Twentieth-century science was not a religious competition. But twentieth-century history was engulfed in a war against Jewish scientists and capitalists, and their flight to the West was indispensable to the Western triumph. Von Neumann remains the only figure to bridge all the most critical physical sciences, technologies, and policy decisions of the era. Von Neumann was the unelected avatar and personification of the Jewish triumph and the Israel test.
Now, in an era long after von Neumann’s, we face a new Israel test, based on yet another war against wealth and individual genius. Israel is at the forefront of the next generation of technology and on the front lines of a new war against capitalism and Jewish individuality and genius. Israel is not a peripheral player or a superficial issue of Middle Eastern history and politics. It is at the center of the sphere.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Hidden Light
The most precious resource in the world economy is human genius. Let us define it as the ability to devise inventions and enterprises and to create works of art and science that enhance human survival and prosperity. At any one time, genius is embodied in probably fewer than 50,000 individuals, a creative minority that accounts for the majority of human accomplishment and wealth. Cities and nations rise and flourish when they welcome entrepreneurial and technical genius; when they overtax, criminalize, or ostracize their creative minority, they wither.
During the twentieth century, an astounding proportion of geniuses have been Jewish, and the fate of nations from Russia westward has largely reflected how they have treated their Jews. When Jews lived in Vienna and Budapest early in the century, these cities of the Hapsburg Empire were world centers of intellectual activity and economic growth; then the Nazis came to power, the Jews fled or were killed, and growth and culture disappeared with them. When Jews came to New York and Los Angeles, those cities towered over the global economy and culture. When Jews escaped Europe for Los Alamos and, more recently, for Silicon Valley, the world’s economy and military balance shifted decisively. Thus many nations have faced a crucial moral test: Will they admire, reward, and emulate a minority that has achieved towering accomplishments? Or will they writhe in resentment and plot its destruction?
Today, an outsized share of the world’s genius resides in Israel. Israel has become a center of innovation second in absolute achievement only to the United States, and on a per capita basis dwarfing the contributions of all other nations, America included. How Israel is treated by the rest of the world thus represents a crucial test for human civilization and indeed survival.
My interest in Israeli innovation began in 1998, when I invited an Israeli physicist named David Medved to speak at the Gilder/Forbes Telecosm conference. Medved described the promise of “free-space optics” — what most of us call “light” — for high-end communications among corporate buildings and campuses. He also spoke of air force experiments in Israel that used the still-higher frequencies and shorter waves of ultraviolet light for battlefield communications. At a time when most of the world’s communications, wired and wireless, were migrating to the electromagnetic spectrum, some of the most important explorations of electromagnetic technology, I realized, were taking place in Israel.
Author of a scientific book on scripture, Hidden Light, Medved had a polymathic command of the world’s physical and spiritual wisdom that he brought to Israel as part of his aliya. Nearly a decade after his Telecosm appearance, Medved introduced me to his son Jonathan, a pioneering Israeli venture capitalist. In his offices high over Jerusalem, the younger Medved told me the startling tale of Israel’s rapid rise to worldwide preeminence in high technology.
I had long known that many American microchip companies located laboratories and design centers in Israel. I knew that, in a real sense, much American technology could reasonably bear the label ISRAEL INSIDE. I was skeptically familiar with a few showcase Israeli start-ups, such as “A Better Place,” the electric-car company launched by the fashionplate innovator Shai Agassi, which brashly bypassed the entire auto industry in redesigning the automobile from scratch. I had marveled at Gavriel Iddan’s company Given Imaging, with its digestible camera in a capsule for endoscopies and colonoscopies, but had been disappointed with its limitations when I myself needed a colonoscopy.
What I learned in Jerusalem, however, was that Israel was not only a site for research, outsourcing and the occasional conceptual coup, but also the emerging world leader, outside the United States, in launching new companies and technologies. This tiny embattled country, smaller than most American states, is outperforming European and Asian Goliaths ten to 100 times larger. In a watershed moment for the country, in 2007 Israel surpassed Canada as the home of the most foreign companies on the technology-heavy NASDAQ index; it is now launching far more high-tech companies per year than any country in Europe.
To take but one example among many, Israel is a prime source not only of free-space optics but also of another form of hidden light: ultra-wideband. This technology features wireless transmissions that are not, like cell-phone signals, millions of hertz wide at relatively high power, but billions of hertz wide — gigahertz — at power too low to be detected by ordinary antennas. The technology is typically used for mundane purposes, such as connecting personal computers and televisions wirelessly. Israeli companies Amimon and Wisair pioneered this feat. But a firm called Camero, in Netanya, Israel, has invented an ingenious ultra-wideband device that enables counterterrorist fighters and police to see through walls and identify armed men and other threats within. An easily portable box about the size and weight of a laptop computer, Camero’s Xaver 800 could suffuse an urban battlefield with hidden light that would penetrate walls and bunkers and be detectable only by its users. Such inventions are changing the balance of power in urban guerrilla warfare, to the advantage of the civilized and the dismay of the barbarians.
As I investigated companies such as Camero, it became clear to me that Israel had achieved a broader miracle of hidden light illuminating the American and world economies. As late as the mid-1980s, Israel was a basket case, with inflation rates spiking from 400 percent to nearly 1,000 percent by early 1985. As recently as 1990, Israel was a relatively insignificant technology force, aside from a few military initiatives and its perennially inventive agriculture. Yet in little more than a decade, the country had become an engine of global technology progress. Still more important, Israel’s technology leadership has made it our most vital ally against a global movement of jihadist terror. How did it make such an astonishing leap?
With the history of twentieth-century science largely a saga of Jewish accomplishment, technological leadership might have seemed foreordained after World War II for the rising Jewish nation. Yet for all the incandescence of deserts in bloom, the miracle did not occur quickly, and Jews outside Israel far outperformed Jews within Israel.
In the country’s early years, its research activities were predominantly public, devoted to defense, and paltry by any standard. As late as 1965, the ratio of research-and-development spending in Israel to its gross domestic product was under 1 percent, nearly the lowest in the entire Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, behind only Italy. Just one-tenth of 1 percent of Israel’s employees were engineers, placing it far behind the United States and even Sweden. Michael Porter’s definitive 1990 tome The Competitive Advantage of Nations mentioned Israel only once.