Now, as a serial entrepreneur of video-game companies, Shaul claims the world’s first system for “streaming applications over the net,” the world’s first OS-neutral video-game player runtime engine, and the world’s first set of in-game utilities to enhance the realism of the experience of massively parallel online multiplayer games such as World of Warcraft (“Look, Mom — no browser!”). The claims are arguable. But here the great challenge of survival is to reach the next level of the game — whether it’s “hyperspace” or a NASDAQ IPO.
“Nothing excites Israelis so much as the idea that something is impossible. Goes back to the fact that the whole being of this state of Israel is risky. The entire state is a new venture.” As Fox-pundit Dan Senor and Saul Singer of the Jerusalem Post wrote in their best selling book, Israel is the Start-Up Nation.
Olmert goes on: “If you want to send a space ship to Mars… next Thursday… you will get Israeli engineers to work on that project, and the spaceship will go out to Mars next Thursday… but it might not come back.
“If you want the spaceship to go to Mars every Thursday and come back you want American engineers. It will take longer but it will go to Mars every Thursday and it will come back.
“The Americans are good at systems and planning,” he observed. “I wish the Israelis were better at planning. But they’re not. But they are good at innovating.”
Shaul is sure that Israel’s test of survival, daily undergone, is the secret of Israeli enterprise. “When you’re concerned about your survival, every day, you think outside of the box…”
As he says this he imagines that he has been doing it, thinking out there beyond the “pale of settlement,” beyond the flapping tongues and flags of tradition. But for all his talk of innovation and survival, Shaul is an utterly conventional follower of the Israeli Left.
He is uncertain how his wealth contributes to the world or to Israel. “Wealth is finite,” he says. “If one side gets too much, the other side will suffer.” As his colleague Itzik Ben-Bassat explains his game technology to me, Shaul looks off into the darker recesses of the restaurant with a look of anxiety, the features of his father imprinted on his handsome young countenance, but as if haunted by a harrowing memory or a portentous future lurking in the darkness. It seems as if all is not well with the rebel youth and his virtual games, as if from the kitchens of the seaside bistro may burst forth at any moment a Palestinian mob of busboys and waiters demanding a redistribution of the wealth, or an Arab capital in Tel Aviv, or as if his father might suddenly loom up out of the shadows and reproach the son for his globalist views and hedonist games. Shaul wants to move ahead with his company and his life. He is impatient with the perils and moral entanglements of his country. Playing it safe, he retains his apartment in New York and will send his children to summer camp in upstate New York. Like so many, he wants “Peace Now.”
“I have never tried to run away from my Judaism,” he explains. “As a Jew growing up I heard many stories about the sufferings of Jews, the fear, the Holocaust. As a Jew I’m obliged to be sensitive to the suffering of others. The occupation is making us less moral and less sensitive to the suffering of other people. I don’t want to occupy other people. It is important for Americans to be good. I fear that Israelis are losing their moral bearings.”
“I want the Palestinians to have a better life,” he says.
“The reality today is we’re sitting here in this nice restaurant having a nice dinner and an interesting conversation while 4 million Palestinians live in misery.
“I support the Peace Process and the withdrawal from the territories.”
I point out that withdrawal will not help the Palestinian Arabs but betray them to terrorists. As Jonathan Adiri, a top advisor to President Shimon Peres, told us earlier that afternoon, withdrawal is not that simple. I recall standing on a promontory near Gilo in Jerusalem looking down across the valley into the West Bank. We contemplate an elegant four-story mansion a few hundred yards away from which a stream of bullets had issued during the intifada toward an Israeli apartment complex on the top of the hill. Pointing to the entangled weave of ethnic communities, Adiri told us of the failure of all efforts to separate the Palestinian Arabs from the Jews. “We expected the Palestinians to gravitate to their own communities but instead the prosperity and growth in the Jewish parts of Jerusalem acted like a magnet.”
From the beginning, the Arabs have been attracted to parts of Palestine that the Jews have been enriching. They don’t want to move toward the existing Palestinian communities. They vote with their feet. It is the Palestinians who would benefit from the overthrow of the leaders sacrificing them to the jihad — leaders who say they would rather their people suffer for “a hundred years” than prosper by working with Israelis.
I try a new tack, pointing out that “Arafat died in a house with piles of Mein Kampf.”
Olmert laughed bitterly and then launched a riff familiar on the Israeli Left: “Yes, I know we did a terrible job in picking our enemies. A lousy job. I apologize. Next time we should do better. We will do better. I promise. We’ll audition them better. Find nicer guys to oppose us. I’ll give it more thought.”
Until then they would seek “Peace Now.”
Before meeting him, I already knew that Shaul was not all fun and games. I had read of a petition that he had signed urging Israel’s reserve forces to refuse to serve in the “territories.” I also learned of his famously lesbian sister Dana, who had joined a rowdy protest march against the Israel Defense Forces for their apparent responsibility for a deadly explosion on a beach in Gaza that accidentally killed eight members of a Palestinian family. “The Intifada Will Prevail,” read a placard in the march.
The Olmert family accepted the rebellion of Dana, according to Shaul, and Shaul apologized for embarrassing his father. But they did not recant their positions. As Shaul explained: “My father is paying the price for being a liberal person. It kind of reminds me of this movie Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?, this movie in which two parents raised their daughter to be very liberal and very open-minded and one day she comes home from college and brings her new boyfriend and they find out that he’s an African American and they are trying to be very liberal and politically correct about it, but they’re also kind of stunned by their daughter’s choice.
“So I guess that my father was in a similar sort of internal debate throughout our childhood because we definitely used the freedom that we were granted and the encouragement to think for ourselves and develop our own views, and we developed our own views, which happen not to coincide with his.”
Nonetheless, the Olmert kids were altogether too trigger-happy in blaming Israel first for violence instigated by enemies set on their country’s destruction. In the end, he and his sister are privileged children assuming costly moral postures that are inevitably paid for by the less fortunate. Jihadists will inevitably see pacifism and other dissension in Israel’s then “first family” as a sign of weakness. Conspicuous weakness is a prime cause of war.
Olmert reminded me of Bernard Avishai, a similarly impatient Israeli leftist who has published a passionate book entitled The Hebrew Republic in a kind of quest for a separate Peace Now. A shaggy professor with a plaintive manner of speech, as I recall from his editing one of my articles for the Harvard Business Review some twenty years ago, he has long seen Zionism as “a tragedy.” Nothing that has happened in Israel in recent years has dissuaded him from the view that the country as currently constituted is a gigantic mistake. His catalog of complaints echoes Shaul Olmert’s: discrimination against Arabs, sorely maldistributed wealth and income, a runaway engine of West Bank settlements that represent an imperial “occupation,” and an impending demographic catastrophe caused less by the more procreative Arabs in Israel than by philoprogenitive Haredim and other ultra-Orthodox Jews. Over the last twenty years the Orthodox share of the population has risen from 10 percent to around 25 percent. By any reasonable standard, these defenders of the faith represent the answer to the demographic crunch caused by secular Israelis with their abortion culture and their gay-rights marches. Yet it is Orthodox population growth that disturbs the Israeli Left.