Israel's wartime tech brilliance and the cost of innovation
Israel's wartime tech brilliance and the cost of innovation
The mobilization of high-tech to aid in the challenges of war, from locating missing people to treating post-trauma, is also expected to give rise to advanced developments and new startups. But this innovation also reveals the broken parts of our society
It took a while, but eventually, the press releases returned to our lives. After a period of shock in the face of the events of October 7, a routine began to creep into everyday reality, and with it, those marketing publications, well-formulated by public relations companies and eager for publicity. The messages attempt to navigate between drops of sensitivity and reveal the dimensions of the innovation that feels as if it does not stop arising even in this terrible time. Among other things, there were announcements about a chatbot designed to provide initial care to post-trauma victims, a company that develops "eyes" for suicidal drones, virtual reality glasses for practicing complex medical first aid while "fighting in an alley," or a development designed to "optimize the delivery of messages on social networks" as part of the Israeli advocacy efforts.
When talking about the technology sector in this period, it is agreed upon by the majority that, inevitably, the civil mobilization in the first days of the war is expected to yield future innovative ventures that will flourish. They tell how, in the military and civilian headquarters that were established, whether to help locate the missing or to take care of the evacuees, technologists met—sometimes without prior acquaintance—to try to find new and ground-breaking ideas that would provide answers to some of the pressing problems of wartime. How those talented foreigners became new friends, teams, and partners are born, and new ideas and ventures are forged. This is Israel: innovation of a damaged society.
1. Factory for the production of entrepreneurs
The State of Israel is a national space where one of the most productive hotbeds of innovative companies exists. The unique Israeli case is well-documented: Tel Aviv has the world's highest number of start-ups per capita, the world's highest investment in research and development, and is home to approximately 270 multinational corporations, including Google, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft, which have established over 350 R&D centers. Israel is also home to hundreds of venture capital funds and steadily attracts ever-increasing investments that reached a peak of $27 billion in 2021, at the top of the global high-tech bubble. At the time, Israel had about 100 unicorns, among the world's leaders in unicorns per capita. Tel Aviv has long been known as a "factory for founders and entrepreneurs," which produces them in droves, and the place where everyone flocks to get quality personnel.
The unusual numbers are considered particularly extraordinary due to the country's small size and young age. Therefore, Israel has become a role model and a topic for discussion in an attempt to explain where the abundance of innovation that brought us the "Startup Nation" comes from. Speculations abound: Israeli insolence; the unique nature of the country that turns it into a kind of "laboratory" and guides the entrepreneurs in it to always be "looking outwards"; entrepreneurship education; the social heterogeneity based on immigration from all over the world; and exposure of soldiers to advanced technology. Some speak of a local culture that tolerates failure and encourages people to try again and again. Others describe the tax policy beneficial to the sector, various grants and benefits for foreign investors, or emphasize the government programs designed to encourage entrepreneurship that arose in Israel as early as the early nineties of the last century.
It seems that to some extent, everything is true, and a complete answer must include a very wide variety of explanations and contributing conditions. No person or explanation can alone claim ownership of the subject (no matter how much they pretend). To complete the picture, we need to ask not only what makes Israel unique but what makes innovation companies, in general, unique. To do this, one must look at a larger and much more well-known hotbed of innovation—Silicon Valley in California, United States. There are also unique conditions or a certain type of exceptionalism, but both in Israel and in the United States, there is one similar driving factor: a kind of depressing biblical existential situation of "and by your sword, you shall live."
Not only is the United States in a state of "endless war" as part of the never-ending campaign against terrorism in the world, which it has been leading since the September 11 attacks, but even before that, it was involved in long continuous wars around the world as part of the Cold War. These, combined with the world wars, were the motivation for some of the most important developments in the world, the basis of what we know today as Silicon Valley. Whether it is atomic energy or the computer, encryption or the Internet.
In recent years, the United States has increasingly allowed itself, at the diplomatic level, the authority to continue the war without limitation of time or space while designing official legal frameworks that would allow targeted killing. The main executor of this policy was former President Barack Obama, under whose leadership the US military began the assassination drone campaign. He was called "the most successful terrorist hunter in history" when he established the United States not as a country committed to peace but as a country that does not limit itself during its war on terror. UAVs were employed ten times more than their his predecessors in the position and killed thousands. His commitment to the mission was so great that today the US Air Force trains more drone operators than pilots. Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize shortly after he was elected.
Against this background, the struggle of engineers at Google or Amazon against military developments and other government contracts is sometimes seen as socially and historically deaf. After all, wars spanning decades and all over the world were and are the main motivation for the products they develop. The same military needs are also directly responsible for the technological architecture that governs our existence. Whether it's the open and decentralized network or autonomous assistants to serve the battle machines.
2. Better disscusion over beer
The thesis that war and the technological innovations accompanying it largely drive history is not new, of course. It has been quite convincingly conceptualized by theorists on the right and the left, sometimes more deterministically and sometimes less so, but quite similarly under the idea that human progress is driven by constant wars, and that these wars leverage technological innovation. That technological innovation, unfortunately, perpetuates this eternal state of war between societies, nations, states, or classes, depending on who you ask.
If so, it is also appropriate to dwell on the glorification of Israel's power as a startup nation and to wonder if the existence of the residents of the State of Israel as a fertile ground for the development of technology and entrepreneurship is indeed the holy grail we should all strive for. It is possible that the innovation that surrounds all of us not only signals our uniqueness but also the broken parts of our society and maybe—just maybe—it is better to aspire to a slow and sleepy state of existence of a society that is happy and peaceful, where the distress is not great and there is no urgency to locate abductees with advanced technological means that have not yet been developed. Perhaps we prefer European mediocrity or the ongoing Australian preoccupation with the price of local beer. Maybe that would be a nicer existence, with a little less unicorns and artificial intelligence labs trying to develop a chatbot to deal with soldiers' post-trauma, designed to quickly rehabilitate them on the battlefield.
