Israelis are Christian-friendly fellows who understand the value of the dollar. They’re not running around with their faces covered blowing up pizzerias, and he thinks they have to fight guys who do. He’s worried that this is the future of the United States. He’s worried that if it is, his small business may not survive. He’s worried that the socialist in the White House doesn’t understand that you enjoy peace only after winning victory. Whatever the authors’ intentions, Start-Up Nation is a book that presents Israel as safe for gentiles – or, at least, for those that can be persuaded to vote in Republican primaries. (clip) ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
