Israel - Turning Security Lemons into High-Tech Lemonade

...Israel isn’t the only country in the world that has been at war for decades. But few other countries have taken this obvious drawback and leveraged it into a spate of high-tech development that is benefiting people all over the globe. That determination to turn lemons into lemonade is a major source of Israel’s success–and not just in high-tech.

Evelyn Gordon..
Commentary Magazine..
05 February '15..

Bloomberg released its annual Global Innovation Index this week, and Israel was ranked fifth worldwide. Given Israel’s reputation as the “start-up nation,” that may not seem surprising (in fact, it should, but that’s a topic for another post). Yet “start-up nation” has become such a cliché that it often obscures one of the most important–and admirable–qualities behind Israel’s tech successes: a consistent determination to turn lemons into lemonade.

This is true in many walks of Israeli life. Back in 2007, for instance, I wrote a column about the astounding fact that after losing a child in a war or terror attack, Israeli parents had repeatedly responded not with a desire for revenge, but with a desire to commemorate their child by doing something to make the world a better place. Consequently, bereaved parents in Israel have set up everything from public parks to foundations that help families care for special-needs children.

In the high-tech field, this same quality has led Israel to respond to a horrendous security environment by creating products that not only serve immediate defense needs, but have the potential to benefit humanity as a whole. And this response has played a major role in fueling its tech boom.

Take, for instance, the Iron Dome anti-missile system, which was born of the grim need to deal with nonstop rocket fire from Hamas-run Gaza. Though the system proved spectacularly successful during last summer’s war, it initially seemed to have limited application; few other countries routinely suffer rocket attacks from their neighbors.

Now, however, an Israeli-Canadian partnership is busy turning the technology behind Iron Dome into a system for smart electrical grid management. As the Jerusalem Post reported last month, “The same algorithms that help Iron Dome respond to complex inputs quickly and efficiently were applied to monitoring and controlling the electric grid,” which will both save energy and help reduce blackouts. The new technology “has the potential to change grid management in North America and beyond,” according to Henri Rothschild, president of the Canada-Israel Industrial R&D Foundation, which helped broker the joint venture.

Flogging a Gaza Atrocity Story Even Human Rights Groups Won’t Touch

...Given the willingness of the international press to publish just about anything negative about Israel, it speaks volumes that Rosenfeld is alone in claiming that this tale is worthy of further investigation. The only question is why the Daily Beast, which has other highly credible foreign news reporters, continues to allow him to circulate an unsubstantiated atrocity story. Rosenfeld’s shameless propaganda is a new low point for the media in a summer of journalistic malpractice in Gaza.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary Magazine..
08 September '14..

If there is anything we have learned in the past few decades is that there is a thriving international journalism market for any story that can besmirch Israel’s image. Given the appetite of the mainstream media for the deluge of negative pieces alleging Israeli misbehavior during the Gaza war, it is therefore interesting to note that one particular such tale circulated by the Daily Beast has gotten no traction. But that hasn’t stopped the website from continuing to promote it despite the threadbare nature of its narrative and the less than sympathetic “victims” of the supposed “war crime.”

The story revolves around the claim that during the height of the fighting in the terror tunnels along the Israel-Gaza border, the Israel Defense Forces “executed” five Islamic Jihad terrorists who had supposedly peacefully laid down their arms. This is the tale left-wing Canadian journalist Jesse Rosenfeld has been peddling for the last month but none except his employers at the Daily Beast have been biting on it. This troubles Rosenfeld, who complains bitterly in his latest story about the indifference of the world to the allegations as well as the lack of an official commitment by the IDF to investigate his claims.

But there are a couple of easy explanations for this that have nothing to do with any sympathy for Israel on the part of a media corps that is deeply hostile to the Jewish state or the willingness of groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch to circulate biased attacks on the IDF.

The first and most basic problem with Rosenfeld’s story is that he has no real proof that any such execution took place.

Islamic Jihad hasn’t made any such claim. Though perhaps that can be explained by the fact that although Rosenfeld’s narrative tries to make the terrorists in question appear as if they were making a heroic, if futile last stand against the dastardly Israelis, the group isn’t likely to embrace any story that ends with fighters that are supposedly eager to embrace death meekly surrendering.