Yaalon believes that this unique feature of Israel’s military is critical to its effectiveness: “The key for leadership is the soldiers’ confidence in their commander. If you don’t trust him, if you’re not confident in him, you can’t follow him. And in this case, the battalion commander failed. It might be a professional failure, like in this case. It might be a moral failure in another case. Either way, the soldier has to know that it is acceptable—and encouraged—for him to come forward and to talk about it.”
Former West Point professor Fred Kagan concedes that Americans can learn something from the Israelis. “I don’t think it’s healthy for a commander to be constantly worrying if his subordinates will go over his head, like they do in the IDF,” he told us. “On the other hand, the U.S. military could benefit from some kind of 360-degree evaluation during the promotion board process for officers. Right now in our system the incentives are all one-sided. To get promoted, an officer just has to please more senior officers. The junior guys get no input.”
The conclusion Oren draws from displays of what most militaries—and Fred Kagan—would call insubordination is that the IDF is in fact “much more consensual than the American army.” This might seem strange, since the U.S. Army is called a “volunteer” army (not unpaid, but in the sense of free choice), while the IDF is built on conscription.
Yet, Oren explains, “in this country there’s an unwritten social contract: we are going to serve in this army provided the government and the army are responsible toward us. . . . The Israeli army is more similar, I would imagine, to the Continental Army of 1776 than it is to the American army of 2008. . . . And by the way, George Washington knew that his ‘general’ rank didn’t mean very much—that he had to be a great general, and that basically people were there out of volition.”
The Continental Army was an extreme example of what Oren was describing, since its soldiers would decide on an almost daily basis whether to continue to volunteer. But it was a “people’s army,” and so is the IDF. As Oren describes it, like the Continental Army, the IDF has a scrappy, less formal, more consensual quality because its soldiers are fighting for the existence of their country, and its ranks are composed of a broad cross section of the people they are fighting for.
It’s easy to imagine how soldiers unconcerned with rank have fewer qualms about telling their boss, “You’re wrong.” This chutzpah, molded through years of IDF service, gives insight into how Shvat Shaked could have lectured PayPal’s president about the difference between “good guys and bad guys” on the Web, or how Intel Israel’s engineers decided to foment a revolution to overturn not only the fundamental architecture of their company’s main product but the way the industry measured value. Assertiveness versus insolence; critical, independent thinking versus insubordination; ambition and vision versus arrogance—the words you choose depend on your perspective, but collectively they describe the typical Israeli entrepreneur.
PART II
Seeding a Culture of Innovation
CHAPTER 3
The People of the Book
Go far, stay long, see deep.
—OUTSIDE MAGAZINE
THE ELEVATION OF LA PAZ, BOLIVIA, is 11,220 feet and El Lobo is one floor higher. El Lobo is a restaurant, hostel, social club, and the only source of Israeli food in town. It is run by its founders, Dorit Moralli and her husband, Eli, both from Israel.1
Almost every Israeli trekker in Bolivia is likely to come through El Lobo, but not just to get food that tastes like it’s from home, to speak Hebrew, and to meet other Israelis. They know they will find something else there, something even more valuable: the Book. Though spoken of in the singular, the Book is not one book but an amorphous and evolving collection of journals, dispersed throughout some of the most remote locations in the world. Each journal is a handwritten “Bible” of advice from one traveler to another. And while the Book is no longer exclusively Israeli, its authors and readers tend to be from Israel.
El Lobo’s incarnation of the Book was created in 1986, Dorit recalls, just one month after her restaurant opened. Four Israeli backpackers came in and asked, “Where’s the Book?” When she looked mystified, they explained that they meant a book where people could leave recommendations and warnings for other travelers. They went out and bought a blank journal and donated it to the restaurant, complete with the first entry, in Hebrew, about a remote jungle town they thought other Israelis might like.
The Book predated the Internet—it actually started in Israel in the 1970s—but even in today’s world of blogs, chat rooms, and instant messaging, this primitive, paper-and-pen-based institution is still going strong. El Lobo has become a regional Book hub, with six volumes: a successor to the original Book started in 1989, along with separate Books for Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Peru, and the northern part of South America. There are other Books stationed throughout Asia. While the original was written only in Hebrew, today’s Books are written in a wide array of languages.
“The polyglot entries were random, frustrating, and beautiful, a carnival of ideas, pleas, boasts, and obsolete phone numbers,” Outside magazine reported on the venerable 1989 volume. “One page recommended the ‘beautikul girls’ [sic] in a certain disco; the next tipped a particular ice cave as ‘a must’ (at least until someone else scrawled a huge ‘NO!’ over that entry). This was followed by a half-page in Japanese and a dense passage in German, with bar charts of altitude and diagrams of various plants. . . . After that there was a full-page scrawl devoted to buying a canoe in the rainforests of Peru’s Manu National Park, with seven parentheticals and a postscript that wrapped around the margins sideways; a warning against so-and-so’s couscous; and an ornate four-color drawing of a toucan named Felipe.”
Though it has become internationalized, the Book remains a primarily Israeli phenomenon. Local versions of the Book are maintained and pop up wherever the “wave”—what Hebrew University sociologist Darya Maoz calls the shifting fashions in Israeli travel destinations—goes. Many young Israeli trekkers simply go from Book to Book, following the flow of advice from an international group of adventure seekers, among whom Hebrew seems to be one of the most common tongues.
A well-known joke about Israeli travelers applies equally well in Nepal, Thailand, India, Vietnam, Peru, Bolivia, or Ecuador. A hotelkeeper sees a guest present an Israeli passport and asks, “By the way, how many are you?” When the young Israeli answers, “Seven million,” the hotelkeeper presses, “And how many are still back in Israel?”
It is hardly surprising that people in many countries think that Israel must be about as big and populous as China, judging from the number of Israelis that come through. “More than any other nationality,” says Outside, “[Israelis] have absorbed the ethic of global tramping with ferocity: Go far, stay long, see deep.”