The New Zionist Propaganda: Israel Is An Economic Miracle

A "miracle" built on the theft, massacres and continued oppressive occupation and disposition of another people and their land.

photo lg israel 9zAKU 19672

Right-wing and Zionist New York Times columnist David Brooks' new column promotes the new Zionist propaganda that Israel is some economic miracle. This is going to the the new Zionist lie. After all, the "land without a people for a people without a land" and the "Israel made the desert bloom" and the "Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East" and the "Israel is a light onto the nations" are starting to lose their favor (long past around the world) and now the United States too.

So Zionists need a line: Israel is a state of economic miracles. This is Brooks' point:

Tel Aviv has become one of the world’s foremost entrepreneurial hot spots. Israel has more high-tech start-ups per capita than any other nation on earth, by far. It leads the world in civilian research-and-development spending per capita. It ranks second behind the U.S. in the number of companies listed on the Nasdaq. Israel, with seven million people, attracts as much venture capital as France and Germany combined.

As Dan Senor and Saul Singer write in “Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle,” Israel now has a classic innovation cluster, a place where tech obsessives work in close proximity and feed off each other’s ideas.

I've written before about that propaganda book which states that the nation is home to an economic miracle because Israel is small and has so many innovative start-up IT companies. Good for them. But does this constitute a miracle?

A miracle is defined as: “an extraordinary event in the physical world that surpasses all known human or natural powers and is ascribed to a supernatural cause. Such an effect or event manifesting or considered as a work of God.”

Is that the case here? Is Israel such an ostenible economic engine of growth because it is God’s “Chosen Country”.

Israel is home to many start-ups, but a miracle-explanation is unfounded. A miracle implies that Israel’s successes just cannot be explained using normal analysis of economic growth. That there is just something special about the country that has somehow produced several interesting companies. But that is not the case. Israel’s growth is not due to some special reason, but to simple cause-and-effect.

Here is why Israel has so many start-ups:

Since 1948:

- 120 Billion in US aid

- 50 Billion in German aid

- Billions more in aid from Jewish communities around the world.

It is not surprising that this or that Israeli university produces this or that product since they get so much free aid from the world. It is as simple as that. If you hevaily fund and support a, say, R&D center then it will grow into a success. Why is this difficult to understand? And if Israel is so successful then why the constant begging of aid? It gets $3billion from the U.S. a year and hundreds of millions from Germany. But you will say: that money goes to defense and a lot of these start-ups are non-defense (more on that below), so how does defense spending benefit a, say, software start-up? Because Israeli society is militarized and the IDF is at the core of Israel. The IDF finds talented Israeli engineers and molds them, and creates a network and offers training, ect... The author's of the book make this point:

Q.

At the age of 18, almost all non-Arab Israeli citizens must serve in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) for at least two years. How does the IDF service experience shape the future of young Israelis and contribute to the country’s economic success?

A.

Certain units have become technology boot camps, where 18- to 22-year-olds get thrown projects and missions that would make the heads spin of their counterparts in universities or the private sector anywhere else in the world. The Israelis come out of the military not just with hands-on exposure to next-gen technology, but with training in teamwork, mission orientation, leadership, and a desire to continue serving their country by contributing to its tech sector — a source of pride for just about every Israeli.

Beyond the elite tech units, the military has a much broader cultural impact. The compulsory service produces a maturity not seen in Israelis’ foreign peers who spend that time in university. “They’ve got more life experience,” British Telecom executive Gary Shainberg told us, which “is critical, since innovation is all about finding ideas, and finding new ideas is often about having perspective.” And perspective typically comes with age. But in Israel you get perspective at a young age because so many transformational experiences are jammed into Israelis — including military service — in their late teens and early 20’s.

Perhaps even more surprisingly, Israel’s resource-stretched and constantly tested military teaches improvisation and flattens hierarchies. Soldiers learn “the value of five minutes” as one general told us. They are taught to get the job done and figure out how. And especially in the reserves, barriers are broken; young people command their teachers or bosses, no one salutes, and privates address generals by their nicknames. All this contributes to an informal and anti-hierarchical culture outside the military, which is critical for an experiment-focused, probing, and innovating economy.

So defense spending is intertwined with the rest of the economy, and it is American taxpayer dollars that underpin Israeli economic growth. Again: Israel is a militarized society.

No miracle here. Impressed by Israel? Want to replicate the success? Just get the United States to give $120 billion to, say, Zimbabwe and then see what happens.

And, more importantly, what are the start-ups all about. A great many of them are in defense so they are not dedicated to curing diseases or improve technology, just interested in making the killing of innocent Palestinians and Arabs in general more efficient. Yet Again: Israel is a militarized society.

And, finally, all that Israel produces is in on top of and in the shadows of the ethnic cleansing, theft and continuing occupation of the Palestinian people. No “miracle” will hide that fact. And many of these ostensibly great start-up are defense companies dedicated to killing people instead of making the world a better place. So spare the propaganda!